 
### TELL ME A STORY

104 Short Stories In 52 Weeks

Gillian and Kevin Rhodes

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 Gillian and Kevin Rhodes

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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ALSO BY GILLIAN AND KEVIN RHODES

For more information about the authors and their other ebooks, click here

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The Legal Times They Are A-Changin'

### CONTENTS

Gillian's Preface

Kevin's Preface

Week 1: A story entitled "A New Beginning"

Week 2: A story about rising to a challenge

Week 3: A retelling of a fairytale

Week 4: A story about three siblings

Week 5: A story set in London

Week 6: : A story about finding something that has been lost

Week 7: A story about a journey

Week 8: : A story set during a war

Week 9: A creepy story

Week 10: A story featuring a countdown

Week 11: A story set at a full moon

Week 12: A story about a competition

Week 13: A story that take place entirely inside a vehicle

Week 14: A story from a villain's perspective

Week 15: A story set at a concert or festival

Week 16: A story that begins with a gunshot

Week 17: A story set in a country you've never been to

Week 18: A story about a historical figure

Week 19: A story set in a theatre

Week 20: A story written in 2nd person narrative

Week 21: A story set on another planet

Week 22: A story written from the perspective of someone dead/undead

Week 23: A story about a birthday

Week 24: A story that ends on a cliffhanger

Week 25: A Story set during the summer solstice

Week 26: A story about nostalgia

Week 27: A story featuring a song or poem

Week 28: A story that ends at sunrise

Week 29: A story that opens with the words "F*** you!"

Week 30: A story about a magical object

Week 31: A story set at sea

Week 32: A story about a curse

Week 33: A story set 100 years in the future

Week 34: A story about loneliness

Week 35: A story featuring a real recent newspaper article

Week 36: A story written from an animal's perspective

Week 37: A story about a scientific discovery

Week 38: A story set on another planet

Week 39: A story with only one character

Week 40: A story about a secret

Week 41: A romance that ends in tragedy

Week 42: A tragedy that ends in romance

Week 43: A retelling of a recent Hollywood movie

Week 44: A story that takes place the year you were born

Week 45: A story about a near-death experience

Week 46: A story about anger

Week 47: A story about a magic spell

Week 48: A story about a strange small town

Week 49: A story about justice being done

Week 50: A creation myth

Week 51: A story set at Christmas

Week 52: A story entitled "The End"

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Gillian's Preface

This project began very simply. I was browsing the social media site Tumblr, and happened upon a post on a writing help blog ("Our Writing Therapy"). It was fifty-two writing prompts, one for each week of the year. I glanced through it, a usual practice for dash scrolling, but something about the prompts captured my imagination. I decided to give it a go – it was only halfway through the first week of January at that point.

I can't remember now why I shared it with Dad; perhaps I just thought he, as a writer, might be interested, or perhaps I was looking for a partner to hold me accountable. But for whatever reason I did it, Dad was all in, and we started right away.

It started as just a fun little thing we sent each other every week, but quickly we both found that we were surprised and delighted by the stories that came up. Dad had decided to limit himself to 100 words _exactly_ for each story. I didn't regulate my word count, but I did decide to not use my first idea for the prompt. Instead, I tried to see it from another angle, or question the meaning of the words – something to approach it from a different angle.

Perhaps for that reason, I found somewhat to my surprise that many of my stories tended towards the science fiction, the futuristic, the post-apocalyptic, the dystopian. In week 30, for example, we were prompted to write about a magical object – so I wrote about a radio, but set in a time in which electronics had gone extinct. A radio _would_ seem magical, in that world!

As the weeks kept ticking and we faithfully wrote our stories, I started looking for ways to share them. Eventually I decided on the online writing platform Medium, and created a publication entitled "52 Stories in 52 weeks." That sowed the seeds of the idea for publishing this book.

Over the course of the year, Dad and I did not miss a single story. A few weeks we forgot and sent it late, but those were few and far between. It began part of my Monday routine to write the story, and when the year ended, I missed it.

I found, in the end, the project an excellent creative experiment, completed by doing it in tandem with one of my favorite partners in crime.

I'm delighted to present all our stories side by side in this collection. As I read it, I'm struck by how different our interpretations of the same prompts are – but that is half the fun! I hope that you will enjoy these stories as much as we enjoyed writing them!

Gillian Rhodes
Kevin's Preface

In a moment of weakness, I actually applied for a job. Well, sort of--it was a setup, a lure I couldn't resist. I took the bait, got hooked, reeled in, and netted before I knew what hit.

It started with one of those email popups that makes you wonder how it got through and figure you need to change your settings. It announced a new article on LinkedIn Pulse: "The Most Unconventional Job Posting Ever." "Job" wasn't on my radar, but I'm a sucker for "unconventional." I started reading faster than I could hit delete.

The article delivered on "unconventional" alright. You couldn't tell what it was. But then it told you, at the end: "The article... it wasn't really an article... or a job post. It was a story about me."

A story.

About me.

About me, finding my way as a writer.

Being known is a powerful sensation; it happens so rarely that you remember when it does. Who was this guy writing this article, who knew what it was like to be me, in love with writing since I was a kid? I tracked the article to a real job posting from a startup with a mission to help employees "adopt behaviors and mindsets that improve individual and team performance." They were looking for a writer.

Ah, so that's it.

Mindsets and behaviors interest me. Teamwork, not so much. I work alone; most writers do. I almost quit there, but then something else snagged me: they wanted to know if you could tell a story in 100 words.

Seriously? I had no idea. I needed to find out. Besides, a steady income wouldn't hurt....

I applied for the job. It was fun for awhile, then I dropped out for reasons unimportant now, leaving the question unanswered.

About then, Gillian proposed the 52 Stories in 52 Weeks challenge. This was my chance: my stories would be 100 words. Exactly. I would sit down the same time every week, read the prompt, write the first thing that popped into my head no questions asked, and finish the story in exactly 100 words. Exactly. All in one sitting.

Gillian and I got started, and right away I envied her. She could read the prompts ahead of time, think about her response, then use as many words as she wanted. Her reactions to my compact entries gave me quick feedback on how well I was doing. If she struggled to find the story, I missed it. If she got it right away, it worked.

So it went, for a whole year, and now I have an answer. Can I tell a story in 100 words? No, not really. But you and I can tell a story together if we both doing our part. My weekly 100 words set up the possibility of a story. Then it's your turn--you, the reader, the imaginative one, the one who can't resist the allure of a story, the one who must track it to its source, like I did with the mystery job posting. When you read my 100 words, something happens like when you get a joke or get to the end of a haiku: there's that burst of surprise when you get it, and then--bango!-- your imagination floods the spare outline with all the details you need to create the meaning. It happens just like that, just that fast.

That's the plan: for you and I to create these stories together.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that of you. I think stories always work that way. We start to read, and a deep creative magic goes to work on us. We like to experience that magic, and so we read--not so much for what the writer gives us, but for what the writing says to us about ourselves and our own lives. We welcome the story, invest ourselves in it, make it matter. We create meaning for ourselves, make the story come true for us.

We do this whenever we read. That's why you and I can read the same thing but it becomes something different in you than in me. We fill in the details differently, see and hear and feel what's written in a way that matches the sense of self each of us brings to it. We shape its meaning to fit ourselves, make it something we can take into our own selves and use in our own lives.

I didn't know all of that before I started, but I know it now, thanks to Gillian's storytelling challenge and her responses to my entries over the year. Over time, I felt I sort of got the hang of it --like when you do crosswords or Sudoku or play Jeopardy or charades or solve riddles or do something else like that a lot: you get into the swing of it, learn the codes and secrets and shortcuts, get quicker on the uptake. I suspect that will happen for you, too--that the stories will come quicker, and that you will find yourself telling your own stories more easily.

They _are_ about you, after all.

I believe that, but we'll see if it plays out that way for you.

And then I'll really have my answer.

Thanks for giving it a try.

Kevin Rhodes
Week 1: A story entitled "A New Beginning"

### Gillian 1: A New Beginning

On the day after the world ended, the sun rose in the east. Birds trilled in the trees and the line for the coffee shop was long. The morning rush hour traffic was jammed, and cell phone coverage was spotty exactly when the cars' occupants tried to call in late.

In short, nothing at all had changed. But nevertheless, the world _had_ ended. There was only one person who knew it: five-year-old Mary Beth Guarderson.

She told her father. "Daddy, what happened to the world?"

Her father tried to remember yesterday's news. "What world, honey?"

Mary Beth frowned. "All of them," she responded.

"Uh...nothing happened, sweetie," he said.

She told her mother. "Mommy, what happened to the world?"

Her mother worried she'd been watching too much television. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"It's gone," Mary Beth replied.

Her mother wondered if this was normal for five-year-olds. She decided to play along. "Is it? What are we living in now then?"

What a silly question, Mary Beth thought. It was obvious. "A new one," she said.

"And what's this new world like?" her mother asked.

Mary Beth considered. She looked around her. It sure looked the same, but it wasn't, she knew that very well. The newness was rubbing at everything, the shine of the sun on the windows, the dust in the air. Blank slates of being. Maybe it wasn't the same at all, but it didn't know what else to be, so it made itself like it was before.

"New," she said finally. "It looks like the old one, but it's not."

Her mother patted her on the head. "Okay," she said.

The sun doesn't reflect a circle, Mary Beth thought, staring at the neighbor's window. It reflects a star. A star, like the ones Daddy showed me in the planetarium.

Across the way, the reflection became a star, and Mary Beth smiled. That's what I thought, she thought happily.

And so, little Mary Beth Guarderson, the only one to know that the world had ended, began to reform it. 

### Kevin 1: A New Beginning

The balloon blew into the mower's path. Jason snatched it.

The rain started as he stepped inside.

"Beat it," he said.

Ginny cocked an eyebrow at the balloon.

He held out it out in front of himself. "Congratulations!" it said.

"For us," he said. "You okay?"

"Sort of," she said. "You need a shower."

"Seriously," he said. "I mean the message." He sniffed an armpit. "The shower, too. You think maybe?"

"Maybe," she said.

"I always wonder how high they go. Don't you?"

"No," she said.

"Saw the stork maybe."

She fixed him a look.

"You'll make a great dad."
Week 2: A story about rising to a challenge

### Gillian 2: The Door Guard

It happened on a Tuesday. A lady, head to toe in fringes and hoops, passed through the door he held open as per his (albeit very simple) job description.

"Hell _oo!_ " she said.

She couldn't be talking to him. He was invisible. Even with the shiny brass buttons on his uniform that he loved so much. It was part of his job description.

By the time he realized she was looking at him and waiting, it was too late.

"Don't bother," the valet said. "Poor dumb bastard."

She did it again when she returned. "Hell _oo!"_

He didn't move. It was in his job description to not move.

"Don't bother," the concierge said. "Mute bastard."

He practiced all night, shining the brass buttons of his jacket, ironing the crisp trousers, polishing the black boots. It was hard. It wasn't in his job description.

The next day the lady was wearing more fringes.

"Hell _oo!"_ she said.

He was too slow, and she had gone.

"Don't waste your time," the valet said. "Dumb bastard."

He had to practice again that night.

The third day he was ready.

"Hell _oo!_ " she said.

He opened his mouth, working his tongue around the two, sweet syllables.

"Hel-lo," he said.

The lady smiled.

"Well, I'll be damned," said the valet.

### Kevin 2: The Art Lesson

Mrs. Hanson made the project because of the horses in his notebooks. He met it by raging while the others drew stick horses.

Later, he laid out his treasures on his bed. Fierce wild horses, thundering, manes to the wind.

Later, Mrs. Hanson read _Equus_ :

"Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created."

"He'll be delivered from madness. What then?"

"The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes. It is also the dead stare in a million adults."

Her challenge wasn't to make him draw horses. It was to leave him his worship.
Week 3: A retelling of a fairytale

### Gillian 3: Cinderella's Farce

It was a setup. The whole damn thing.

She didn't think I knew. She didn't think anyone knew. Even after all this, even after the blinding, I kept her secrets.

Why?

She was my sister. I wasn't kind to her – my mother was more important than her. She didn't forgive me. But who cares? Our stories are over now, one of which ended in Happily Ever After, and that's enough.

They'd met weeks before. He dragged up at the house with a bleeding leg from a hunt gone wrong, and she patched him up in the kitchen. She used my handkerchief to do it, that's how I figured it out.

He kept sneaking back to the kitchen. We never saw him, because we never went to the kitchen. I heard their voices filtering from the laundry chute. They talked. They planned. I heard only snips of it. Enough to know.

I could have done something. Why bother? It was her destiny. Anyone could have seen it.

They planned it. She said the packages were food when I asked, but I knew better. Finery. Dresses, jewels. The glass slippers were last, wrapped in tablecloths.

She knew we'd stop her, and leave her alone at the house. I ripped her dress for her. She pretended to care.

I guess he sent a coach after he saw us arrive, to be sure we wouldn't pass on the street. She left early and left the shoe, as they'd planned, and he set off on the farce of the shoe. He had three sizes hidden in his shirt, and used whichever one he knew wouldn't fit the person in front of him. Only when he got to our house did he use the real one. I don't know how anyone believed their "surprise."

Either way, he took her off to the castle and I heard started a royal – if you'll pardon the pun – fight about her origins. They must have won, because I didn't hear any more of it.

The way they tell it now, there's a fairy involved, magic and chance and the _coup de foudre._ But there was no magic. It was a farce. A genius, impossible, bold setup.

And me? I sat back and watched the show, and paid for it with my eyes. Happily ever after, and then some.

### Kevin 3: The Board Meeting

He scrolled again through the PowerPoint, noticed his fingers trembling.

The usual list: capital, suppliers, shipping, design; more this, more that; we'll pivot, manage the burn rate.

They always bought it. Their Golden Boy. Can do no wrong. Done this before, will do it again.

The door clicked. "The Board is ready for you."

She knew, he'd bet. She'd watched all these liars telling each other lies, crying wolf and ignoring the warnings. But this time there really was a wolf. He'd put a name to it: his own. Save the sheep? Fire the shepherd.

That wasn't in the PowerPoint.

### Week 4 : A story about three siblings

Gillian 4: The Mountain

Everything changed when we left the mountain.

They said it was time, because the world was moving on ahead and we were getting left behind. We had to go to school, learn real things, grow up, leave behind all "those wrong stories ol' Hefter told you." No more place in the world for us anymore, and mom and dad had been wrong to hang on.

Taren and Jed believed them. They were older and so they knew better, they said.

It was only me that held on. I knew better than to say so, watching my brothers disappear into this modern, uncivilized world. I kept my mouth shut, went to school, did the learning I was told to. I learned the way they say the world works, how it began, where we came from. I even work it in now, studying the how the universe grows and moves.

I have not been back to the mountain. But these days when my students ask me how the world was made, I tell them the truth, and I remember.

In the beginning, I say, there was nothing, and in nothing, there came one.

The oldest was Soul, and Soul was born by fire, and bathed in sea. But Soul was lost in that great sea, and so there came a second.

The second was Being. Being began in stone, and stretched all the way to sky. But Soul and Being were cold and afraid in the darkness, and so there came a third.

The third, and the youngest, was Time. Time began as the first dark night gave way to dawn.

After I tell the story, there is always one student who raises their hand.

