1:45pm

1:45pm.  It was a good time.  It was the most logical time, he’d concluded, after several hours of debating when the best time would be.  The store should be as empty as it gets during the day and he would have the best chance of striking up a conversation with her in the most nonchalant, seemingly uncalculated way possible.  1:45pm was it.  He’d fallen asleep repeating it to himself like a mantra.

He looked at the clock. 1:38pm.  He was already sweating.  He clenched and unclenched his hands, then wiped his wet palms on his apron.  He shook them, trying to air dry them, and told himself to stop it.  This was the plan.  He would not let himself deviate from it, no matter how nauseous he got.

He’d waited so long for this, refusing to let himself make a move before he earned the promotion.  Now, newly settled in the deli department and proudly managing the responsibility of  the high-quality deli meats there was no way his inner judge could justify not making a move.  He wasn’t monstrous looking, he had a good job, he had an uncanny ability to mimic great moves from classic kung-fu movies and several other quality characteristics he’d been reminding himself of all day.  He was just as much of a catch as Charlie Gelecki if not more so because he wasn’t perpetually stoned.  Plus, they’d broken up 5 months, 21 days and 6 hours ago anyway.

He looked up over the counter and caught her arraigning a garland of brightly colored fall leaves around the salad bar.  She had a slightly far off look in her eyes and a small smile crossing her perfectly shaped lips.  He instinctively looked down to avoid her seeing him staring.  Dammit!  How had she snuck up on him without him noticing? 

“Breathe, Jeff- breathe,” he chided himself.

“Dude, you ok?” a voice came from behind him.

He jumped and let out a small, started grunt as he turned around to see Niles looking at him sideways.

“Sh-sh-shit!” he stammered.  Goddammit- he was already stuttering.  No, no, no!  This couldn’t happen, not now!  He bit his tongue and tried to breathe through the obstruction in his partially opened mouth.

“Wow- what the hell is going on?” Niles said.

Jeff looked down at his feet and reminded himself of how perfectly ordinary and not on fire they were.  They felt like they were on fire, of course.  And his stomach felt as if it was about to empty out the remainder of the breakfast he’d barely managed to choke down before coming on his shift.  And his head felt like it might fly clear off his body and rattle around the giant building like a pinball in a really big machine.  It was all he could manage to move his head in her direction.

“Oh, is it time?” Niles asked him, the dawn of understanding in his voice.

Jeff forced himself to glance up at the clock.  1:42pm.  He opened his mouth and inhaled, his tongue bouncing the way it did when his stutter was acting up.

“Dude, it’s ok- seriously.  Like I said, we got the best job in the store, you got the best sense of humor and if she’s too stupid to no- yeah, sure!  I’ll go get it right now,” Niles interrupted himself, rapidly darting his eyes at Jeff.

Jeff turned and nearly swallowed his tongue at the site of Chelsea standing right in front him, her smiling eyes shining at him.

“Hey” she said, her ponytail bouncing slightly as she tilted her head at him.

“Hey Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-“ he stopped and bit his tongue, hard.  Not now!  He couldn’t choke now.  It must be 1:45pm and 1:45pm was the perfect time.  He took a breath, closed his eyes and breathed out “Hey Chelsea.”  It sounded normal if a bit a winded.  He opened his eyes, looked directly at her and said “How’s it g-going?”

“Good,” she smiled at him.  He studied her face.  Her smile hadn’t wilted at all and she seemed to be completely ignoring his stutter.  It strengthened his determination.

“List-st-sten,” he stumbled.  He bit his tongue again and tasted blood.  He swallowed, sang the sentence to himself in his head and proceeded, “I was wondering if you wanted to go that Ha-ha-ha-halloween party with me.”  It was not the way he had practiced and the ‘halloween’ had come out in a shout.  But there was nothing he could do about it now.

He was just starting to curse himself for epically screwing up when the sound of “I’d love to” slammed into his ears like a sonic boom. He blinked and looked up at her.

She was smiling, even wider than before.  She wasn’t joking.

“I was actually gonna ask if you wanted to go- I love Halloween, it’s my favorite holiday, like, ever, and I really wanted to go but I kind-of felt stupid going alone and I thought that if you wanted go then we could go together and it might cool and I-“ she stopped herself mid sentence and looked down.  Jeff waited, holding his breath.

“I’m babbling,” she said as she raised her head, her lower lip tucked firmly under her perfect top lip as she grinned at him.  He’d been studying her facial expressions since he first saw her.  He knew the look.  She was embarrassed.