"It's a metaphor, right?" they ask.

And I smile.

### Kevin 4: Jerry

Dad was staunch Irish Democrat, so they named us John, Edward, and Robert.

People called us Jerry -- you know, JER. So we were Jerry1, Jerry2, and Jerry3. You got blamed for stuff you didn't do. Jerry1 did it, but somebody slips and says Jerry3 and he gets it instead.

Now, we're Edward, Bobby, and I kept Jerry -- just kind of liked it. So if we're all around and somebody says Jerry, Edward and Bobby still look up, just like old times.

And we still take the blame for each other -- got to be a habit, I guess.
Week 5: A story set in London

### Gillian 5: The Lost City

I had heard the name whispered every now and then. It was lore among the archeologists, what Atlantis had been before ocean mapping had left the drowned city naked and bare before the world.

It was the holy grail, the last so-called secret place in a world where nothing was secret anymore, where history's secrets had been sprawled across a million screens and humanity had gotten bored, turning their faces to the sky instead.

Except me, and Professor Tarring. He was the only one I ever heard who had spoken the name aloud, who dared to suggest that it had existed, still existed, hadn't been crushed like everything else.

We were laughed off. Professor Tarring taught Atlantis and saved the money for our expeditions.

We knew it had to be in the area, but there were still too many square kilometers to just dig anyway and hope we stumbled on something. We went down, as far as we could, donning gas masks and struggling through centuries of trash to try and get close to the earth's surface, where it would have to be.

I'm not sure why it called to me so much. It was part of the lost world, the world Before, the one before the great Crush and the mapping. I needed to know it existed, in some unreasonable, irrational, desperate way.

And then we found the map. Matching the new coordinates to the old world maps was a long, painstaking process, but when the computers finally dinged and the Professor and I looked at it, I felt like my heart had stopped a beat or two.

"My god," the Professor whispered.

I stared at the map, trying to make sense of what it was telling us. The blue lines of the inner section of our city against the red lines of where the lost city would have been. Matching perfectly.

I savored the words, loving each one, dreaming of the possibilities.

"We live in London," I said, and began to laugh.

### Kevin 5: The Hyde Park Soapbox

"You could go say something," Rich said. "You could preach." He pointed at a guy shouting, bending pedestrians in an arc around himself.

I stared blankly.

"The Hyde Park Soapbox," he said. "Derek Prince used to preach there. Want to?"

His eyes burned with challenge. Derek Prince was our Bible hero. I thought Rich would do it, go over and fulfill the Great Commission.

I stood there dumb, trying to shrink. We came to see the Palace. He saw through me, I know he did.

"Let's go," he finally said.

I followed, ashamed. It was always that way with Rich.
Week 6: : A story about finding something that has been lost

### Gillian 6: The Walker

The desert is unforgiving.

The nights are not cold, they are ice. The days are not hot, they blister. The dunes look like the clouds of heaven, but punish like the depths of hell.

That's what the Walker said, each endless cycle of crushing cold and wavering heat. He had walked for so long he'd forgotten why, footprints that no longer made any mark in the sand behind him. It was merely what he would do, what he had done. He walked, unseen by anyone but those already halfway into their own reckoning with the scales of eternity. He was a reminder of the dangers, the truth of that whispered promise.

Until they came. He was drawn to the camp by the fading spirit, as he always was. He didn't smell the honey or the herbs as his shadowed form broke into the dancing, distorted firelight, didn't leave a trace as he came to stand in their midst, restlessly, endlessly walking, pacing through the camp.

"He's here," someone whispered.

"Bind him," whispered another.

For the first time in centuries, the Walker's feet drew to a shuddering, staggering halt, and his head threw into the air and saw –

Stars.

The stars. So thick they were like a blanket, an alien landscape where the sky was a floor of glitter and the earth was the inky black heavens.

He had forgotten.

The Walker turned and left the light behind him, walking lightly over the shadowed sky, eyes turned to the heavens. He remembered now.

When he reached the horizon, the world would flip, and he would reach the world where the only pathway was splattered across the dunes in stars.

Purposefully, the Walker set off, with great strides, the dunes softening into no more than waves, cresting into the sky.

### Kevin 6: Mushrooms

A recipe for magic mushrooms, on an Eiffel Tower postcard. Another one for banana peels, on the Statue of Liberty. A baggie with a few shreds of grass. Some red, white, and blue papers. A water pipe. A Jimi Hendrix "Are You Experienced?" poster. Abby Hoffman's _Steal This Book_. Love beads, a floppy hat, some decrepit bell bottoms, a tie-dye...

Icons of the 60's. _His life_ in the 60's. The one he hid from the folks - they would have freaked out.

All here, in a box neatly tied with string, in Mom's cedar chest. Today. The day she died.
Week 7: A story about a journey

### Gillian 7: Summit

"Is that it?"

If it was, Alice thought, it wasn't a very impressive summit for the extravagant promises of this trip.

The guide, white-haired and dark-eyed, glanced up and surveyed the high point across the shallow saddle. "Hmm," she said thoughtfully. "Not yet, I think."

She was right. No sooner had they reached the top point, another high point appeared, a pile of rocks poking from the trees. "Is that it?" Alice wanted to know.

The guide glanced only briefly. "Not yet," she said.

Of course, it wasn't impressive enough yet, Alice thought. The travel agency had said that it was an indescribable journey. They had gushing testimonies of people to prove it. Despite the fact that many other agencies offered a much cheaper guide for this hike, Alice had been intrigued. She needed something life-changing anyway, and her previous forays had yielded nothing but disappointment.

The next summit was only a few hundred feet beyond the second, but the guide didn't even look up this time to verify.

"Not yet," she said.

Neither was the next, or the next after that, the path winding up and down. Every time Alice asked, she got the same response. Hot and tired, she started thinking she'd fallen for false promises yet again.

The next time, she didn't ask. She just put her head down and walked, one step after another.

Sometime after, as they climbed above treeline, her previously silent guide began to speak, sweeping her hand across the land, describing how it had been formed, where the lay of the land looked like a woman sleeping, how if you looked closely enough, the wind moving through the trees below looked like giants walking.

This high, the wind sang across the rocks. Alice watched for the giants. No, she thought, it looks more like waves.

It was sometime later when they took a break on a pile of rocks. They had been sitting for a few minutes when the guide glanced over.

"We are here," she said.

It was only then that Alice realized there were no more high points around. She was surprised by it, but didn't think any more of it as they descended, wondering why this hike had been so talked up.

It took her thirty years to understand that the journey the agency talked about had nothing to do with climbing a mountain.

### Kevin 7: Across The Room

Across the room. That's it. That's all.

That's the whole world.

Someone thinking, and the need to get through a viscous blur of half-air, half-water, through the thickness, the weight, back to the crisp edges of reality.

And to get across the room. Something over there. Something he needed to do once he got there.

Heaviness. Leaden muscles melted over the floor. And deep sleep.

Another awakening. A ringing, and a distant observer. A piercing beam of light.

Something he needed to do. Somewhere to go.

Rest. To lie here forever.

To be light. To float free.

Across the room.
Week 8: : A story set during a war

### Gillian 8: The Word

"What's this word mean, Pa?"

Pa looked, his brow furrowing like it did when I asked about a hard word. This one didn't have a lot of letters but I'd learned that sometimes the hardest words were the shortest ones.

"Ah...well let's see. I'm not sure myself," Pa said. "It means...well, you know the night hammers?"

I knew them. The ones that came from the sky and gut the world into patterns.

"Well, I think this word means...they wouldn't exist."

I didn't understand. "It means no night hammers? But what would we listen to at night then?"

"And I think it means we could live in the same house and not move all the time," Pa continued, as though I hadn't said anything.

"But that would be boring!" I protested. The night hammers and the teethmen were always chewing up the land, and so we always got to find new houses to explore.

"And the teethmen wouldn't exist."

"But –" I struggled to imagine such a thing. "But where would they go?"

"I just mean they wouldn't be here."

"And that's what it means? No night hammers and no teethmen?"

"I think so. Next time we visit the cave, we can ask your grandmother. I think she might know. It hasn't happened since...well, maybe even before she lived."

Grandmother lived in a cave, the only one the teethmen hadn't found yet, with the other old people and some young people like me. We couldn't visit a lot, because the teethmen would see us go there and because we were always trying to guess the night hammers next pattern.

The next time we went, I showed her the book and the word.

I don't know why, but she just laughed. She put her head back and laughed and laughed and laughed.

She never answered the question, either.

### Kevin 8: The Photograph

A G.I., cigarette in hand, crouching by a balustrade, high up on a cathedral, Paris spreading out below.

The G.I. is my dad.

He was afraid of heights.

Another photo: him x-raying a guy's arm. So that's what he did: took pictures of the broken bones of war. Do that every day, maybe you lose your fear of other things. Like heights. At least while you're on leave in Paris.

They didn't talk about it. Did what was necessary over there, came home, went to work, kept it to themselves.

But inside there was this fear of things.

Like heights.
Week 9: A creepy story

### Gillian 9: The Stairs

It wasn't so much that the stairs were creaking. The stairs creaked all the time. It was an old house, that's one of the things she loved so much about it. Old Victorian, bought it at a dirt cheap price when she and Rich first got married and patched it up with love and care.

No, the creaking stairs weren't really the problem. She loved them, really. It was a way of telling each other they were home, the long work day was over, kind of their secret signal that the bed wouldn't be cold for much longer.

The problem was that the stairs _shouldn't_ be creaking, because Rich wasn't home. She knew he wasn't because he wasn't supposed to be and he always called when he left work early, and because the front door didn't close properly unless you slammed it, and she hadn't heard it slam.

It wasn't the house settling, the house settling didn't sound like that. She knew what that sounded like. This was like Rich had come home early and hadn't slammed the door, but she knew that wasn't right.

"Rich?" she called hesitantly.

The stairs only kept creaking.

### Kevin 9: Martin

Something is knocking. Or hissing. Hissing and knocking together. I don't like it.

The light is green. Light shouldn't be green. It should be... something else. There was a puddle under the car -- that color. The air shouldn't be that.

They put something up my back. I got goosebumps. Some people say gooseflesh. People shouldn't say that. Gooseflesh is cold and bumpy where the feathers were. They never felt gooseflesh, otherwise they wouldn't say it.

The antifreeze puddle had a snake in it. A dead snake. The snake was cold. When I drank it, it made the air green.
Week 10: A story featuring a countdown

### Gillian 10: The Clock in the Square

There was a clock in the square that was always counting down. Dalia didn't think anyone else had noticed it, because she was always the only one watching it. It was under the big flashing advertisements, white digital numbers like any normal clock.

But it wasn't a normal clock, because it didn't show the time. It just counted down. Sometimes it would be from large number and take several days, or sometimes a small number and take a few hours. Sometimes it counted slowly, sometimes fast. It never reached zero; after one, the next number would appear and it would start counting again.

For as long as she could remember, Dalia watched the numbers ticking away and wondered what they meant.

Some days it was the seconds left in someone's life in the city. Or perhaps it was the time left in a relationship. When that seemed too sad, she thought it might be time before a new relationship began, or someone was born.

But those things seemed too simple. A countdown was a beginning or an end, but was not the world beginning and ending every day? Maybe it was the time before a flower bloomed, or before a leaf fell, the number of people who believed in magic, the seconds before the next child stopped believing in Santa Claus.

Some days, when she was tired and stressed and thought she should be more of an adult about the world, she thought it was nothing more than a programming error, or the time before the advertisement changed. Something normal, explainable, and unworthy of notice.

And yet, when they took down the ad screen, they left the countdown clock, and it kept counting down.

_The time before a new song is written,_ Dalia thought that day as she went to work, and programming error or not, it still made her smile.

### Kevin 10: The Countdown

It looked sure this time. The only game was how long the old bastard would stick around, just to spite them.

They had a pool going for awhile, but then he kept going so they quit. Now they had an email with a hundred ten thousand dollar bills, and every day one disappeared. Today, there were forty left.

It wasn't about the money. He promised they'd never get a cent. Amazing he didn't charge them rent, growing up.

He left it all to some damned nuns in Portugal. Our Lady of Fatima. Sisters is Portugal!

It was about the money.

### Week 11: A story set at a full moon

Gillian 11: Moon Sickness

The moon on Dhaegar rose once every one hundred and seventy days, and every time it did, it left chaos in its wake.

The science people used words like "elliptical," "irregular orbit," and "large gravitational influence," but it was a long time before I understood them, and even when I did, it didn't make a difference, because moonrise on Dhaegar was _terrifying._

We could feel it coming for days before hand, a kind of tugging in your heart, a rumbling in the earth. It would get worse and worse, pressure building in the head, the thundering of blood moving to a beat not quite yours, until the whole world would begin to shake and the great moon would labor over the horizon, so close you _knew_ this time it would fall and destroy everything.

The world would shiver and shake and try to tear itself apart as the great ball rolled across the sky, an excruciating few hours, before it would vanish again and the pull would slowly lessen.

There was no way to fight it, no way to protect yourself. The pain in the head was enough to send most people insane, and those hours were full of wailing, shouting, destruction as people sought to distract themselves. Sometimes it took days before people were able to live normally again, picking up the pieces they had destroyed.

We left as refugees to the Marble Planet when I was still a child, and to this day, I remember how afraid I was to know that the moon rose only every twenty eight days. How could such a place be a sanctuary? I begged and begged not to go, but it wasn't my decision.

The first full moon on the Marble Planet, we watched together. We held our breath as the tiny little silver ball pulled its way from the horizon. Our blood was tingling, but not throbbing, and suddenly we were laughing and crying in relief.

Our new neighbors never quite understood, and neither did my new family, why every full moon, I looked up at the sky and began to laugh.

### Kevin 11: The Moon and the Stars

As a child he wondered, where do the stars go when the moon is full? When it is empty, their light fills the land. Then comes the slow disappearing, until the moon is all and they are naught.

He asked the adults, who explained but didn't answer. He became one of them and stopped asking--until tonight, when he asked again, and finally knew:

They don't go anywhere; they are still there, but have given all their light to the moon, which has none of its own.

That night he slept as a man who has done great work.
Week 12: A story about a competition

### Gillian 12: The Non-Fighter

When I was a kid, my favorite time of the week was the Saturday fights. I can remember going even when I couldn't climb the rafter steps on my own I was so small, and Dad had to hoist me up by my armpits. As a young boy, I dreamt of being one of the fighters. I used to watch them with stars in my eyes, in awe of their auras, their bodies, their sheer _being._ I'd go home and try to be like them, walk like them. Punch my pillow and narrate my own fights.

I might have thought about pursuing it, but as a teenager, I realized something disastrous for my fighting career – I wasn't a fighter. I didn't like being hit or hitting, didn't like the aggression. When Mattie challenged me to a fight for Sophie in sophomore year, I couldn't even face him down. I let Sophie go. She didn't look me in the face again until senior year, and only then with pity.

I wrote it off as a boyish dream and went to college, where I was taught to think about why and how and question everything. I left questioning everything, and wandered a bit.

It was during that wandering time that I found myself wandering back to the fights. To my surprise, they still called me, still filled with the same fervor and thrill.

It took me a long time to figure out _why_ they did that, to me, this mild, unassuming, _non-fighter_ of a lost man.

I realized finally that it wasn't the fighting, per se. It was the personas. It was the way the fighters came in with their hoods and entourages, like modern gods or gladiators. The aura of their energy, blasting through the arena. The way they were nowhere but there, inside the ring, all their energy and being wrapped up in that charged cube of living.

I didn't want to fight; I wanted to be the one who walks in to thunderous roars and only flicks their head, who carries all the human energy of the spectators in their fist.

Some years down the road, I finished my PhD and started teaching. I wrote about the force of the non-fighters, and yet, every time I walked into the lecture hall, I stopped at the door and closed my eyes.

In that second, I was back at the fights. Covered in a robe, my supporters at my back, the crowds stamping their feet and shouting themselves hoarse.

It was only then that I walked through the door.

### Kevin 12: Spelling Bee

This one for the win.

"Compel."

Tracy's heart dropped into her shoes. She thought she might go there with it. One l or two? She could never remember in practice.

Homonyms, Ms. Deetz had said. Think of homonyms.

Im-pel...pro-pel...No help. Same problem.

"30 seconds. Your word is compel."

How about bell, well, smell...? No help there.

Caitlin Loughlin looked smug. She knew. Tracy hated her.

Sara, her bestie, leaned in, willing her to spell it.

Her mom.. more nervous than she was.

Pounding heart. Shallow breath. Dry mouth. Dizzy.

"10 seconds."

She began, "C-o-m-p-e-l..."

She paused.

One l or two?
Week 13: A story that take place entirely inside a vehicle

### Gillian 13: The Road Untraveled

"Don't."

Trace looked over, fingers gently tapping the steering wheel. "Don't what?"

"Go this way."

There was a pause. "You don't even know which way we're going."

"Trace, please."

She leveled me a glance that wasn't very subtle about its meaning, but since she didn't say the words aloud, I chose to pretend I couldn't read them in her eyes.

"It's just a street."

I could feel it coming, still far enough we could escape it, but not for very long.

"Trace, _please."_

I knew she didn't want it. The waves of not wanting were radiating off her, like they did every time, and every time we had this fight.

"Next time," I told her as we sat at the red light, her fingers tap, tap, tapping on the wheel some more, not so gently now. "Next time we can go that way."

Trace glowered. "That's what you said last time, and every other damn time."

"Next time," I said again.

Trace shook her head, but as the light turned green, she swung us out of the lane and into the left turn lane, irritating and shocking the car behind us. The horn blared and Trace held up a single finger out the window.

"If he rear-ends us, you're paying the insurance," she said, and the acceleration yanked me back in my seat.

### Kevin 13: Runnin' Up the Mountain

"Guy went over right here. Took 'em twenty grand t' git 'im out.."

He kept taking a hand off the wheel, pointing. I burrowed my eyes into the road -- "shortest the Butte to Aspen" -- willing us to stay on it.

He saw me doing it, spat out the window, took a hand off the wheel and poked toward his eyes.

"Don't help... SHIT!"

The wall we were hugging let loose a surge of rock and gravel. He gunned it, fought the wheel, got us through.

He turned my way and grinned.

"Woulda cost you twenty grand right there."
Week 14: A story from a villain's perspective

### Gillian 14: The Madman's Painting

I'd do it all over again. Every single damn second of it.

There will be no record of me. There are no records anymore. There will be no trace of me. There are no traces anymore. If by some chance some alien creature peers their alien eyes upon this place they may never know how it happened.

I don't care. I didn't do it for the posterity. There is no posterity when you are the last. I didn't do it to rule, or build an empire. That's what they said, what they tried to say, what they screamed.

I burned the world to watch it burn. I burned it to watch the flames, the beauty of it, the orange mixing with the blue and all the colors like a madman's palette, _my_ palette. I painted it with all the colors of destruction, and it was beautiful.

No one saw the colors like me. They didn't look. No one ever looked. No one ever turned their eyes from their own navels, sucking the colors through the straws of ignorance.

It was a masterpiece. It is a masterpiece. I have made of the Earth a piece of art, of which no one will ever know. I have left no signature. Even now the green is returning. Even now the Earth makes of itself a new beginning. By the time I too have burned, there will be no trace anymore.

There are no traces anymore.

### Kevin 14: Eden

That old story -- it disgusts me, how they tell it. Paradise... man and woman running around naked... fruit and flowers... until I ruined it.

Me, the snake in the grass.

Please.

There was no apple. I didn't steal anything, just gave them a taste of something they never knew they could have: the ability to know.

They've been after it ever since. They want to know so badly, they pretend they do. They keep chasing it.

That was the plan: give them a taste of what they can never have, but want anyway.

The perfect heist.

I love it.
Week 15: A story set at a concert or festival

### Gillian 15: The Fire Master

Keep the rhythm. Not too many at first.

I set the fuse, counting the seconds to myself, dashing down the line. Purple here, green splashing in the middle.

Don't watch them. Concentrate, plan the next volley.

The lessons and the sequence were burned into my head, anxiety having tattooed them as surely as ink across my eyelids. The fire festival was known as far as the horizon itself stretched, and each year they came in droves to see the magic of the Fire Master.

Only this year, there was no Fire Master. There was only me, and the years of training burned into my skin more deeply than the scars that came from not moving fast enough once the fuse was set.

Paint the sky with the colors. Let them see not fire, but the very forging of the world.

I dared not to look up across the sky, to see their faces as they watched. They did not know there was no Fire Master anymore. If they knew it was all a show by a scrawny lad not yet grown into his hands and feet, would they protest? Would they mind?

The last volley must dazzle them, must set the fabric of the sky alight, must rumble even in your bones.

I dashed from fuse to fuse, sweat in my eyes, breathless and lost in the act of it, worry sloughing off into the explosions. I stepped back as they caught, and suddenly the boxes began to beat, my heart matching their rhythm.

As the fury of that last painting settled, the silence deafened me, and I gaped into the silence. But then, suddenly, from the other side of the lake –

A shout, and then a roar, hands clapping and voices shouting. It took me a long time to understand what they were saying, but when I did, I felt a thrill creeping up my spine and exploding on my face.

Fire Master, they were saying.

### Kevin 15: Roadie

"They come for the show, but what they really want is to get backstage. Or on it."

Tim nodded at the crowd -- maybe 50,000. We were running the final sound check. He was right, it was powerful, being up here.

"Like that guy."

He pointed downstage right . Yeah, the guy had the look. Tim radioed Security. Two of them moved over, stood between him and the stage.

Five songs into the set, Tim said, "About now."

The song finished. Another one.

"Guess not," I said.

That's when the guy made his move.

Tim grinned. "Timing's off," he said.
Week 16: A story that begins with a gunshot

### Gillian 16: The Shot

It wasn't a bang – no, it was a crack. It was a finger of heaven ripping the air so fast sound couldn't make itself into a proper noise. Not a rip, not a tear, just that – _crack._ There was something inherently _wrong_ about the sound, like it shouldn't exist and because it shouldn't, it sounded like that.

And it was too, _too_ close.

The shots always started at the same time every night, so most of the time I was ready, already home and with my fingers stuffed in my ears. Not that it mattered. I still felt the air crack. The sound echoed in my guts, not my ears.

They said it was normal, the war games. The children had to learn somehow. For the most part, no one got hurt, it was just sound and shouts. They couldn't aim much anyway, not at first. When they started grazing each other, they were taken away. Wherever 'away' was, I didn't know. I just know most of the time, they didn't come back.

I wasn't supposed to be out when the games began, and so I wasn't. I hated them, hated the sound, so why should I be?

Except that I was.

I'd been out too far, played too long, left too late, and time ran too fast. And although I was close, I was not home yet, and the first crack had just exploded through me like the bullet itself.

I would have to play now – I had no choice. They were all around me. Cold, heavy metal pressed into my hand. It was unnatural, wrongly heavy.

I must have squeezed the trigger somehow – I don't remember how. All I remember was the crack, the way the sound ripped forwards and backwards and through me and inside me, and all that was left was the ringing.

The ringing never fully went away. Not then, not since.

### Kevin 16: Rite of Passage

A comic book would say "ka-pow" for the sound, but it was more like "pawk."

Not much of a kick... a 410, just right for me: at 13 years, I didn't have much of a kick either.

But with the pawk and the kick, something else: one of the coffee cans sailed off the sawhorse 30 yards away. Just like that: pull the trigger, can sails off.

Dad shouted. A couple months later, another shout when I hit the pheasant he missed.

Surprise, I'd say, both times. Like "Well would you look at that!"

Fall. Minnesota. Hunting. What guys did.
Week 17: A story set in a country you've never been to

### Gillian 17: The Old World

The world began here.

It might end here, too.

The world is growling here. It is turning, rolling, shouting, tossing and turning. It is confused, lost, alone, shunned, outcast.

The world began here, so the stories say, in a garden whose fruit was so sweet it ruined us all. The sweeter the taste, the more it rots, the spoils more bitter.

If it began here, should it not end here too? One wrong choice to start the descent, one more to finish it?

The world was beautiful here.

The world is dark here. It is threatening, angry, tense like a coiled spring.

The world is forgotten here, hidden under the harsh spotlights of judging eyes and explosions, shrouded by the smoke. By name they know, as though naming is the same as knowing, knowing the same as experiencing, experiencing the same as understanding.

The world began here, and the amount of life that has been lived shakes and quakes and pushes at the boundaries of time and space, the fights for the answer to an eternal question that has never been and may never be answered.

The world began here, and maybe, it might end here too.

### Kevin 17: Kandinsky

I hurried to The Hermitage -- the Russian Louvre -- to see the one thing they had of Kandinsky, no longer a Russian when he died, a Frenchman, but I guess once a Russian always a Russian, like once an anything always an anything. My goal was Composition No. 6, he painted it 1913 in Germany, then back to Russia, then the Bauhaus in Germany which the Nazis stormed and then to France and they stormed that, too, but he painted and died before it ended, until here he is today, a son of St. Petersburg, captured on a canvas.
Week 18: A story about a historical figure

### Gillian 18: The Lightning Boy

Once upon a time, there was a boy who had a talent for making fire. A talent; or perhaps a penchant.

In a world where setting fires was more power than skill, the lightning boy was a curious phenomenon.

Those around him liked to joke that he had hands of fire, like the light from the sky that set the trees ablaze. Others watched him with mistrust, envy, or greed. There was much one could do with a boy who knew how to set fires, especially one with a powerful family.

Fire followed the boy where he went; where he played, where he ate, where he slept.

That was the day his brothers were in the tent with him.

One of them didn't survive. The other emerged in flames and was plunged into the public baths. He survived, but he was never the same. He never said a word to his brother, and never left the water if he could.

There was much talk about the lightning boy's involvement in that fire. Some said it was a tragic accident. But many more said it was more than that, it was calculated, carefully planned, for now he had no rivals, no brothers to contend with for power.

The lightning boy himself never said. He grew from a boy with a talent for making fire to a man whose hands of lightning were feared and revered. Power was a spark away, and a spark was never far away. The man the lightning boy had become used it.

People talked. Stories spread. Time passed.

The lightning boy and his sparks had long since gone out, but he had not truly gone. He was given a name for the myth he'd become. They named his brothers, built him a temple and a heaven, and handed him the keys to the world.

All for a boy with lightning in his hands.

### Kevin 18: The Tomb of the Unknowns

Nobody knows his name. That way, he's more than just one, he's all of them we couldn't put together enough to know who they were.

You hear him called "soldier," but he's actually parts of four -- two from the European Theater and two from the Pacific. I know -- I did the putting together. You can find my name on Wikipedia, which is more than I can say for him... or them, I mean.

"These honored dead" Lincoln called them at Gettysburg. Honored to die. Me, I was honored to live, knowing what I put together in that tomb.
Week 19: A story set in a theatre

### Gillian 19: Ghostlight

The light comes on at night, without fail. It catches most of the shadows onstage, but it can't touch all of them. For example, there's a little patch in the President's box, behind the curtain, where the shadows are deep and dark enough to keep away the light's magic.

That's where I spend my nights.

I'd rather face the stage, of course, but I have the day to do that, dancing through the catwalks and leaving cold shivers on the neck hairs of the technicians. They know it's me, at least, the veterans do. The young ones are jumpy. Some of them can't take it, and they quit. The ones who stay don't mind.

"Leave out the wine every now and then and he won't make trouble," the veterans say, and they're right.

In this line of business, there's a lot of shady sorts that pull down lights and fray the electric cables. To be honest, I never understood that. I tried, back when I first started, but I could never get behind it. To me, intentionally destroying any part of a theater felt too much like smashing pews in a Church.

So I do my haunting in more quiet ways. Sometimes I try to help the performances. I managed to turn a spectacularly dull production of _Death of a Salesman_ (god help the poor director, he was trying to go post-modern) into a showstopper with a few well-timed pyrotechnics, though my best moment was perhaps scaring the world's most jaded Hamlet actor so much he won an award for his performance.

Most of the time the actors don't know it's me. I don't mind, they don't need to. The staff and the technicians know, and we take care of each other.

It doesn't stop them from putting out the ghostlight every night, but they'd be a fool to break that tradition. I'm the resident here, but the night invites the freelancers, and _nobody_ wants to mess with them.

Still, when old Rick closes up for the night and sets that little bulb on the stage, he always gives me a nod and a wave.

"Sorry about this, old boy," he says to the empty theater, "but you know how it goes."

I know, I tell him. He glances at the hairs raising on his arm, and smiles.

### Kevin 19: Julius Caesar

The first time my father took me to the theater, my initial reaction was something like, "How odd."

One thing about parents who take you places where they make their living is they forget what it's like for someone who doesn't. So they don't explain things. He was like that.

One of his students had set Julius Caesar in South America, with a military dictator and Marxist rebels. So there were soldiers with machine guns, and everybody speaking Elizabethan English.

How odd, like I said. And how incomprehensible.

And how magical. I was undone -- my life onstage forever sealed.
Week 20: A story written in 2nd person narrative

### Gillian 20: You

I didn't realize that you were me. You'll have to forgive me; I am not in the habit of opening the door for myself. I'm afraid I must have seemed quite boorish, and you must have been quite cold.

I had heard you knocking for some time, I have to admit, but I thought you were someone else. I thought maybe you were the night, or maybe one of the others we must be careful about, the reason we kept our blinds closed.

But after a certain time, your knocking became so insistent, so desperate, that I told myself, perhaps I should open it to tell you to go away. I was not expecting visitors, nor did I want visitors.

Yet still the knocking continued, and at last, frustrated and angry and wary, I threw open the door to shove you away.

I didn't recognize you right away. I apologize. I am not in the habit of looking myself in the face.

I believe I shouted; I'm not proud of those words I said. They were meant for that other, not for you.

But you didn't leave, you only stood there, wretched, miserable, shivering, and finally, as my shouting slowed and I moved to shut the door, you looked up at me.

"Do you not recognize your own face?" you asked.

When I at last I did, I apologized. I was ashamed. I didn't see, I said. I didn't look.

"I thought you were the other," I told you.

But at that, you smiled at me, in a way that still haunts me to this day. You smiled so widely, and reached out, and took my hand with your freezing fingers.

"I am," you said softly, and without another word, vanished into the night.

I am so cold now, as you must be.

You must forgive me. I did not recognize your face.

### Kevin 20: Birdman

You stand there like you're checking out your options. Just jump. Just go. Waiting doesn't help.