He exhaled.  His tongue stopped jumping down his throat.  The room suddenly cooled and his head settled heavily onto his neck.  He smiled at her and forgot all about looking like an idiot.

~

He’d forget the rest of the conversation they had after that.  He’d wonder if she said yes because she liked him or just really loved Halloween.  He’d wonder if she had been nervous because it was him or because she just really hated going to parties by herself.  He’d drive himself to the brink of madness with anxiety until he’d drop her off that night after the party and she’d place a small, tentative kiss on his cheek before getting out of his car.  And after that day, whenever he doodled in his notebook at school, he’d doodle “1:45pm”.

Spring

Outside the sun is so bright it nearly blacks out the interior of the room.  The faded wallpaper surrounding the window is nothing more than a black box from which the light emerges.  A blinding green coming from every corner of the world as new life emerges again.  It’s so overwhelming he can’t see the world through the color.  There is nothing but the green burning into his eyes, enveloping him in a cocoon of greedy weeds swallowing his body completely. 

Outside fresh stalks are pushing their way up through the ground.  Slowly climbing through a thick weave of clay, top soil, dead leaves and lush weed cover until they finally break free to the air and sunlight they thirst.  He can feel the light warming his skin.  Eventually, a sheen of sweat will begin to emerge from his pores as he traces the residue of long, hard days working out in the field pushing plows through red soil in the oppressive heat.  He can sense it the way that arthritics sense rain.  A dull pain in his muscles promising hours spent kneeling in a garden combing through the moist earth planting seedlings and staking budding plants.  His body aches for it- a hunger in his bones.

Outside the wind is full and ripe, almost like it’d been blown in from off shore carrying the scent of salt water and flotsam.  He hears it beating against the window and can almost taste the scent.  If he focuses he can smell the entire world out there.  Every particle flooding his nose with scents that bring back memories of landscapes so lush he can barely breath through the aroma.  They say that emotion is more deeply rooted in olfactory stimulus than any other sense and he can feel the truth of that now.  His eyes water with the deluge of feelings that pour over him.

Outside there is a pulse beating heavily as the world moves.  He can hear it thumping against his eardrums and his body responds to it violently.  The sound of his heart, of his blood flowing through his veins, his breath moving through his lungs, his muscles stretching all fall in line with the rhythm.  Every molecule in his body is one with that sound and it moves him like the tempo of a song so old he can’t remember its origin.

Outside it is spring and he knows it.  He knows it in a way that he is not capable knowing without eyes or skin or a nose or ears with which to connect to it.  He knows it on a level that transcends the lifeless body that cages him. 

As they turn off the machines whose incessant beeping keep his heart beating at an artificial rhythm the sound of the outside world becomes more real.  As the sterile, blank interior retreats from his nostrils he can smell the soil and the sea.  As the tubes that pump air into his lungs slow he can breathe the air outside.  As the feel of the starched cloth evaporates he can feel the wind and the sun and the rain.  As the sight of people around him crying and talking of loss and endings fades away into the green he can see the shores and fields beyond the window.  An excitement expands beyond the boundaries of the physical form that once jailed him.  Because today, he is finally going outside.

They want her.


        She can feel it her bones.

Their whispered invitations and passing caresses were enough to drive her mad.
And now as she sits
                   watching the blood spill from her veins

she awaits being enveloped in their embrace.



But on the other side the world is cold and distorted.

They are all there,
         just as they always have been.

But although she is now with them,
                                                     she is more alone then she ever was.

And now
        Always will be.

The colonies marched through the endlessly dark tunnels without map nor guiding light.  Their mission was only to spread; destination was meaningless.  And by sheer number, sheer force of mass, they spread forth and filled the intersecting passageways.  Soon there was no escaping their onslaught.  They burst through the small opening to the outside world, the damn bursting and spewing forth their numbers in a massive rush.  Achoo.

Ear Worm

No one believed her but she knew- she knew they’d changed her somehow. It wasn’t just a simple medical procedure like they’d told her it would be. She’d never acted like this before- losing track of time, ending up in places she didn’t remember going to. And they’d never used words like “paranoid” or “delusional” to describe her before. No way a simple medical procedure would do that.