And it's not a jump, it's a step, like they said. It's just that your foot doesn't land on anything -- just keeps going, until it finally touches down, and you right behind it.

That's the plan, anyway.

That's your option: one big long step. So take it already.

And in between? "You'll be a bird, Dude." That's what the instructor said.

Your brain screams, "But I'm not a bird!"

Okay so forget the bird part, just be a guy in a wingsuit.

Dude.

Week 21: A story set on another planet

### Gillian 21: Star Chaser

"Do you think anyone else is out there, Mam?"

Mam glanced out the window, hands still hard at work beneath her.

"Mm. It's a big universe, Eggs," she said.

There was a long silence. Then, "How long do you think it would take me to visit the whole galaxy?"

Mam laughed. "Oh, Eggs," she said gently, "probably a lot more years than you have."

The young boy she called Eggs thought about this too for a long time. Sometimes she thought he thought too much. His peers played; Eggs thought.

"Mam," he said, with the kind of tone that meant he knew he was asking too many questions, but couldn't stop himself.

"Yes?" she responded, in the kind of tone that meant she knew he meant well, and didn't mind answering.

"Do you think I could steal time?"

The questions the boy asked! She laughed again.

"I suppose if anyone could, it would be you," she said.

Eggs was opening his mouth again, but Mam gently put her hands on his shoulders. "The suns are setting," she said, "and the deep cold is coming. We have work to do. Save your questions for the dark night. We'll need them to keep us company."

Eggs nodded solemnly, and set to his chores. Later, when the dark night had fallen, they sat by the window and stared into the long night.

Eggs pointed. "I'm gonna visit that star first," he said, "and then _that_ one. And then that bright one. And then..."

He chose the stars in their order, a litany and a chorus, as the dark night settled deeper and deeper. Then he named each one, writing them and charting them on a napkin.

"This is my map," he told Mam, in the steady light of their sturdy candle.

"What's that?" Mam asked, pointing to the letters he had scrawled at the bottom. "Star Chaser?"

Eggs grinned. "That's my name," he said.

### Kevin 21: The View From Here

I thought the night sky would be different, but we're still in the Milky Way, so we still get that blotchy stripe across the sky. Every night.

I wish we didn't.

I was thinking a wormhole to another universe. What we got instead was an alley to a different street. You go this far, there shouldn't be reminders. That should be guaranteed: no reminders.

Plus it's always night here, so there's always the same galaxy stretched across the sky. It's annoying, like when my uncle used to put his shoes up on the couch.

Now he's here every damn day.
Week 22: A story written from the perspective of someone dead/undead

### Gillian 22: 1,547 Deaths

As of yesterday, when I was killed in a freak accident, I have died one-thousand five-hundred and forty-seven times.

At least, I think so. It could possibly be forty-nine or forty-five; there are a few that are rather blurry and a few hundred bleak years when I wasn't very good about counting.

If you passed me on the subway, you might not notice anything. Most people don't. I look like any other foreigner, though you would be hard-pressed to say from which country. It is only in my eyes that people notice. Sometimes they stop, stare for a moment.

Maybe they see the years unfurling there, like an unending string, winding back into the days of the gods and the wilds. Times before language, before knowledge. They stare, and they wonder.

But then they shake it off and continue their lives, living as they do. I find it often ironic how often people fail to be alive during their lives, even though they only have one.

They have so little time; I have so much. There have been years that I wasted. I have endless lives to live, so why should I save them? I have drowned in loss and drugs and ecstasy, I have jumped from planes and swum into the depths of the sea. I have hated and raged, I have spent weeks lying on the floor in protest until I expire from hunger.

And yet – those are only the dark years. There were just as many full of beauty, full of exploration and joy, of gratitude. One would think that after so long, there would be nothing that could surprise or astonish me anymore, that no human could interest me. But it's not true. In fact, sometimes I think the longer I live, the more I am amazed. The more I love. The deeper I feel.

Because the truth is, however each life ends, every time it begins – the moment when my heart starts beating again and life rushes back through my veins – the only emotion I feel is relief.

And although it has already been one-thousand, five-hundred and forty-eight (or fifty or fifty-six) times that I have reawakened, I am still afraid that this time might be the last.

### Kevin 22: Revenge

"Well that settles that!" the hospice nurse said when I flatlined. It heard it the way you hear things when your head is underwater.

She was relieved. Why, I can't say. What did my dying settle for her, I wonder?

I got my revenge later. I sat up. Corpses sometimes do that -- it's some kind of gas build up.

I heard the scream -- all the way from underwater.

I saw it happen. No, I _felt_ it. And now I'm telling you about it, even though you'll never hear me.

Because there's no me anymore.

Weird, this afterlife thing.
Week 23: A story about a birthday

### Gillian 23: The World Watchers

"Jake! Jake! Jacob Patrick Mackenzie!"

It was only on the third one that Jake turned, spoken in the kind of hissing shout that's louder than shouting but that parents use when the situation requires them to pretend they're being quiet. He found two sets of identically disapproving eyes glowering at him.

"Don't wander off," Debbie whispered forcefully. "You don't know what's out there."

Jake glanced contemptuously into the wood behind them. He knew what was in it – trails for BMX bikes, rocks for climbing, abandoned cars for playing. Worlds for a young boy, but nothing dangerous.

At least, not on any other night but this one, supposedly, according to the ridiculous stories Debbie and Mom and all of their friends believed in. According to them, there was an old legend about how that was where the world watchers lived, and on this day, to celebrate their birthday, they came out to play. For some reason – Jake never really understood what – it was important for them to be there during that night. Something having to do with keeping the world watchers safe during their party.

(The story kept changing, which was how Jake knew that it was false. It was how he'd figured out about Santa Claus too.)

In any case, they had been there every year and they started dragging Jake with them once he was old enough. At first he'd thought it was cool because he got to stay up all night, but now, approaching teenagehood, he wished he was at home, or with his friends, or at the skate park – in short, anywhere but there.

Jake slouched back towards the adults with their candles. He sat and stared ferociously into the night, eyes crossing and uncrossing. He was wondering if he could actually hear the seconds slowing down when something bit his finger. Hard.

Jake almost shouted with surprise and was about to shake his hand, but the surprise died in his throat. The thing crouching on his finger was so small he could barely focus on its tiny face. It was glowing softly like a firefly, but it was no insect. Its eyes were full of light, and inside them were worlds. Jake had no trouble understanding where the name "world watcher" had come from.

Jake stared at the thing for a long time, taking in its alien features, fluttering things that could only be called wings for lack of a better word, and furiously intense gaze. Finally, he bent his head to his hand.

"Happy birthday," he whispered.

### Kevin 23: Cousins

You knew this was BIG because the cousins would all be there -- first cousins, second cousins, cousins you lost the numbers for -- which meant something was happening that needed everybody to celebrate or mourn it together.

The line of cars began rolling up the driveway early, raising dust and spilling out cousins and laughing uncles and busy aunts. Hugs, games, shrieks, secrets, jokes, and two fights was the day's cousins tally. Pretty typical.

All for The Birthday -- three digits big, with enough cake to cross all the cousins' eyes as they fell into a collective sugar coma.
Week 24: A story that ends on a cliffhanger

### Gillian 24: The Roll

The gods were gambling again, gambling being a particularly fond pastime of gods. There were so many worlds, so many dimensions to win and lose, and if they ran out, well, someone could always make more.

The world they were playing into today was laid out under their fingers in squares of cities. They'd started small, no point in putting all the chips in right away until they were reasonably sure what direction things were going. Some evolution, species creation, world building, the usual.

They were really getting into the swing of things, making teams against each other and building up for a truly spectacular shootout at the end, when the doors of their gambling hall banged open. All heads turned, and a very un-godlike gasp of surprise echoed around the hall.

"Who invited _that?"_ one whispered.

Being was more than a god, it was _Being._ It didn't play with them, in fact, they rarely saw it. For the most part, they viewed it with some disdain, for what was the point in Being if you didn't play?

And yet here it was, shapeless and shapeful and entirely confusing even to the god's eye.

"Em...hello," said one of the major gods, rather timidly, all things considered. He shifted his eyes across his various holdings, feeling unaccountably nervous about them for some reason. Premonition being a specialty of gods, he thought this was a bad sign. "What can we, er, do for you?"

"I'd like to roll," Being said, his? her? voice at once a crackle and a river.

The gods exchanged uneasy glances, their collective omniscience sending off alarm bells of all kinds, some even audible.

"For what?" another major god asked, feeling rather possessive about his holdings, which were pretty vast for this game.

Being may or may not have waved a hand over everything. Including them. "All of it," he? she? said. "One roll, doubles or nothing. Your dice. The odds are, after all, in your favor."

The gods were skeptical, but they were also pretty sure one did not say no to Being. They glanced at each other. Finally, reluctantly, they handed over the dice.

The dice rattled in Being's shapeless hands, and then, without warning, it threw.

They fell for a long time.

### Kevin 24: The Four Seamer

Two out, bottom of the ninth, full count. One pitch away from a trifecta. A kid's dream, but his died long ago. Now he's one hit away from just another might-have-been in a journeyman career full of them.

The home crowd is on its feet, thundering.

He leans in. Jake puts down two fingers. He laughs out loud, steps off.

It's the perfect call -- the curve's been his best pitch all day, dancing like a marionette.

He steps back on, ignores Jake, loads up the four-seamer. Nothing but heat here. Right down the middle.

Catch it if you can.
Week 25: A Story set during the summer solstice

### Gillian 25: Summers Before

All right, all right, you've got me cornered. Sit down now. All right. What can I tell you...what's that? You want to hear about the world before? Well, what about it?

The world before...you wouldn't believe me if I told you. You have to promise you'll listen closely, all right? No interrupting.

Here we go, then. Back in the world before, today was a special day. Do you know why? Oh yes, I did say no interrupting. Well, have a guess. No one?

Before the great crunch straightened the world, the seasons used to change. The days changed length. Sometimes they were very long, sometimes very sh — what's that now? Oh, for heaven's sake, it was all twenty four hours, but the days would be longer than the nights, or the nights longer than the days.

Don't shout now, I'm telling the story, and I tell you, it's true. Every word of it.

On this day every year, in fact, the day was so long that the sun had only barely set before it rose again. It was the very longest day of the year.

Oh, the festivals we had! Imagine, one night where no parent could tell you "in bed after dark" and make you feel disappointed! I was allowed to stay up and join the festivals, the dancing, the eating, the ribbons and colors...it was so beautiful...

...What's that? I'm all right. I can just picture it still. You couldn't imagine it, the world is not so gentle anymore.

What did you say? You'd like to pretend? Well, I don't see why not. Bring the extra lamps, light the candles. Oh, don't worry, we'll have enough. Here, make a sun. We can watch it set together. No, not that close to the horizon, it's still early yet. The day is so long.

You want to dance? Oh...I'm not sure I could still remember, or move this old body, but let's see...it went like this...

And then this...

And then this...

### Kevin 25: Get It Right, People!

Matthew had this "Scientist in Training" t-shirt, and he took getting things right seriously.

Like correcting anyone who said the summer solstice is the year's longest day. No, it's the same as the rest: 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4 seconds.

He'd watch for the look of confusion, and pounce.

One earth orbit takes 366.25 days, which is 31,557,565 seconds. Divide that by 365.25, and you get 86,400 seconds = 24 hours, what we call a day. We make up the difference between real days and 24-hour days with leap year. Plus we also have "leap seconds"...

Accurate, certainly.

Insufferable, mainly.
Week 26: A story about nostalgia

### Gillian 26: The Forgotten Man

It doesn't always hit like that, so fiercely. Sometimes I can catch it, bottle it, gently release it like the fireflies. But sometimes I'm not ready, and it hits me like a wave.

The haze blurs my eyes and these buildings melt like ice cream on the pavement. The heavy air settles softly on my shoulders like the touch of an old friend, and I crumble into it.

The lights in this modern creation are harsh, blinding, but the lights in my memory are sepia-toned and yellow, infused with the summer smells and heavy green leaves. Lights in my memory are blinking, yellow-green twinkles of magic heralding the dusk.

I used to try to tell the children that the insects made their own light.

That's why I don't sit on a stoop anymore, with the soft creaking of the porch swing and the chattering of the cicadas.

I sit instead on the pavement, huddled in everything I own, frozen and paralyzed inside the world as it was, as has been lost.

But my god, the summers. I tell myself out loud so I don't forget, but I'm not sure I could even if I tried. The memories are like the haze; ever-present, thick and choking.

The sounds; past the clunking and the wheezing and the rush of tires and feet and voices, I can hear the birds and the cicadas, the firecrackers at the festivals.

The smells; past the burning pavement and rubber and chemicals, there is the fairground, the cakes, the barbeques.

I hate the memories, but I love them. I live for them, cherish them, and fear them. But when they come in those waves, I sway on this broken concrete stoop as people rush past, pretending they don't see me. I close my eyes and breathe it.

Sometimes it almost even seems real.

### Kevin 26: Diagnosis: Homesickness

You unlearn a lot of things when you become a shrink. Like homesickness.

17th Century Swiss mercenaries had it. They missed their mountains, so they deserted.

Wait a minute. S _witzerland._ Had. _Mercenaries_?!

The French called it "mal du pays" or "mal du Suisse." In German it was _"Schweizerheimweh"_ \-- "Swiss homesickness."

Seriously.

Later it became _nostalgia_ : Latin for _"homecoming pain."_

Me? Never. Don't play me _that_ song and expect me to tear up. Homesick = weakling. Some mama's boy at camp missing Teddy.

Until I found out it's good for you -- mood, self-esteem, social connection, psychological growth....

Damn.
Week 27: A story featuring a song or poem

### Gillian 27: The Stranger's Song

We'd been waiting for him a long time. We'd heard stories he was traveling in the area, coming our way, though of course you couldn't always believe the stories. Some of us weren't even sure he existed.

Turns out he did, because one day he just turned up, sort of like he'd been there all along. The children gathered at his feet and tugged at his clothes.

"Do it, grandfather!" they called. "Show us!"

"Soon," he promised, but they kept asking, until their parents called them away.

That evening, we all gathered in the center of our area. There were some mocking faces among the crowd – after all, who had time to listen to such an obsolete practice? – but they were the minority. Most were simply curious.

Our leader introduced him, but no one listened. We knew who he was, or what he was supposed to be. At last, our leader stepped aside and gestured to the stranger.

The stranger smiled as he looked around at all of us. It was hard to tell if he was old, or simply tired. "I am going to sing you a song," he said softly. Heads craned, people watching intensely, but he pulled out no tools. He only took a large breath and opened his mouth.

What a sound! Some of the children burst out laughing at its strangeness, but the rest of us were transfixed. It was like a spell. The words were a language long since dead, but they didn't seem to be important.

The sound was certainly coming from the stranger's mouth, but how? From where? His throat moved gently up and down as the sound dipped and soared.

We stood in rapt silence until the sound vanished. Was that why it had been outlawed, so many years ago? For this power?

"Would anyone like to try?" the stranger wanted to know. We looked at each other and shuffled, all too afraid, but finally our leader raised a hand. His finger wavered, then landed on me.

"She will," he said.

It was not my place to refuse, and so I didn't. I learned a long time. The sound was ugly, and rough at first, and felt wrong in my throat. But I learned, and kept learning.

It is my voice that casts the spell now. They've been waiting for me a long time.

### Kevin 27: Casey At The Bat

If your name is Casey, whatever you do, don't get good at baseball. That damn poem follows you around.

Like it's doing now: two outs, bottom of the 9th, down by two, runners second and third... and five thousand pleading Toledo Mud Hens fans. They know the poem, too -- remembered it when Casey didn't offer at the first two strikes.

They said this kid throws heat. No shit.

Casey digs in, his face stern and cold, his muscles straining... and now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

" _CRACK!!"_

So much for that damn poem.
Week 28: A story that ends at sunrise

### Gillian 28: Waking the Sun

Grandma could predict the sunrise. It was crazy; it was the only time she ever spoke, really ever moved.

It'd be getting light and we'd keep asking, "What about now?" But she'd just stay there, all twisted and hunched, until one moment she'd sit up straight, that bent back suddenly unrolling itself like a hunting cobra, and she'd stare at the horizon and say, "Now."

And sure enough, the first sliver of a red sun would peek on over. Even if there were mountains or valleys, she'd know that first second we could see it.

She could do it even when it was cloudy. We used to test her on it, with an atomic clock and the scientists' prediction for the day. She never failed. One day her "now" came within a hundredth of a second of the scientist's time.

She appeared in the newspapers sometimes. A few television shows wanted her to appear, but we couldn't move her from her rocker. Some of the more determined characters came to our porch, filming with serious women and men with mocking eyes. They'd ask, like us, "Is it now?"

And she'd hunch and shiver and they'd look at each other with amused smiles, until that moment when she unrolled, all straight and tall and proud and say "Now." It was always a few seconds before they recovered (the longest was ten seconds. On air, that's a long time.)

When I was a little girl, I used to think it was actually her voice that commanded the sun to rise. When she died, the morning after I was so afraid the sun would never rise I hid in the basement and cried. My brothers had to coax me out with lots of chocolate. The sun was still there, they said. Grandma can still call it from Heaven.

Of course I learned the way the world works, and went on with my life. But now I'm getting older too, and recently I've noticed a little itch that comes every morning around dawn and wakes me up. So one day I got up before sunrise and went outside to the porch.

That little itch started getting stronger and stronger as the grey got lighter and lighter, until all of a sudden, like a cramp or a surge or a I-don't-know-what, I just knew.

"Now," I whispered.

And the sun came up.

### Kevin 28: The Dawn Of Philosophy

"What I want to know is, why do we wait?"

"For what?"

"The sun. It like comes up every day. So we sit here waiting for it. Why?"

"So?" Joey pulled a dripping beer from the cooler, put it back. "Not cold anymore." He got up to leave. "You'll have to figure out the meaning of life without me."

"No, seriously, this is important. The sun's going to rise whether we wait for it or not... so why don't we like, just let it happen?"

At that moment the sun crested the horizon.

"Like that?"

"Like that."

"Got it. G'night."
Week 29: A story that opens with the words "F*** you!"

### Gillian 29: Irascibly Yours

Fuck you, my darling.

That's how the note began. It was written on a page torn from a magazine, perhaps the least cluttered page the writer could find, the words squeezed and squashed between hilariously outdated advertisements for cigarettes and cleaning supplies. They marched between lines and around the margins, determined to find their way amongst the mess.

It wasn't always easy to track which sentence followed which, a mess of accusations and damnations, somehow endearingly cloaked in words of kindness and affection. It took me a long time to wind my way around to the end, but at last I found it, scribbled on the very last available margins, the writer having leveled a million fiery denunciations of delight. It said, I remain; Irascibly Yours.

I'm not sure why it intrigued me so much. I should have just thrown it out – in fact, if I hadn't noticed the writing that's what I would have done. I puzzled over it for a long time, trying to figure out if it was a love note or a hate note, if it was serious or humorous, if it spoke of heartbreak or laughter.

It was true that the words were crammed around the page, edges messily torn as though the writer couldn't care less. Yet although it was all so calculated to appear uncaring, the words cared. I don't know how to explain it or what, indeed, they actually cared about, but they cared with a deep urgency that fluttered my stomach.

It was much like where I'd found it: stuffed in a ball at the very bottom of the last box in the pile of them the previous owner of the house had considerately left for me to find, as though to very pointedly save it in the most ungracious way possible. There was great wanting in this story, I thought, great love, great anger.

That, or two very stubborn people whose lives were dragged together by love and time, much to their chagrin and delight.

### Kevin 29: The Manservant

"Fuck you!"

He only swore strategically, when it suited his purpose. But not now: raw fear ripped it from his throat.

Black ice on the bridge, a careening lorry, their plunge through the ice...

Dragging them from the submerged Bentley through the swollen current...

They lie under his coat, lips white, breath ragged, eyes unfixed....

Fire! Warmth! Now! Strike the flare, light the pile of evergreen boughs...

He willed a half-century of aplomb into his palsied hands. A miss. Another... weak, off target.

"Fuck you!" This time a scream -- horrible, primal, the death sob of a stag poorly shot.
Week 30: A story about a magical object

### Gillian 30: The Magic Sound-Making Machine

Linny was kooky, and everybody knew it. She used to claim all kinds of crazy things about the world, like there used to be big old boxes that spat poison out their back-ends and carried people around – and she didn't just mean ol' Granpa Mart down the street.

I teased her like all the other kids, until the one day she came to school with the magic sound-making machine. That's what she called it, right in front of everyone. Even the Lean Mean Teacher Man (his name was Mr. Definit but no one called him that) struggled not to laugh at her.

"But it makes no sounds," said he, very reasonably.

Linny shrugged. "That's just because I'm not magic yet. But when I am, it will."

Oh how we mocked her! It was hilarious, it was ridiculous, and underneath oh lord how I wanted it to be true. I wanted it to not be true too, but more than that I wanted it to be true. _Magic!_

It was a strange thing, this magic sound-making machine. It was square with little knobs all over it, and a funny long stick that poked out one corner. It looked like it could be magic somehow.

I don't know how, but I guess Linny must have known that I was doubting, because she found me after school, away from the other kids.

"You believe in my magic sound-making machine," she announced.

I laughed at her, because I had to. "Not really. Magic isn't real."

"But you want it to be."

I didn't answer that. Linny grinned real big and leaned in real close. "Tell you what, Trooper. When I think I've found the magic, I'll call you."

Over the next several weeks I waited. I waited, until I forgot, remembered to resent, then forgot again. It was only after summer blasted in that Linny came to find me.

I was playing with my friends, but she just walked right up. Her eyes were shining and she didn't seem to notice the laughs around her. "I think I've got it," she said. "I think I've really got it this time."

My friends were laughing, but I went with her. She took me to her garage, where the magic sound-making machine was sitting, its funny long stick poking way up in the air. She took a big block of something and stuffed it inside, pushed some buttons, and then slowly, slowly started turning the dials.

There _was_ a sound, I guess, a little crackling one. It wasn't very impressive and I said so, but Linny just held up a hand and kept on turning, until –

Boom. The magic sound-making machine came a rocking and a rolling to life, voices and music and singing almost rocking itself off the table.

Linny started laughing, and I laughed with her. It was real, magic was real, and on that dusty summer afternoon, I tell you, we were gods.

### Kevin 30: The Magic is in You

Brandon threw a fit when magician showed up. That's for little kids! We thought it was cool, but it was his party, so we had to act bored with him.

Until the man said pick a card. Brandon grabbed the Jack of Spades, tore it up, knocked the rest to the ground.

The magician just smiled. "Pick them up," he said.

Brandon crossed his arms.

The magician smiled again, then reached down and picked up a card. The Jack of Spades, whole again.

"How did you...?!"

"I didn't. The magic is in you. Never forget."

None of us ever did.
Week 31: A story set at sea

### Gillian 31: The Dune Sea

I didn't know why they called it the Sea, because there wasn't anything wet about it, in fact, everything but.

The Sea lay beyond the borders of the town, behind the electric fences to keep any wanderers from losing their way. Rolling, endless waves of sand, ever creeping in past the fences no matter how diligently we tried to sweep it away.

I only knew of a few people who lived out there, though why was beyond me. I guess some people still had wild hearts, spirits too big to live within a fence, and so they had to spill out into the Sea.

The only one I'd ever met was Jacky, the one who always came to the gates to barter for supplies. He came with strange things in return, but always useful somehow. Tough little plants whose fiber made strong thread, things like that.

I was a little afraid of him when I first started working on the fences, but not a little curious either, and with time we got to talking more and more.

Jacky talked about the Sea like it was a living thing, something that breathed and thought. Most of the time his voice was the kind of rough sort you'd expect from someone who lived out there, but when he talked about the Sea there was a kind of reverent tone in his voice.

"The Sea is harsh," he told me often, "but if you respect her, she will care for you."

"But there's nothing out there," I used to protest. "It's just sand."

Jacky would just laugh and shake his head, pat me on the back like I'd missed a really good joke, and head off into the wastelands.

One day I asked him why he kept calling it the Sea. "The sea's water," I said. "There isn't anything out there like that."

Jacky considered that for a moment, then he said, "Come with me and I'll show you."

The idea of going out there was pretty scary, I'm not going to lie, but I was at an age when I wanted to show that I was never afraid, so I agreed.

We walked in silence for a long time, the town quickly swallowed by the dunes. It was hard-going and slippery, but I didn't say anything.

After a time, Jacky stopped at the top of one of the dunes and waved a hand around. "Take a good look, son," he said. "Take a good look."

I did. The sand rippled around me as far as the eye could see. On the horizon, wind was sculpting the tops of new dunes, and if you looked long enough and unfocused your eyes, you might think the dunes themselves were moving, in slow, stately waves. I don't really know what I saw, but I definitely saw it.

"Okay," I told Jacky. "I get it."

### Kevin 31: Totally At Sea

"Totally at sea." I looked it up: it means "nonplussed, so surprised and confused you don't know how to react."

Okay, I can buy that. Let me lay it down: crashing, thrashing, the darkest of dark, no up or down, water over the deck, spray in your eyes. And always the howling, everything rattling and banging and creaking. Nothing to do but ride it out. Maybe you will, maybe you won't.

People get afraid out there, when they're totally at sea.

Me, I come alive. It's my natural state, where I come home.

At sea. The more totally the better.
Week 32: A story about a curse

### Gillian 32: The Choice

Dear reader,

I am truly sorry for you.

Perhaps you also are sorry for yourself, or perhaps you are startled by this. What does this person know, you may scoff, they know me not! I am the most fortunate of humankind! (In which case, dear reader, I _truly, truly_ am sorry for you).

For you see, dear reader, by virtue (or otherwise) of opening this letter and placing your eyes upon these words, you are cursed.

From this moment forwards, you are cursed. Why?

Because I too was cursed. I faced a choice; the same agonizing, unbearable choice that you too now face: you must either live with the curse, or through a written letter, pass it to another.

I have passed it to you. Yes, I have chosen the ugly choice. I have saved myself at the expense of another.

You will rage. I did, when I received mine. I hated that person, that low, pitiful creature that would rather others suffer at their hand. I swore I would never do the same.

I wish I could speak to you of the horrors I suffered and that you will suffer now too. I wish I could tell you how to bear them.

Dear reader, I am, and please believe me, truly sorry for you.

I was a monster then and remain a monster now, too cowardly to face the trials. I was a poor creature then, and finish a poorer one now – but, at least, freed.

The choice is yours now. Live with the curse, the beginnings of which must be plaguing you already, or pass it to the next unfortunate soul. I give you no advice on which to choose.

Yours pitifully

### Kevin 32: Turd!

"Turd!"

Saturday afternoon at my dad's farm implement shop. One of his guys was building me a go-cart. Dad was too busy, I guess.

He banged a knuckle, and out it came -- a bad word you didn't say at school or home. But here, in this man's world of machines, grease, heavy tools, and hoists, here you could say it.

I said it at dinner that night. "Where did you learn that?" Dad asked.

"Phil said it."

Mom and Dad exchanged a look. I'd like to think they were trying not to laugh.

I got off with a warning.
Week 33: A story set 100 years in the future

### Gillian 33: The Mess-Up Museum

It was a great day to not be in school. School was inside and it was a beautiful day, though we still had to be inside. But at least not in school. We got to go the Mess-Up Museum.

That wasn't actually its name. It was just what everyone called it, even the grown-ups when they weren't thinking. They'd say it and then laugh a little sheepishly. "I mean," they'd say oh-so-politely, "the Pre-Shift Memorial Museum."

Its real name was dumb, anyway. The Mess-Up Museum suited it better.

Most of us had been there before, but we lined up and followed Ms. Thedeker and the bearded guide, who was trying too hard. I guessed he wasn't real used to kids or something.

Me and my buddies, Garrett and Darian, were kind of hanging in the back like we did, when the guide stopped us in front of an exhibit and asked something. We must have missed it the first time, because Ms. Thedeker waved a warning finger at us in the special way she had. We shut up and listened.

"I said," Mr. Beard said, raising an eyebrow at us, "does anyone know the main problem facing the world a hundred years ago?"

Garrett spoke up. He was pretty smart, that one. Ms. Thedeker said he'd be smart if he wasn't so smart-mouthed. We were still working that one out.

"Garbage."

I laughed, but Mr. Beard actually looked impressed. "In a way," he agreed. "Do you know why?"

Garrett had the look on his face when he didn't know something but he was thinking how to answer anyway. "Yeah," he said, "'cuz 'fore the Shift people didn't know what to do with it so they burnt it and burnt it and burned up the whole world, so the scientists scienced a bunch and made all the garbage into stuff again, so –" here he paused for breath (and drama) "—we're all garbage now."

Mr. Beard raised an eyebrow. "Indeed," he said. "Especially you, my friend."

We got a good laugh out of that one. Even Garrett. Him and Mr. Beard were best pals after that. I guess he was used to kids after all.

### Kevin 33: Coin Collection

Grandma pulled out a box wrapped in plastic film. They used to wrap food in it, she said. And something called an "envelope." She read the marks on it: "Open in 2116."

Inside was something she called a "letter," with more marks on it. She read them: "By 2116, the USA might not exist. Coins certainly won't."

"The United States quarter collection," she whispered, then she started crying.

Why? I wondered. Old coins -- shiny pieces of metal they used for money. We don't have coins anymore. Or money. Or States.

Or United anything.

Maybe that's what got into her.
Week 34: A story about loneliness

### Gillian 34: The Rememberer

It is my job to remember.

That was what I was meant to do when they shot me up, up and away. The Designated Survivor, the last desperate plan of a dying species on a dying world. There were other stations, but they were all vulnerable. It was only mine that wasn't, and that's where they kept most of the eggs.

I flew and I slept, waking to sleep and sleeping to wake. And I remembered. I remembered that which I'd lived and that which I hadn't, the files traveling with me and in me. I learned, and I remembered. I wrote, and I remembered.

The computer did the flying for me. There was no guarantee I would reach the destination, or if I did, if it would bear its promises.

It did, and now it is becoming full. Our species moves on.

It is only I who remembers. The others, the young ones, most of them don't much care, and maybe they shouldn't. Their life is not there, but here.