The first time it had happened she’d ‘woken up’ in a back alley. It wasn’t like she’d been sleeping- it was like coming back into conscious after fainting. Like her mind had just been somewhere else. She didn’t remember how she’d gotten there. All she could recall was the strains of a song that was familiar in a way she couldn’t place. It was stuck in her head but she couldn’t hum the chords when she tried- forever caught on the tip of her tongue without the finality of sound.

She tried to convince herself it was sleep walking or amnesia or something that would explain the memory gaps. She’d even contemplated the possibility that it might be a brain tumor but a CAT scan had eliminated that hypothesis. She couldn’t tell anyone- she knew they’d lock her up. But it was happening more and more often.

Then one day she finally ‘woke up’ in a jail cell and the police told her they’d found her standing over a body. They told her they suspected it was only the most recent of several they’d been finding. She’d had enough- she told them. Told them how they’d put something in her during the surgery. That none of this was her fault, that she wasn’t in control. That’s when they shipped her to the nuthouse and the doctors started using those terms. Idiots.

She didn’t have long to be scared though, only one day later she had a visitor. It seemed strange to have someone come see her when they’d deemed her a threat to both herself and others- especially considering that she had no friends or family or anyone else that might come to visit. But when she saw him it made sense. Plain suit, nondescript face. The kind of person you’d see a thousand times on the subway and never remember. She knew he had come from them- the ones that had made her this way.

He spoke to her in soothing tones, told her it would be ok, that he would get her out of there. Said he’d know this time had been difficult for her but that ‘testing’ was hard for everyone. He said the word as if it were standard operating procedure from some employee manual.

She tried to explain to him calmly that wherever he was from they had the wrong girl. But all of her protests were met with an air of calm disregard and hurried attitude like there was too much to do. She was getting ready to make a run for it when he started humming a familiar tune. She had just enough time to think “I wonder when I’ll wake up again”… then that strange haze fell over her vision again.

Rookie Speech

“You rookies come in here, brand new badge flashing away on your lapel, thinking that you’re hot because you’re young you got the edge on us seniors. Well, kid- you got nothing. Nothing more than a boat load of adrenaline and a jumpy trigger finger. That’ll calm down real quick, just you wait.

“Me? I been around too long and seen too much to be trying so damned hard. And I learned a long time again to keep my head down, mouth shut, and ears open. You, buddy, are gonna learn. You won’t be so desperate to catch a bust and flash your pride around here when get down to the real business of homicide.

“You look at me and you think I’m old. Well I’ve seen more than you can even dream of your misguided little brain. I saw my first body when I was 12 years old- can you say that? That’s right, 12. It was the summer of ’72.

“Back then, kids left their bikes sittin’ out on the lawn. People left their doors open to catch the cross breeze. Nobody had a fenced-in yard or security systems or any of the rest of it. We played baseball and ate ice cream from the local dairy. We hung out at the damn swimming when it got real hot. We went fishin’. And that’s where old Mr. Baker first saw us.

“Tommy was the first one to go missin’. Everybody thought he fell into the damn at night, maybe tripped up while running down the path. We formed a search part after the second day cause nobody believed he’d run away- we didn’t have trouble youth back then. If you were trouble your dad put the fear a’ God into you and you worked off your troubles in somebody’s yard pulling weed or pushing a mower. No, Tommy didn’t run away.

“We even dredged the dam, see. Went right down to the bottom. Never found him. Not till three weeks later. His body was sitting all arraigned in the playground at school. The killer had scooped out his organs, replaced them with potting soil grew a nice sunflower in there.

“Oh, now you’re paying attention- now you know what I’m talkin’ about. That’s right, my friend Tommy was the very first victim of the Sunflower killer. That’s when Foulkrod went on the map, when we got our very own serial killer. You know the rest of the story, I assume. They found a total of nine bodies before they finally figured out Mr. Baker from the bait shop was tracking down the boys from the dam. Well, I was there from the start.

“I saw this town go from the laid back, blind community where everyone was safe to the place is now. Now everybody’s got a security system or a gated yard. Everybody keeps guard dogs and double locks. You never see kids running around cause all the families that could afford to moved away and the playgrounds turned into apartment complexes and factories.

“Now we got ourselves a real hot bed of crime that leaves rookies like you chompin’ at the bit for their first big bust. Well, you’ll loose that cocky attitude real quick round here. When you get used to the smell of blood after it’s been sitting in the hot sun for a couple of hours, or a decomposing body that somebody just dug up- then you can talk to me about pride. Pride is what you get for keeping your lunch down at your first crime scene. Until then just shut up and stay the hell out of my face.”

*That was the speech Capt. Shaw used to give to all the new detectives back when he was still investigating. It's a good thing he got promoted cause by that time Wikipedia had invented and all the rookies had already looked up the Sunflower Killer and been disappointed to find out he was famous in Foulkrod, IN- not Foulkrod, IL.

The Box

There was a box sitting on her desk in home room looking so unassuming it made her stomach clench. She'd had boxes on her desk before. She'd learned not to open them. Without even bothering to peek inside the lid she shoved the thing off her desk with her books, being careful not to touch it with her hand, and sat down to await the teacher.

Really, what amateurs, she thought to herself. As if she'd never opened up a box to see something horrible before. As if the curiosity to see what was inside would be enough to make her endure another stupid prank. She couldn't help but shove her nose just slightly upward throughout the rest of the class. She didn't bother to look for someone acting suspiciously culprit- like.

As she sat in the library later on remembering how nonchalantly she'd responded to such a childish game she was startled by a needlessly perky "Hi!"

"Huh? Oh, hey Cybil. What's up?" she asked, unable to keep the irked tone out of her voice.

"Did you get my cookies?" Cybil asked, her bouncy hair doing its characteristic move as she spoke.

"Cookies?

"Yeah. I left them on your desk in home room. Didn't you get them?"

"Damn it!"

She decided to open her boxes from then on.

Not more than a month later there was another box sitting on her desk when she walked into first period. Inside was a dead cricket.

The Outsider

She is not of this world.

She should be. She was born through basic biological functions of the human body, her organs perform the same operations, her senses input information for processing and reaction. But she is, inexplicably, an outsider.

She wanted to belong, because she knew she was supposed to want to. She just didn't. But she played the role they assigned her well and got by. She started to think that’s there all there was to any of it- getting by.

When the attacks started and the world cowered and panicked, she just watched in curiosity. She felt nothing, she never had. But there was a spark of the potential to feel something. To know something. To understand something, maybe something she’d always understood underneath all the lines she had to recite.

The news reports screamed of Armageddon. The religious zealots committed mass suicide in preparation for deliverance. The rest of humanity scurried around like insects, hurriedly picking up anything they could carry. She just watched and waited.

When they finally arrived, to capture her along with the rest, she knew. What she’d wondered in a way that logical thought couldn’t describe, what she’d hoped for in a way that humans don’t hope, what she’d been sensing underneath everything her whole existence.

She wasn’t an outsider. She was just waiting for her family to come home.

Neti pot

Gourd fertilizer wasn’t nearly as cool of a job as it sounded. Like a lot of jobs it looked pretty good on paper, what with the new breeds he’d created and the studies on variation in genomes he’d gotten published. But the day-to-day actions were pretty damned repetitive. Once you’ve swabbed seed on the inside of a flower you’ve crossed the thin line between interesting and sanity-crushing repetitive.

The studies, the molecular dissections, the gene mapping- that occupied about 10% of his overall time. The real work- the stuff he technically got paid for- was the monotonous, mind-numbingly dull reproduction of fertilization. He concluded early on that if he were going to survive he’d have to think of something to do with his brain while his hands repeated their simple actions flower after flower.

He’d always been fond of the picnic game as a kid- going over the items one would bring while cycling through the alphabet. Except that in his variation he would set the picnic location in a very strange place and try to come up with the most ridiculous items one could possibly bring there, in alphabetical order. It seemed like a waste of brain power for a botanist of his standing at first but then, what else was he gonna do?

Today he’d decided the picnic would be in space. He started with the basics- ant farm, balloon, things of that nature. But he found himself struggling later on in the alphabet. He was stuck on N and getting quite agitated with himself when his friend interrupted him from his thoughts.

“Man, the pollen is killing me today,” Jed said, making a loud and terribly elephant-sounding blow into his tissue.

“Why don’t you take something?” Ken asked without really paying attention. A night-light? No, too stupid. Nestle cocoa? Too obvious…

“Nah, that stuff makes me all wonky and sleepy, can’t take it. I just need my Neti-pot and a cup of hot-“

“Neti pot! Thank you!” Ken interrupted him.

Jed raised an eyebrow and then knelt to start spreading seed. Having known Ken for a disturbingly long period of time he had learned it was best not to question his random exclamations.