But someone must remember. Someone must see the genetic ghosts splashed across the faces here and know what it was their mothers and fathers gave to them. Someone must watch them grow up in this strange place and burrow into their strange houses and worry about the future of this second chance.

Was there someone who remembered before? Was there a moment when we arrived on that blue marble and forgot everything that came before? Have we darted across the stars infinitely, carrying our mistakes and the sins of our ancestors on our shoulders?

If it is by remembering that we move past the mistakes of our past, then I must. The only, the one, the last. She who has seen both the end of life and the beginning.

I doubt many believe the stories I tell. Memory is just a word, a word they use that could mean "story" or "myth" or anything at all.

If the memories didn't haunt me so, I might start to think the same as them.

### Kevin 34: Major Tom

Major Tom died of suffocation when he used up all the oxygen in his spacesuit,. Without oxygen he wouldn't decompose.

So I wonder, what does a non-decomposed face look like?

He would have orbited Earth awhile then fell back in \-- one of those shooting stars you saw at summer camp.

But what if he could have drifted away, like the video? 100 Billion stars per galaxy, times 100 Billion galaxies, and Major Tom, he's out there somewhere.

You ever want to feel small, think about that.

I do. It's my job. They call me Mr. Lonely, like the song.
Week 35: A story featuring a real recent newspaper article

### Gillian 35: The Artifact

We found it in some of Grandpa's things. There were a lot of amazing things in there, nothing like you'd see in the museums, because we all knew that stuff wasn't _real._ It was plastic or something, or a picture. But Grandpa's things were actually real. I mean, he'd touched them and everything.

Most of the stuff we couldn't even figure out what it was or what it was supposed to do. Lots of slim black boxes with some kind of electrics inside, but not even Yez could figure out what it was, and he was pretty much the expert on electrics. Didn't serve him much these days, but hey, he liked it, so we let him be.

But then we found the paper. It was all yellowed and cracked and Derr screamed like a girl and said it mucked his hands. We called him a baby and crowded around it. It was hard to read, in the old alphabet and dialect. I thought it might have been English, but it was hard to tell. Yez – he was kind of the expert on everything, I guess – frowned.

"This can't be from your Grandpa," he said.

"Why not?" I said, feeling all defensive.

"The date, man, look, I think that's 2016, man, that's way before his time."

We observed the date solemnly, suddenly cowed at handling such a very _old_ thing.

"Can you read it?" Derr asked Yez, because we did that whenever we didn't know something.

Yez wrinkled up his brow. "Uh...well it's the old ABC alphabet...lemme see, this one says, uh, 'How...T-trump...Goot...His...Sterrt...and...was...first...'—oh man I don't know this word—"ack—kuzed of...'—I don't know this one either—'b—eeas'" Yez finished triumphantly, grinning at us.

Me and Derr stared at him, then at each other. Then Derr said exactly what I was thinking. "What the hell does that mean?"

Yez shrugged. "No idea." He surveyed the newspaper with his tongue between his teeth, trying to read the other headlines, but gave up pretty quick. "I dunno, the world was kind of dumb back then, that's what Grammy says, she says that's what her Grammy says too and she was there, so it must be true."

"You think we should give it to the museum?" Derr wanted to know.

"No way man," I said, "because then it won't be real anymore. We'll take it to your Grammy, Yez, maybe she knows what it means."

"Or we could sell it!" Yez suggested brightly. "Bet it's valuable! Nobody got papers anymore."

The three of us contemplated the paper for a bit, imagining how much we could sell it for, what on earth people must have been doing back then, and how strange the language was.

Then Yez whistled. "Let's figure it out later. Sun's out, let's go play."

None of us could argue with _that._

### Kevin 35: Miss Manners

"'Dear Miss Manners: How best can a hostess graciously accept compliments on her cooking?'

"God! How about 'thank you?'"

She threw the newspaper in disgust. Her roommates looked it over, weighed in.

Tim: "No self -esteem."

Darla: "They want something."

Brady: "Why do you read that shit?"

Why indeed. Miss Manners? Seriously. Weaklings. Like who cares anyway.

Trouble is, she cares. That's why she can't tell them she's going to drop out to... um... travel.

Like it would be wrong.

Like maybe it would be.

"I got class."

"Rad Islam," said Brady.

"People willing to die for something," she said.
Week 36: A story written from an animal's perspective

### Gillian 36: The Giants in the House

The Giants who lived in our house were pretty cool, I guess. More cool than most Giants. We heard some nasty stuff on the news.

We weren't supposed to interact with them, because it was a lot safer that way. We just heard them banging around and vibrating the walls. We were told to wait until the banging stopped before we went into their territory.

When I was little, I used to ask Ma why we stayed. I mean, everyone knew that deliberately sharing territory with huge, hostile creatures wasn't very smart, right? Why didn't we follow the Miskins and live in the field?

"Don't be a cheesehead," she'd tell me. "The fields are even worse, and there's hardly any food. The Giants are dangerous, but we're well-fed here."

So I did my part to avoid them, but one day I made a mistake, and ran into one.

There hadn't been any banging so I thought they'd gone, but when I ventured out to look for food, I suddenly heard one of the waves of sound that was their voice.

If that ever happened, I'd been told to run, but I couldn't – I just froze in place, completely stuck, and one of the Giants came into view.

It was a lot bigger than I thought. One foot was four times my size at least. It could so easily crush me, and I knew it, but still I couldn't move.

There was a long pause, and then the Giant folded itself down and its head came down so I could see its eyes. It was staring at me, I thought, just like I was staring at it. It opened its mouth and blasted out some more sound, but it didn't seem threatening.

After a moment, the Giant straightened up and pounded away. I knew I should run, but I was curious, so I backed up under one of their tools and watched. After a moment, the Giant returned and bent down again, this time depositing something on the floor in front of me with fingers the length of my body. A little bit of bread.

It seemed to be waiting for me, so I hesitantly edged out to the bread. But just as I touched it, there was another bang and a second Giant came into the room. When it saw me, it let out a high, horrible sound wave and jumped backwards, spreading sound all over.

I took that as my sign to leave, grabbing the bread and speeding off as fast as possible.

It occurred to me much later that the second Giant was actually afraid of me. I laughed about that for a long time – that a creature so big could be scared of something so small.

I didn't see either again, though the story of how I met the Giants has become quite a legend among the children. When they tell it, though, somehow it's much more heroic and dashing...

### Kevin 36: "A small aircraft has crashed in a remote wilderness. It is not known if there are survivors."

My bloody hands, cut on stone. Branches whipping my one-eyed face. Each step like dragging fieldstone lashed to my ankles.

And always this groaning, whimpering, growling, chattering.

I am watched, followed. I am prey.

No. It is my own throat, wrenching evidence of my existence from somewhere so deep inside me I am afraid to know, down from where life begins.

It is the sound of me, dying with every ragged breath, every throbbing heartbeat, every stabbing movement.

I fall across a stream, the cold shocks my brokenness awake.

I drink -- gurgling, choking, making the sounds of me, surviving.
Week 37: A story about a scientific discovery

### Gillian 37: The Spark Machine

Jin was always making things. It was just the two of us, and so she had to. I told her not to, but she didn't listen.

"But if the Bu finds you, they'll take you away," I would say, one of the only true things I knew. No one was allowed to make things like Jin did.

"They won't take me away, I promise," Jin would tell me, touching my hair like she did and pulling me to her spark machine. "Come keep warm now."

It's true that I'm not sure how we would survive if she didn't make her things. We weren't attached with a pack like we should have been, though lots of people were like us, drifters. But we didn't run with the other drifters. It was just us, me and Jin.

One day, Jin was working with her machines when she gave out a little shout. I thought she was in pain until I realized she was laughing.

"Pen, Pen, come here," she said, and showed me a little sheet of metal she'd hooked to one of her spark machines. "Put your hand over that, don't touch it though."

I did. "It's hot!" I exclaimed, instinctively yanking my hand away.

"It's hot!" Jin echoed with a laugh. "Yes, it's hot! The spark machines can make heat. I bet if I found some meat scraps we could put them on this and cook it on our own. What do you think, Pen? No more paying for rations!"

I opened my mouth to respond, but I suddenly realized that we weren't alone. Someone was watching us from the street level, peering down into our basement squat.

"Jin!" I hissed, and she shoved the spark machine out of sight, but it was too late. They had seen. They stood for a long second more before leaving.

I begged her to destroy the spark machine, but she refused. She sent me away with it that night, said she'd try to find out if it was the Bu or not, and she'd catch up later.

She never did, so now it's me who works on the spark machine. I joined a pack in the outside circles, and we make our food with it. I've almost finished a new one that makes heat from water.

I know the Bu will take me away like Jin soon, so I teach everything to little Yee. The Bu may find us, but the spark machine will live.

### Kevin 37: Nomads

The winds still blow cold, which means the Spring crops will fail. We must leave now, and plant when we arrive, in three full moons. Autumn will come soon after, but with warmth and plentiful sun. There will be a crop.

We will travel close to the ridge on the windward side, where the rains fall and feed the small streams. We will fish in the higher lakes, not the lower, where the water is already poisoned with the blowing dust.

I am afraid to hear these things, but I trust. I too will learn the ancient magic one day.
Week 38: A story set on another planet

### Gillian 38: Bioshock

They say culture shock is the experience of the difference between your home culture and the new one. It can be destabilizing at best, catastrophically so at worst.

Before we came to AA-Hefter-5521, affectionately known as Heft, we went through counseling similar to what they give for culture shock. I guess it was supposed to prepare us for living on another planet.

I bet right now at home they're inventing a new name for what we're actually going through. The first psychologists are no doubt being trained. Maybe they'll even be ready to accompany the first round of settlers. Our reports are forming the base of their textbooks.

Here on Heft, we call it bioshock: the experience of the difference between your version of life and the new one. Tell you what, it's pretty destabilizing.

See, we didn't actually know that Heft was inhabited. Indeed, we've already been here a year, and we only recently figured it out.

The thing is, the life on Heft isn't anything at all like life as we understand it. It's only due to the jaw-dropping genius of Dr. Ecker, our biologist, that we even know the Hefters are there.

The Hefters are not made of cells, or molecules. As far as we can tell, they're made of waves, electrical waves. I guess they communicate in the same way. We've progressed as far as sending each other electric blips that neither of us understand.

We're pretty sure they can't "see" us, and hell, they certainly don't have eyes. Maybe they only know we're here because we blipped at them accidentally.

That's the creepy thing about it – I guess they're everywhere. They live here. They eat something in the atmosphere (it explains the enduring mystery the scientists back home could never figure out: Where the ----- is all the extra gas going?). "Eat." "Breathe." Words we use to explain something that has no form.

Are we hurting them? Do they want us here? Are they afraid? Do they even have emotions? These aren't just games psychologists play with us anymore, they're real, every day questions. Are they here right now? Can they hear us? Most importantly, are they friendly?

Bioshock might eventually prove to have the same stages as culture shock. That'd be nice, because it'd mean I'd get used to this at some point.

In the meantime, every time my equipment blips when it's not supposed to, I get this chill in my spine.

It takes a long time for it to go away.

### Kevin 38: Doppelganger

" _There!_ Did you notice that just... _now?!_ "

Danny waved his arms, punching out his words-- a perfect Prof. Freisen.

"We think this is still Earth, but we're _wrong_." He always said it like that.

"Everything is _different_ because we _observed_ what was going on. Our _observing_ created a new world! We live in a _multi-_ verse, not a _uni-_ verse!"

Quantum mechanics. Sci Fi 101. Crazy shit. Crazy professor. I'm a _uni_ man, myself. I'm me, and I'm here, not some doppelganger of me on another planet.

Right?

I mean, if I were somewhere else I would know, wouldn't I?

Wouldn't I?
Week 39: A story with only one character

### Gillian 39: Alpha and Omega

On October the 23rd, in the tenth millennium past the world's breaking and a few sun degrees before twilight (in antiquated terms, just in time for tea), a young man was dreaming.

He had had the dream before, but even before waking he could not remember it. Indeed, even in the dream, he had the sense of trying to remember something, chasing something so close to his grasp but that he could never catch. And yet, when he woke, he was always sure that he _had_ caught it, and seen it, but could only remember the part about not remembering.

There was a part of his subconscious now that was aware the dream was happening and was desperately trying to activate his memory functions. The young man's eyes flickered back and forth restlessly behind his eyelids. In the dream he sensed this dangerous rise to the surface and pushed back against it.

_I cannot wake up yet,_ he thought, _because I have not caught it yet. I must catch it first, and then wake up as quickly as possible, so that I can remember._

The sun was creeping closer to the horizon, but the young men slept on. He was much closer to catching it now, he could feel it. Although it was a dream, he could feel his legs tiring.

_I cannot stop yet,_ he thought, _because I have not caught it yet. I must catch it first, and then I can rest._

The movement behind his eyes had now settled into a rapid flickering as he fell further and further into his subconscious, straining for this thing. In the dream now he thought perhaps he had never actually caught it, but this time he would.

The dream was expanding. It was growing in his mind and he was growing inside it. He could feel his self growing. He was becoming more, wider. The earth itself now could not hold him. Nor even the sun, or the galaxy, or across into the infinity of space around him, and just then, at this point of infinity, of all, of being all that is and was and will be, the young man who dreamt understood.

When he woke some point three seconds later, the young man's mind snatched at the discovery as it faded, his connection to the "I" of all fading to the place where only dreaming can find.

"I've had the dream again," he said out loud, words dropping into the late sunlight. "I understood!"

But what exactly it is he had understood, once again, he could not remember, the secret remaining lost.

Until, perhaps, the next time he dreamt...

### Kevin 39: Jacob's Ladder

"It's just a ladder."

She looked around. Nobody heard. Besides, it was her house, in broad daylight. None of their business.

It was still a dumb idea.

Climb up, take the screen off, go in over the sill. How hard could it be?

Really hard. Visions of the water tower, shivering, sobbing, waiting for the firetruck. A long time ago. Not long enough.

An old wooden ladder. What if she broke it? Got stuck in the window?

What if. All her life what if.

She put the full weight of a lifetime of shame on the first rung.

It held.
Week 40: A story about a secret

### Gillian 40: The Gravestone, The Secret, and The Failed Investigation

Many people think a secret is only for one person, but in fact, a secret requires two people. The first to know it, and the second to not know it. A secret that only one person knows is something different. Most people don't know this, but that kind of secret is actually the last bit of magic left on Earth.

In fact, Beck and the gang didn't actually know that last part, though some of them were starting to suspect it by the end of the investigation.

The investigation revolved around a certain enigmatic gravestone in the local cemetery, belonging to an unnamed person, who died at an uncertain time (though judging from the stone, some time ago), and had only left this message behind on their headstone: _I have taken the secret to my grave._

It was maddening, that gravestone! Some of the guys thought it was someone's idea of a colossal joke, and were making plans to leave similar messages behind when they kicked it, but it wasn't enough to suspect, and so the investigation began.

Through a lot of guesswork, luck, and frustratingly vague town records, they eventually narrowed the grave to two potential occupants, a certain Richard P. Murray, died February 2nd, 1836, or Vivian Clara Radswell, died June 17th, 1827. However, further investigation into their lives yielded nothing extraordinary whatsoever.

Living relatives had no strange stories or letters, town records showed no strange purchases or suspicion of anything odd. The only thing they found of remote interest was that both owned cats.