Reeses Penance

Having angered the chocolate gods by not partaking of the glorious bounty they provided John knew he would have to make a grand gesture to win back their favor.  He'd never actually performed the ritual himself and being one of the only practicing cocoalics in the area he didn't know how to find someone to ask.  So he turned to the area he usually turned to for obscure information: the internet.

Thanks to the wonder that is Youtube John was able not only to find someone performing the ceremony, but also a step by step instructional video that showed him how to follow suit.

The most difficult part was getting his hands on enough Reeses pieces to fill the tub.  But once he was settled in with the cleansing peanut butter chocolate candies washing his sins away he knew it was worth it. 

The Magic Teapot

Thanks to Shelly for this idea!

Susanne had never really given much thought to where the mice and gerbils and other small rodents and reptiles in the pet shop came from. Or, for that matter, where the little turtles and snakes came from. All she knew was that every Thursday Bob, her boss, would ask her to come to the back room to pick up the newly arrived rodents and reptiles and deliver them to their respective tanks.

When she first started she did find it slightly odd that the animals arrived in a cardboard box instead of... well, whatever you would ship rodents and reptiles in. And also odd that the exact number they needed to refill the tanks would arrive- three gerbils, two teddy bear hamsters, a turtle, the rare chinchilla. Never a bulk supply. She had once asked him if it wouldn't be safer to buy a shipment of, say, ten. All he'd said was "It's taken care of, no worries."

She also found it odd that all they sold in the store was small animals instead of dogs and cats which seemed to be more common in other pet stores. But Bob had explained that it was a bit of a specialty shop in that respect. "I figure the dogs and cats are covered," he'd said. The logic was reasonable enough that she didn't question it. Besides, it was just an after school job, anyway. The unanswered questions weren't enough to keep her interest when her line of questioning got her nowhere.

One perfectly ordinary Thursday afternoon at precisely four forty-nine she was minding the front register and wondering how much neater the counter top could be until she conceded defeat to her efforts of procrastination and gave in to her calculus homework. It did not bode well for her future work in the subject that she found herself considering cleaning the tanks sooner than get started.

"Suzanne, could you come back her for a minute?" Bob called from the back room. She glanced up at the clock. Precisely five pm. 'Saved by the bell', she though to herself. Bob was nothing if not a creature of habit. It was time for the weekly delivery.

She went back expecting to be greeted with the usual assortment of cardboard boxes containing the usual assortment of small animals but was instead greeted by Bob, sitting contently at the desk, with a teapot in his hands. She'd seen it before, sitting up on the shelf above his desk. She'd assumed it was a gift from his mother or something like that because she'd never actually seen him drinking tea around the shop. She had lots of gifts from her mother taking up space on the shelves in her bedroom because she didn't know what to do with them. But as he sat there he seemed like he intended to use it.

"I didn't know you drank tea," she said.

"I don't," he replied as if it was obvious.

"Well, then- what's with the teapot?"

"I was hoping I might talk to you about your... well not career, I know you're going to school in the not too distant future and I'm glad that you'll be studying something more useful than how to run a pet shop. But you've been pretty reliable here over the past year and I was thinking that you might be ready for some more responsibilities."

"Um, ok? What exactly do you mean?"

"Well, I know we don't have many other employees here but I was thinking of offering for you to be manager."

"Really, I didn't know places like this had managers. I mean, not that I don't want to be manager- I totally do. I mean, as long as it's not going to interfere with school."

"No, no- your hours won't change, you'll just be in charge of some more things around the store."

"Like what?"

"Well, first and foremost, this," he said as he placed the pot on the table in front of her.

"...ok? You want me to guard it or something?"

"No. Well, sort-of. It's a very important teapot. It is, and this may sound a little crazy but just bear with me, a magic teapot."

"Uh-huh..." She couldn't hide the doubt in her voice even though she knew it was probably bad etiquette to let your boss know that you think they're crazy.

"Well, maybe you're not ready for it," he said, picking it up and turning back to the shelf.

"No, wait- I can handle it, I just... I've never seen any real magic. I'm sorry, I really want to know. I just... you know," she said, trying desperately to make up for her obvious faux pas.

He paused, turned back to her and put the teapot back on the table.

"Do you believe in magic?" he asked, completely serious.

"Um... I don't know. I guess I sort-of thought that it wasn't real in real-life. I mean, the movies and books and stuff, yeah. But everyone tells you it isn't real, you know?"

"They're just trying to keep you from asking questions. That's one of the things you don't learn growing up- that some people will try to keep you from growing. But it's true, unfortunately." He seemed sad as he said that last part. And the look in his eyes made her think that he'd come across a lot of people who hadn't wanted him to grow. She'd never thought of him in that way before and now that she did she felt closer to him, somehow. She thought she'd never regretted anything more than making fun of him for trying to tell her something obviously important to him. Well, no. Burping in front of Bobby Benson on their first date was her biggest regret. But this was up there.

"I'm sorry, really. I promise i'll believe you."

"I'll tell you what. You can know the secret of the pot, and you can be in charge of its safe keeping and even use it if- and only if- you can answer one very important question for me."

"Anything!"

"Never say that until you know what 'anything' is."

"I'm sorry, I mean, I'll try."

"Ok, here's the question. Are you- and you have to answer this with complete honesty so consider it carefully before you answer- a good kid?" He put a lot of emphasis on the 'good' as if it meant something really important.

She did what he asked, she thought about it very seriously. She didn't really know how to answer. What makes someone "a good kid"? There were a lot of things she did wrong, she knew. She had just as much self doubt as the next teenager which was quite a lot so her appraisal was probably a bit off. But she listened to her parents, most of the time. She'd never gotten in any real trouble. And she did, in general, consider herself to be very loyal. So... maybe?

"I... I think so."

He considered her for a moment. His gaze seemed to be studying her character, judging whether or not she was worthy. Her heart went up into her throat as she waited for his verdict.

"I think you are, too," he said with a suddenly large and genuine smile on his face. She let out a big breath and smiled back.

"Ok, here's how it works," he said placing the teapot back on the table. "Now, the first rule for now, is that you must always do this with me present- never on your own. Or at least not until you've gotten the hang of it. Understand?"

"Yeah, don't do it unless you're around. Wait- do what?"

"This," he said placing the top on the teapot. She waited expectantly. Nothing happened. She was about to ask what they were waiting for when steam started coming out of the spout. She couldn't really believe her eyes. Here it was, that thing that everyone'd told her wasn't real: magic! But what magic?

"Is it making tea?"

"Nope, I don't drink tea, remember?"

"Well, then what's it doing?"

"Just wait."

After a minute the steam died down and was replaced by... squeaking?

"Is that pot... squeaking?"

"No, not the pot," he said removing the top and reaching inside. "It's this little guy," he said as he removed a small, gray mouse.

She stared in shock for a full minute trying to grasp what she'd just seen. A perfectly ordinary china teapot with little purple flowers painted on the side had, of it's own devices, made a mouse. She'd seen the inside before he put the top on. It'd been empty. And yet there Bob sat with a smug look on his face, holding a little, squeaking gray mouse.

"Oh my gosh! How did you do that?"

"I didn't do anything, it was the pot. I told you it was magic."

"Well, yeah but- how? How do you do make it do that.?"

"I'm not entirely sure," he said, his smug look replaced with one of confusion. "All I know is, I think of a gray mouse, and there's a gray mouse. If I thought of a gold teddy bear hamster, there'd be a gold teddy bear hamster. Whatever I think of, there it is. And that's where all the animals in our store come from."

"Well, what else can you make? Can you make money?"

"Nope, just animals. I haven't any clue why. But magic doesn't come around that often, so you try not to question it too much when it does."

She considered the teapot, and the mouse that had come out of it. And all the other animals she'd brought in from the back over the past year which had apparently been brought about by the same method. And then she thought of something. Something terrible. Something absolutely horrible that she wished she hadn't thought of.

"What happens when you think of a cat?"

Bob got a pained look on his face and looked down.

"There's a reason we only sell small animals," he said, very quietly.

Story Idea thanks to Shelly

The city had been floating for as long as anyone could remember. No one quite remembered why it started, or how, or where it had departed from. Sure, there were the elder scrolls which told of a time when the city was earthbound and it’s inhabitants farmed and fished and great tunnels from which they pulled stones of value. And there were those couple of epic poems that talked about sailing on great oceans and being attacked by winged beasts that only the heros could reason with. But everyone assumed they were just stories from the religion. All of their Gods had wings, afterall. And the king’s family line was said to have to started from the union of a winged God and beautiful mortal. But no one really believed the stories, they were just part of the mythology of the culture: things that had always been there and which you didn’t question unless you wanted trouble.