With no little skepticism, the few remaining members of the gang who hadn't lost interest even went to see a Medium to try and contact the two. The Medium agreed to try, but just laughed maniacally through the entire séance. The gang left, with the uneasy suspicion that it might have actually worked.

At that point, the gang decided to turn their attention to more solvable mysteries, such as why pretty Larabelle was dating The Oaf, though that proved to be equally confusing.

It was only Beck who kept looking, but whoever lay in that grave had had their little joke, and orchestrated the world's best secret. For what better a secret could there be than one that can truly never be known?

### Kevin 40: The Whistleblower

"It's a secret."

Nancy always wanted you to think she knew things you didn't. Well, she did, because she was smart. But secrets go further than smart. They're about conspiracies, spying. You can't trust them, so we didn't trust her.

She was on a power trip. Or she was a fantasy nutcase.

So we thought.

We were wrong.

And now we can't apologize.

Not that we want to. The secret's out -- ugly, real. We didn't want to see it, so we didn't. And now we have to live with it.

So we blame her.

For not telling us sooner.
Week 41: A romance that ends in tragedy

### Gillian 41: The Glass and the Glue

Little Ella was in love. She didn't quite have the words yet to express what it was or why it was, but she knew, and most everyone else did.

"Little dear's got her...what is that again?"

"We're not sure, we think she picked it up at school..."

It was the colors of it, the feel of it, the way it spun and reflected the light. She held it up and laughed.

"Isn't it a bit...dangerous? I mean, look at the edges, she could cut herself."

Ella didn't like that talk, it usually meant someone would try to take it from her. She held tighter, just in case.

"She'll be all right. It's just that she won't let it go. Screams when anyone tries."

The colors. The feel.

But there was a step she didn't see, and her wonderful companion fell from her hands, all the way down the stairs.

Shattered. Lost. She couldn't even touch the pieces, the grownups kept her away.

All of the colors! Ella mourned for them every time the sun shined.

They gave it back to her the next day, the pieces clumsily glued together. They said it was good as new, but it was nothing like her precious thing. It was a poor copy.

Ella took the copy, but only as a reminder that beautiful things, once broken, will never be the same again. Glue will only ever be glue, an ungainly patch for something missing.

She carried that plate a long time, long after the thing itself had gone.

### Kevin 41: Macbeth

How did you meet?

Robert: College.

Marie: Theater. He's this senior who always gets the leads. Me, I'm this freshman who wants to be Judy Garland.

Robert laughs: A snob.

Robert laughs a lot, mostly at himself. I like that.

Marie: We were doing Macbeth.

Robert: And she gets Lady Macbeth. This cute blond, and I'm thinking no way, there's not going to be any depth. Then rehearsals start, and she's amazing.

Marie: He kept wanting to run lines, and I'm thinking we don't need all this.

Robert: Ulterior motives.

You fell in love doing Macbeth?

Robert: No tragedy there.
Week 42: A tragedy that ends in romance

### Gillian 42: Mr. Morris

"No coffee?! What the hell is this?"

The nurse's smile looked, as it always did when speaking with Mr. Morris, forced. "That's what your Doctor says, Mr. Morris. It's not good for your heart."

"My heart!" Mr. Morris was incredulous. "For god's sake, woman, I'm eighty-four years old! Who gives a shit about my heart!"

"The Doctor says that without coffee, you'll feel much better," the nurse persisted, dropping her tone to a more pitying level.

"No I won't!" Mr. Morris insisted. "I won't have coffee, how can anything be better without coffee? This is an outrage! It's a travesty!"

The nurse changed to firm. "I'm sorry, Mr. Morris, but that's the rule. No coffee. You can have tea, though? How about a nice cup of earl grey?"

She was met with stony silence. The next requests received similar treatment, so she gave up. Old codger.

"They took away my cake last week."

Mr. Morris swiveled about. It was Mrs. Teller. He'd seen her a few times. She was in a wheelchair, white hair whiter against her dark skin. Had all her teeth though. That must be nice. He was so astonished, either way, that someone was speaking to him, that he just stared.

Mrs. Teller shrugged her bony shoulders a little. "They said the same, Doctor's orders. Guess my heart doesn't like cake like yours doesn't like coffee. I'm sure it was my son though, he always yammered about that. Can't think why he'd want to keep me alive longer though. Always mutters about how pricey this place is."

Mr. Morris stared some more. "I just want my damn coffee," he managed finally.

"I'll tell you a secret," Mrs. Teller said, and smiled all of a sudden. Mr. Morris wasn't sure he remembered the last time someone smiled at him. He stared more, but for a different reason, as she navigated over to whisper in his ear.

"Nurse Wanda will help you, but don't you dare tell a soul. We'll all get in big trouble." She rolled away slightly and smiled again. "I'll see you later for 'tea' and 'biscuits,' Mr. Morris," she said.

"My name's Gregory," Mr. Morris said. "Not Mister."

This last smile was the largest, and most blinding yet.

"Doris," Mrs. Teller responded.

### Kevin 42: Tornado Love

"It's just so wrong, what happened to you."

That was her all over, at the beginning: that strong sense of justice, laced with pity and a drive to set things right.

No it wasn't wrong. The storm was a meteorological event that broke his legs and his life. Nothing moral about that, just something he had to deal with.

With her help. Because it was her job. Because she pitied him.

But then duty and pity faded, as they must, replaced with eagerness, then joy, and finally... something much stronger.

Love.

Love without pity or duty.

As love must be.
Week 43: A retelling of a recent Hollywood movie

### Gillian 43: Alice

They talk about her in whispers.

It took me a long time before I knew her name, or why, for no one speaks directly about her. She wanders freely, alone on the lost, dark streets long after curfew rings. Even the guards don't go anywhere near her. I'm not sure if they're afraid, or just don't care if she lives or not – or both.

They say she disappeared some time before – it's impossible, of course, no one escapes or disappears from this place. But nevertheless disappear she did. People have their own theories.

Me, I'm not so sure. I finally learned what she says happened. She says she went to another world, one parallel to this one. One that waits behind the mirrors, a world of reflections.

It's not good to be seen close to her, but I've heard her whispers. It's all nonsense, stories of things that don't exist. She begs them to understand her sometimes, wild energy exploding until she wears herself out and they leave her.

I'd like to say I believe the others, but I find her stories haunting. She speaks of worlds where monsters look like monsters, where seeing something isn't the same as knowing it, where creatures that used to exist speak and walk like we do now. I know such things cannot exist, must not exist, and anything that does not exist cannot be discussed, but somehow they dig at my thoughts.

I found her by my bunk the other day. She said there was a white rabbit that used to lead her there, but he's disappeared now and she can't find him.

"You can't be here," I whispered to her, loud in the empty room. "I'll get in trouble."

"But I'm trying," the girl whispered back, eyes searching my face like a wild thing. "Don't you see, I'm trying! It's just all the mirrors are closed and the white rabbit has gone."

Of course it could not exist. There was no such thing, and no such possibility, but I wanted to understand. "Where are you trying to go?"

The girl looked at me, with such indignation I felt almost ashamed. "Why, back to Wonderland."

"You shouldn't speak of things that don't exist," I mumbled. "There is no such place. There is only here. The world ends at the wall."

The girl laughed. "Of course it does. But Wonderland is not this world. Don't you see?" She pointed at the mirror. "It's in there. One day, you'll see. You only have to look for it." She paused, then reached for my hand. "If you find it," she whispered, "tell them Alice is looking. And they must come for her."

She released my hand and ran away, spooked like an animal. I haven't spoken to her since, but I find it difficult to forget her words. And although I try not to, I always look.

### Kevin 43: The Screenwriter

"Superheroes. Comic books with special effects. The end of the world. Explosions. Fairy tales. Anything done before. It's what they're buying. Write that."

A voice from a fat red face in a little box, with a message to him. He needed to decode it. How? Something he was supposed to remember. Yes! How he got here.

He looked at his feet, couldn't see them. Couldn't see anything, only the screen.

It was a dream, telling him what to write next, his next big idea.

He woke up, lost it, groaned.

It was just... that close. His next screenplay, that close.
Week 44: A story that takes place the year you were born

### Gillian 44: Nowhere To Go But Up

"One-nine-nine-zeroooo...boom." He makes an explosion shape with his fingers, shaped like the fireworks, then grins over at her. "It's gonna be a good decade, baby, I'm telling you this is our decade."

"You said that last year was our year," his partner complains gently, but without malice. "Then you went and gambled it away on those damn computers."

"It's the way of the future, I'm telling you, baby, we're gonna make it rich and then we'll live in a real penthouse like I always told you."

"That ain't gonna happen any time soon, baby," she says softly, waving a hand around the trailer. "We've got nothing."

"Nowhere to go but up," he says, and she laughs this time. Yesterday she fought and many rough days before that, but tonight she laughs, because the champagne is warm and the fireworks are bright. Tonight she sees that spark in his eyes, the spark she fell for and keeps falling for, no matter how many times they fight. So she laughs, and shakes her head.

"I'm telling you, baby," he says, as he always has, and will many times before the night is out, "it's a new decade. It's almost the new _millenium,_ baby, just you imagine that. Ten years from now we'll be saying two thousand something and there'll be you and me right there at the top, right like the king and queen of year number two thousand."

"You're so full of shit," she tells him.

"No, I'm promising you, baby, I'm gonna make it and we'll be right on top. And there won't be any more trailers and rice and beans for dinner, it'll be penthouses and private chefs, you won't have to ride that damn broken thing to work at dawn every day in the cold, you'll be just like a queen in your house, and I'll come home every night and run into your arms like I missed you a thousand years."

It's a stupid, impossible thing, but for a moment she believes it, and he's more than a poor man with a naive dream, he's a god and he's created that universe for her and laid it at her feet like a precious vase.

"One-nine-nine-zero," he says, drawing out the words, kissing a finger for each number. "Ain't it something."

### Kevin 44: Bad Year For The Human Race

"Last name?"

"Duplessis."

"Québécoise?"

"Oui."

"You aren't related to..."

"Maurice Duplessis."

"The Canadian Joseph McCarthy. But you're not?"

"Non."

"The Duplessis Orphans... Like a Nazi -- medical experiments on kids! The U.S. and Canada are supposed to be the good guys. You know they died about the same time?"

"The U.S. and Canada?"

"McCarthy and Duplessis. Stalin, too. Stalin gets nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and then you find out he's killing his own people. So the world spits them out. Korean War, too. I mean, 1953... bad year for the human race."

"Quand je suis née."

"No! Non!"
Week 45: A story about a near-death experience

### Gillian 45: NDEs

Some decades previously, a group of extraordinarily talented and crazy scientists and doctors had developed a new, risky procedure with a name so technical not even the news anchors dared to try and pronounce it. In layman terms, it was called an NDE. The group has successfully convinced enough people to undergo testing (how, nobody was very sure, though it may have involved some coerced experimentation on the incarcerated) to conclusively prove that the procedure had a 99 percent success rate in increasing compassion and empathy in its subjects.

Simply speaking, the procedure brought the subject through a "controlled, temporary" period of clinical death before resurrecting them. Hence the name: a Near-Death Experience (some, however, argued it should be called a Forced Death Experience).

The plain truth of it, though, was that it worked. Previous hopeless cases came out more passionate, but less violent; subjects were kinder, more thoughtful, more in tune with a larger vision of the world.

It wasn't long before governments started to implement it, schools started to require it for admission, companies asked for it for employment. It spread like wildfire, and these days, if you haven't completed your NDE, you're a social outcast.

We should have known, of course, that eventually it would be our turn. We had made the procedure, after all. We were those extraordinarily talented and crazy ones. We had an insane idea, and it worked. And so it was that we were asked to undergo our own procedure.

I knew the data. Hell, most of it I had compiled myself. I had seen the procedure done a thousand times or more, I knew how well it worked, how efficient it was. An hour, maybe more. 99.9999999 chance of survival.

That was the problem. It wasn't 100 percent. And however much I knew the data, however much I knew that this was supposed to help me, that I would be raving like all the rest about the experience and how it had changed my perspective, I can't even begin to articulate the fear I felt as I walked into the operating room.

Nor I can't speak of the terror as the drip began. There was a sedative in it, of course there was, and it was designed to help me feel pleasant. But in that instant before my heart stopped beating, I had forgotten that it was temporary, and that I would wake in a few moments, and all I remember was the feeling of staring down the throat of my own mortality, and thinking, _I don't want to die._

### Kevin 45: Blizzard, September 1997

A day of driving snow, dinner with friends, and when we're done no one should have left, but I had this compulsion to ride out the storm at home (living with my in-laws). A moment's disorientation at the end of the block, a right instead of a left, and I'm lost out east of Denver, wondering how long I can keep the heater going. Finally some headlights. I flag down a wide-eyed trucker. That way, he says. I make a three point turn. In two hours I'll be safe.

I could have died out there. That's what I remember most.
Week 46: A story about anger

### Gillian 46: The Edge of the Map

They said we must not go to the mountain. Anywhere in the valley, they said, they could take us. We could make our maps of each stone and tree, survey every inch of the land they knew of, including the caves under the waterfalls and the secret groves where they found their herbs. These were secrets even many of their own did not know, but they would show us.

Anywhere but the mountain.

When we asked, they only told us this: "The mountain is angry."

That night, in our camp a few hundred meters from their bonfires, we talked about it. The group was highly divided. Some said it was just superstitious bullcrap, we'd run into it before. It had to do with their religion or something, no doubt. It was a volcano, probably, and they didn't understand, so they just interpreted it as an angry god.

Some said we should contact HQ to petition for extra benefits or privileges to entice them. Some said we shouldn't go, period.

But the idea of a blank spot on our map of the world, the final survey of the world that would lay bare the secrets of the land for all to see, was galling to all of us. If we had to go at night, we would. If we had to sneak up the other side of the mountain, we would. We would tell them we didn't go, but we would go.

I was one of the few chosen for the expedition. There were three of us – me, J, and Y. We made our approach from the opposite side after a grueling trek on the rover, just past dawn.

I started to feel it as soon as we started climbing, but brushed it off as insects or dew. It began to grow stronger as the incline did, like a hand pressing on my neck. I took a peek at J and Y.

"Do you feel that?" I asked quietly.

"It's just the dew," J said. Y said nothing. We kept climbing.

We made it to the first crest. We stood for a moment, facing the saddle in front of us, leading to the far summit.

"Let's go," J said. Y nodded.

But the truth was, I couldn't take the next step. It was just there, just another step, but I couldn't take it. In the moment I thought about it, I understood what they had said.

The mountain wasn't angry because it was a volcano, it was just angry. It was angry in a deep, unspeakable way that could not be expressed or vocalized, that could not be trivialized or laughed off or calmed, it was beyond human and deeply human. It was raw and as I stood, even just contemplating that next step, it stripped me to my core.

"I'm not going," I said.

"Me neither," Y said.

J shook his head. He wanted to say something, but he didn't.

That spot on the map remained blank.

### Kevin 46: Trash Talk

His problem, not mine.

So I said.

Einar got mad, threatened him, and he shut up. It was embarrassing, needing somebody to stick up for me. Guy trash talks you. you go after him. I told myself he was wrong, going after a teammate, fighting would have lowered my to his level.