No, no one living in the city had any memory of a time when the city did anything more than float, lazily and somewhat drunkenly through the sky too far above the clouds for them to see land. And no one really noticed when the city started to sink, either. It had been submerged in clouds before and, much like fog, they came and went with little more than a few random complaints from the air-born urbanites. But when the city emerged from the cloud cover below the line of clouds and land was seen for the very first time there was an explosion of panic from anyone who’d peaked over the edge.

To be fair, the citizens reacted like any civilization before them had when faced with an apocalyptic scenario. They got really, really stupid. After the failed attempts at decreasing the city’s weight by pushing everything not nailed down off the edge, they turned to more conventional measures. There was mass religious hysteria complete with human sacrifices aimed at appeasing the Gods, suicides, murders and people ranting in the streets. And overall, there was fear.

Fear of the strange new sounds emerging from below, of the change in temperature, of the winds and most of all of the fact that no matter how many ceremonies, prayers, chants, sacrifices and desperate attempts at redemption were made the city continued to sink.

It dropped down alongside a long line of mountains scattered across a vast, strange landscape and veered dangerously close the side of a particularly sharp slope. But despite millions bracing for impact, it did not hit. There was a collective sigh of relief from those still conscious.

And then a shadow fell. A shadow in the shape of a very tall, very steep, very hard peak.

Porn of the Dead

The title had technically already been used but with only one worthwhile scene in the whole movie he figured that the genre was ripe for a sequel. So with the help of a few technically-minded friends, about $300 worth of video equipment, some vaguely dramatic friends, and some wanna-be porn stars he'd recruited from Craig's list he got started.

Porn of the Dead was going to revolutionize the industry and usher in a new era of undead erotica. He could envision not just movies, but magazines, novels, internet shorts, sex toys, edibles, and a whole world of erotic storytelling in which the decaying body parts of the human form would take on a whole new sensuality. He was one of the faithful who not only believed in the project, but believed in the ideal and carried the purpose of expanding the minds of his fellow peoples.

But all true believers have to encounter some ignorance on the way. To say that the movie did not take off would be an understatement. Even with endless possibilities of random viewers on YouTube the movie'd only gotten 324 hits after a full month online. He couldn't understand why. Sure there was a severe lack of exposure, but he reasoned that if people would willingly watch video tutorials on how to floss a cat's teeth then surely SOMEONE would want to watch Zombie porn. It was porn, afterall. And the internet was an endless world of sexual deviants. So what was the problem?

The problem, he learned from his newly matriculating film student friend, was that he didn't have a trailer. He informed him that no movie, no matter how bad, with a trailer ever failed to be viewed. Especially since there was a good five minutes of intro before the first sex scene, no wonder no one was talking about it. The collective attention span of 99% of web surfers was about two minutes so he was way over par.

He put together a full minute and 23 second trailer including some of the racier bits from the film with some bold fonts and dramatic music and posted it. Within three days the movie had well over 2 million views and was an instant viral classic. It was talked about on every blog from right wing republicans denouncing the depths that human morality had sunk to all the way to underground sexual revolutionists praising the expansion of creativity in erotic storytelling. Within a month Howard Stern was interviewing the porn stars while the viewers of Attack of the Show got to see the man behind the myth.

He was fully under-prepared for this level of exposure but he reasoned that it would die down soon enough. Within the popular media it did. But not until after movies, books, magazines, toys and more than he could have ever imagined emerged. He had successfully sparked a new genre of erotica and felt satisfied in his creation. He slept the sleep of a man who had made a distinguishable impact on the world.

That's when the fan mail started.

He'd gotten a whole host of e-mails from fans before. Especially after he appeared on television. Apparently there were a whole lot of women in the world with somewhat twisted sexual turn-ons that found him devastatingly attractive. But their attentions, too, died down in time. But this was different.

These were long, soul-bearing letters. She not only praised his creative genius and his dream of changing the pornographic landscape. She praised him, as a person. She made great assumptions about the thought, feeling, and sexual exploration that must have taken place in him to come up with such a great cinematic masterpiece. She cursed the others who came after him for making pale imitations of his opus. She empathized with the level of loneliness he must feel to know that he was the only one in the world who could feel that level of attraction for the deceased, but assured him that he was not alone.

He closed every website, blog, e-mail address and fan site he'd ever had.

That's when the pictures started coming by mail. They were tame, at first. Fully clothed, then scantily clothed, then partially clothed, then nude but tastefully posed, then full frontal, then in various sexual positions, and so on. He hadn't thought much of it at first, but when he got the first roll of her in various sexual positions with what was unmistakably a cadaver he changed his address.

It stopped. For about a month.

Then he got the video. She had remade every sex scene of his entire movie with her as the star. And since she wanted it to be authentic, she used real bodies. They didn't shamble or attack like the actors in his movie had. But their decaying parts looked a lot more real.

He gave it to the police, along with every other piece of of correspondence he'd ever gotten from her, and filed a detailed report about how long it'd been going on. They assured him that they would keep on eye on the online community for someone fitting the profile of this sicko and he felt a brief twinge of relief. Then he came home to a box containing a decaying penis with a love note about what she'd like to do with it. To him.

So he gave that to the police, and moved to a new town. He wasn't about to uproot his whole life for one crazy bitch, so he only moved half an hour away. But his new apartment had a programmable key code that he could change as frequently as he wanted to with little difficulty, and a security guard in the lobby. He developed an intricate routine of thoroughly inspecting his mail before bringing it up to the apartment and made the guard open anything from an unfamiliar address. They didn't find anything for a full two months, and he started to relax.

Then one evening, after he'd gotten used to entering his apartment without checking the door for marks of a break-in or checking behind his shoulder for shadows of a passerby, he came home to his dark apartment and put his bags down on the side table. As he turned on the light he felt a sharp prick in his neck and reached up to find a dart which must have been shot from close up. He turned and saw her lying seductively on the couch, relaxing back with the shooter pulling away from her mouth.

He felt a sense of overwhelming anger at himself for letting his guard down as his body slid to the floor, pushing the door closed behind him. He couldn't scream, he couldn't blink, and he couldn't do a damn thing to stop her as she came to stand over him with a lazy, seductive smile.

"Don't worry, Curtis. I'm not going to kill you."

Somehow he didn't find that very reassuring.

The Monthly Ritual

Chet had no idea what he was doing. This fact would have been painfully obvious to anyone watching, if anyone were unlucky enough to be watching. A werewolf trying to shave mounts the list of off-putting images faster than a gorilla raping a kitten. It was just wrong on many levels, most of them very hairy. But Chet didn’t care. All he could think of was that scent.

He’d walked past the club two days ago before the moon was full, but even then the scent of an enormous crowd of women sweating, dancing and rubbing their swelling bodies up against virile men whilst menstruating hit him harder than the first time he discovered what came on Cinemax after 2am. It made a physical impact on his brain and lower parts of his anatomy. At the time he’d concluded that a small, scrawny, nerd- looking guy like himself would be kicked to the curb quicker than a young republican at a fair trade rally, but as soon as the moon turned, that logic went right out the window.

He started thinking, as limited as that capacity was at these times, that a big, burly man with a stature such as his shifted form allowed him could get in easily. He just needed to get rid of the fur…

He started with his hands, thinking that they’d be most obvious. As much as he cut himself the shaving wasn’t the difficult part, but once he had bare hands his nails seemed akin to Freddy Kruger and he realized quickly that they had to go. He destroyed a nail clipper, a pair of scissors, a Ginsu knife and an electric can opener before he realized that trying to cut nails strong enough to rip bark off a tree was an exercise in futility. He painted them with black nail polish left over from his early adolescent goth phase and moved on.

Then he focused on his neck and chest as he’d seen big, brawny guys with waxed chests and remarked on how much fuller their muscles looked without all the hair. Granted he’d seen these men in underwear ads, but that didn’t occur to him at the time. He removed a substantial amount of skin along with the fur, but managed to get the bulk of his chest bald.

Then he realized that if he were actually lucky enough to get a drunk woman to leave with him she’d scream that high-pitched, shrill scream that wreaked havoc on his ears if she actually saw him naked. So he started working on his torso, legs, knees, and feet. He forgot any technique he'd had and cut at the hair in the same manner as avid gardeners going after rogue weeds in their prized azaleas.

Had he not lost so much blood in the process of all this, he might have actually gotten to his face before realizing that a hairless werewolf looks a lot like an aborted baby alien straight out of a Ridley Scott film. Luckily enough, he passed out before experiencing that particular horror.

He awoke the next morning looking very much like a murder victim with large bits of black, sticky fur jutting out of him in stalagmite-like formations. It took him a full three days and so many reapplications of Neosporin that he lost count before he looked anywhere near normal again.

The next month he bought a fireproof safe big enough to fit every cutting tool he owned and added the collection and locking of these tools into his monthly pre-shift ritual.

Thanks to John for the story Idea!