Truth is, I thought he might be right. Weakling. Coward. Loser. Yeah, maybe I was.

He called me out once. I've called myself out a hundred times since then. Guess I lost that fight, like I thought I would back then.

And now he friends me on Facebook.
Week 47: A story about a magic spell

### Gillian 47: Jore Perdu

It happens once a year in Jore Perdu, in all other respects a perfectly normal town, in a perfectly normal country, with perfectly normal power struggles and triumphs and bad economies and suspicion of those immigrants, wherever it is they come from. Wherever you picture it, I'm sure that's where it is.

Either way, it's perfectly normal, except for one day a year, when the spell comes.

It would be easy if it was the same day every year, but it isn't. At the very least, the residents can feel it coming, so they can prepare. Some will tell you it looks like a storm. Others will say it's a certain smell, or the way the air moves.

Sometimes it comes slower, sometimes faster. Sometimes it's a matter of weeks, sometimes hours, sometimes even minutes. Last year infamously it was rolling in all spring. Everyone was just dying for it to be over by the time it slogged into town on June 6th.

The strangest thing about the magic spell that comes every year to Jore Perdu isn't the spell itself. It's that no one knows what it does, or what happens during that day. All they know is that they find themselves 24 hours later, somewhere in the town, blinking like waking up from a deep sleep.

Some think they might be dangerous, and lock themselves up in their cellars when they feel it coming. Others try all kinds of tricks to record it, to no avail. Still others simply wait.

Once you leave Jore Perdu, the spell doesn't find you anymore. That's why I left originally. I didn't like the idea of losing a full day, caught in the grip of a force. What if we were responsible for the world's evildoing? Or chaos? Where had I gone, what harm had I caused?

But I have to admit, I missed it. There was a hardness about the world without it, the kind of hardness of scientists who laugh at the mere mention of magic.

So I came back. These days, when I feel it coming, I just wait. The way I see it, the world slowly drains of color, with just a few patches of color becoming ever more saturated, up to a pitch that's almost too beautiful to look at.

And then it sweeps me away, and I greet it like a friend.

### Kevin 47: Hypnotized

It's like she's casting a spell. I know it, and I'm going under willingly. Her ad talked about breakthrough. I can use some of that.

Her voice invites relaxation, offers images of descent, becomes more distant. My experience shifts. I'm awake and alive, imagining and observing, but not as usual.

She guides me to a hall of doors, I enter one of my choosing. Beyond it, I experience a world of my own making.

I'm under the influence. Whose?

My own.

Years later, I will realize we all live that way, all the time: magicians, weaving our own magic spells.
Week 48: A story about a strange small town

### Gillian 48: Jore Trouvet

Many people will tell you that Jore Trouvet does not exist, but do not listen to them. Jore Trouvet exists, and I have been there to prove it.

You wouldn't be outrageous in believing the rumors though. Jore Trouvet exists just on the other side of a tiny little tear in the fabric of reality, and most of the time, it stays there. But once a year – in fact, one day every year, it comes just close enough to the tear that it can be found.

On that day, the streets of Jore Trouvet are empty. Perhaps there are residents, perhaps not. There is a certain lived quality to the houses, even as strange as they are – towering, oversized creations that turn out to be no bigger than the size of a quarter when you approach, or thimbles that cover caves and underground huts with windows that always seem to catch the sun.

Indeed, there is an inherent impossibility about the town that is hard to grasp. It feels both as though it is clinging to the edge of a cliff – just there, down at the edge of the lane – and stuffed up against the mountains. The streets are either cobbled or sandy or both, but never at the same time. Everything is in black or white, except when it's colorful, and you never see the sky.

It has taken me many, many trips to Jore Trouvet to even begin to remember it. You cannot remember it by wanting to remember, or even trying to remember without wanting to. It must happen, slowly, at the moment that you decide not to, the moment you forget you wanted to. Then, you may remember an image, only one.

It's maddening, and I often thought I would die before I ever managed to have a decent picture. I gave up, and when I gave up, I started to remember.

The older I get, in fact, the easier it is remember. I am losing the real world, the one around me, and sometimes I do not recognize the people I used to love the most. Even now, writing this in a moment of lucidity, I have trouble picturing my daughter's face.

And yet, Jore Trouvet is clearer and clearer, its paradoxes somehow perfectly sensible. Perhaps when I die, I will find myself there, in the thimble house I love so much. I am old enough not to fear death, but I find the idea heartening none the less.

One thing is for sure – the day in which the tear is open is getting closer, because the painting on the wall in this otherwise sterilized care center is sucking all the color from the world, and each passing second sees it more steeped in hue.

Jore Trouvet is waiting.

### Kevin 48: Nothing Strange

What was strange about our town is that it wasn't strange at all. Nor was anybody in it. True, there was Cig-Butt Annie--a frail old woman with mottled skin who cruised Main Street for still-smoking cigarette butts. And Old Mr. Budd--a hermit in a haunted house who showed up for church on Christmas Eve every few years with a bad haircut and a ragged suit, the object of some church lady's errand of mercy. They were strange enough for us to notice them, but our noticing drew them in, conferred citizenship, made them unremarkable members of unremarkable us.
Week 49: A story about justice being done

### Gillian 49: Unto Your Own Self

There's not many people alive anymore who remember the Shift. Most of us who are, don't even remember it.

I could say a few things about it, but you know them already. I could say things changed, but you'd laugh. Of course things changed! It was the Shift! The Earth moved and bubbled and rumbled and we fought and cried and shot and hid and somehow came out the other side, not what we were but _something_ we've been trying to learn ever since.

Honestly, the only thing I remember about it is what my old man used to say. In that time I remember a lot of people were talking about justice and rights and this and that. I did too. I was young, and I thought about that.

I used to join the rallies and the shouts and the camps, and shout about how we must bring justice to the world, and then I'd come home and Daddy would just look at me and say, "And when it's all over, Flicker, who will bring justice to you?"

I never got it. I'd shake my head at him and call him old and conservative, I said he was of the generation that ruined us.

He died before the Shift was over. He was old and conservative, but I still didn't want to say goodbye.

Before he died, I asked him what he meant about justice.

"Justice can only be done to your own self, Flicker," he said softly. "If it's something you bring to others, it's just a crime with an excuse."

"But if someone doesn't bring justice, no one will," I argued. "Without justice, there's no government, no checks, no balances."

Dad never answered that. He fell asleep, only he didn't wake up the next morning.

I've been thinking a lot about what he said now, when all I remember of the Shift is the movement, and the loss, and I wonder. I think about what I did, the role I played, the things I'm proud of and the things I'm not, and I wonder, if I could bring justice to my own self.

These days, justice looks a lot like forgiveness.

### Kevin 49: War

Greg's dad said I did it -- broke the .sight on his new plastic toy gun. He even supplied a motive: I was jealous. I didn't, I wasn't, and Greg's dad--who of course bought him the gun--was an idiot.

Mom found me crying in my closet, coaxed me out, listened but didn't rise to my defense against the unjust accusation.

We were soon .back playing our favorite game--"War"-- our battlefields the backyards of the men who fought it not twenty years before.

They were the Death Angel, bringing the madman to justice, executed by his own hand.
Week 50: A creation myth

### Gillian 50: The Professor

The Professor was a mad old coot, for sure. Most of the kids thought he was a joke, and goaded him the entire class. I guess I did too. I like to pretend I didn't, but I did. He made a good target, though I know that's no excuse.

He was kind of a nutcase to be around, though. His classes were pretty much incomprehensible unless you could read his mind or you were like Einstein-level genius in theoretical physics. No one could figure out why we had to take it, except that he was tenured and I guess no one took the class voluntarily, so they had to force people to do it.

The thing was, he was trying to prove something. It was all he ever talked about. He would do his experiments and fuss and mutter about them, and occasionally randomly peer up at the gathered and shout an unintelligible question.

He called it "the creation myth." He said that nothing had ever been created, it was simply one thing in a different form. Paper was wood, color was dye. Paint was a material. Energy turned to matter, and back. But nothing, he said, was ever truly _created._ Unless it was, and he could prove it.

As crazy as he was, near the end of his life he was doing some seriously advanced experiments. I heard the FBI had tabbed him as a potential weapon of mass destruction even. He was playing with the very fabric of space and time by that point, apparently.

He died in a big explosion at the lab, so of course there are a ton of urban legends around his death. Some say he figured it out, and the FBI – or someone else – killed him to keep the secret from getting out, and made it look like an accident. Some say the explosion was the creation. They claim the shrapnel some people found at the site was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before or since.

Others just say that he died in the attempt. True creation is the providence of god if you believe, and impossible if you don't. Just the rearrangement of matter and energy, nothing more.

Someone published his memoir a while back. They included his research, all the facts from the explosion, a few files from his classified folder that the FBI deigned to release for the book.

I've read _The Creation Myth_ more times than I can count, but although I'd like to believe he did it, crazy old genius coot that he was, most of the time I can't. He had a cause, and he died for it, like many people do, whether or not it's worth it, or real.

Either way, the myth remains just that, and we still have to rearrange our matter. You know, in the old-fashioned way.

### Kevin 50: The Fort

Greg's dad said no treehouse in the weeping willow, which left our boxelder, but the V was high and narrow, so the ground it was, next to the tree but not in it.

We built in hot summer-- patchwork lumber scraps made suddenly strong when two doors from Mrs. Sorby's basement made a roof you could stand on and keep watch and fire a giant slingshot to the other end of the block. Plus a trapdoor still with hinges, so only kids could get inside.

Tree or not, it was the perfect fort, created from an idea: let's build one.
Week 51: A story set at Christmas

### Gillian 51: The Christmas Tree

"Here, this way. Don't open your eyes!"

I stumbled a bit, but guided by the small, eager hands of my grandchildren, managed to navigate down the hallway, faithfully keeping my eyes closed.

As they led my slow, painful steps, I wondered what they had to show me this time. It must be a great surprise, but it wasn't my birthday – at least, I didn't think so. I wasn't much good with days by then, so it could be, but I was pretty sure we had done ninety-eight – or was it ninety-seven? – only a few months previously.

Perhaps it was a new seed the researchers had found, or a flower they'd brought from Earth. The children loved to show me those kind of things, distant memories of home. I suppose they thought it would comfort me. I had to put on a brave face for them, smile as though I loved it. Mostly, those little things broke my heart. Perhaps it was better to forget, than remember all the loss, the place that was home, that made us humans – only we never knew it, until we destroyed it, and left.

The children interrupted my somewhat unhappy thoughts by tugging at my hands. "We're here, Grandma, we're here! Open your eyes!"

The sight before my eyes left me utterly speechless. I stared at it, unable to summon any kind of reaction, my eyes drinking it in.

There were no trees on this planet, but they'd fashioned it from leftover antennas, with fiber optic cables for the pine "needles." They'd worked a few LED lights to flash different colors, and had made ornaments – what were clearly supposed to be ornaments – from bulbs and a number of tiny objects I couldn't name. They had obviously grabbed whatever small things they could possibly attach to a loop, and hung it from this little "tree."

Ully, the oldest, cleared his throat and the six of them gathered themselves and shouted, "Me-rry Christmas!" at the top of their lungs, pronouncing the ch sound like chestnut. There was a pause, and then little Mulch asked, "Do you like it Grandma?"

Christmas was something they knew nothing about, a holiday for a dead world. Clearly they'd made this strange contraption from a copy of a picture they'd somehow managed to dig from the archives. I didn't know how to tell them that in building this for me, they'd come closer to what Christmas meant that any tree ever could.

I stared at that little electronic tree, and the little faces of my grandchildren, waiting desperately for me to say something, and for the first time, I thought of Earth, and did not mourn.

This time, when I smiled at them, I didn't have to fake it.

### Kevin 51: Jul

"Mas."

"Like the Catholics?"

"It means 'more' in Spanish."

Freja, Nils, Kris... the best of friends, home from university.

"So we can eat more."

"It's British, they call all the holidays that."

"Guy Fawkes Mas?"

"Don't be dense."

Nils was feeling dense, alright. The glögg, knäck, pepparkakor... alcohol and sugary treats, supplying what's missing this time of year, this deep winter:

Light.

St. Lucia's two weeks past, the Solstice, and now the best: Christmas Eve, risgrynsgröt for breakfast, then the julbord. More. Plenty. The best of the feasts. Eating until no mas.

"Not like the Catholics," Nils said. "Like us."
Week 52: A story entitled "The End"

### Gillian 52: The End

The End was a little old man who lived by the sea. He had lived there as long as anyone could remember, and though the more inquiring young minds liked to ask questions about exactly when and wouldn't-that-be-his-son-then, it didn't change anything. The End lived in his little cottage by the sea, and while both of them seemed ripe to fall straight into the hungry waves, they never did.

He answered to neither "The" nor "End" separately. If you wanted to speak to him, you had to call both, and in response, he would call out something in return. Sometimes it was a name. Sometimes it was a thing. Sometimes it was a word that just plain old didn't exist, or a different language.

The kids would try to tease him, but it was no fun, because he wouldn't rise to it. He didn't seem to hear, or care, and so they gave up soon enough.

The world grew up and most of the kids left the town. People changed, technology arrived, humans evolved. The old and the new clashed and fought and the world groaned and shifted, and back at that little town by the sea, the old man called The End started to change too.

He got younger and younger, taller and more handsome. His house picked itself up from the sea and became a sprawling beachside mansion. The town built up around it, and new residents came to enjoy their time, wondering about the silent young man in the house at the end of the street.

The new residents didn't know how to call him, but I still did, and those days he called back to me the names of things I had known as a child, the names of older relations.

It started spooking me, and I stopped calling to him for a long time, afraid of a hearing a name I didn't want to, a future I didn't want to see. The world wobbled ever more and more and The End got richer and richer. I wondered if we ended the world, if he would own the remains.

But these days, I've started noticing something. The End's hair is going grey, and the corners of his house are looking a bit shabby. A few of the extra wings seem to have vanished.

Perhaps my children, or my children's children, will know him again as the little old man by the sea. And perhaps one of these days I will walk down to his mansion and call to him, and he will respond back with my name. At this point, I think, I'd be ready to hear it.

### Kevin 52: The End

Everybody called it "The End"-- a stub street wrapped by three stories of Georgian brick, a grand doorway into a café with a bakery counter that never emptied, servers in livery, and walnut tables of eccentrics in animated conversation.

The rest was books of leather with gold on the spines, narrow ladders to get to them, and soft chairs to read them.

No one knew who built it, when or why, or who owned it now.

But everyone knew that this was no end, but a beginning... of every story wanting to be told.

And the best one was yours.

###

### ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Gillian Rhodes is a dancer and choreographer currently living in Seoul, South Korea, where she performs with Second Nature Dance Company. Her choreography has been performed in York, Paris, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Korea. She has co-authored books with her father and her sister, novelist Hilary Rhodes, writes poetry, fiction, and essays regularly on Medium, and hosts _It's An Artful Life_ on her YouTube channel.

For information about Gillian's other ebooks, visit her Smashwords author page

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Kevin Rhodes left a successful long-term law practice to scratch a creative itch and lived to tell about it... barely. He has blogged extensively and written several books about his unique journey to wellness, including how he deals with primary progressive MS through an aggressive regime of exercise, diet, and mental conditioning.

For information about Kevin's other ebooks, visit his Smashwords author page

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