Beneath the neon light.

The man in the black suit sat alone at the end of the bar, his hair glowing orange under the neon light of the "OPEN" sign.  He stared down fixedly at his files, the papers spread out across the table.  His cup of coffee sat off to one side, carefully placed away from the papers to avoid any accidental stains.

Behind the counter, I shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.  I couldn't wait for the end of my shift, when I could sit down, take a load off my feet and relax.  There were no other customers; you couldn't call the little diner busy at the best of times, and just about no one passing through a dinky little rest stop on the highway after sundown would bother stopping.  But the man in the dark suit was always here.

He was a lawyer.  I was pretty sure of that fact.  I had once dared to ask, while stopping by his table with his customary cup of coffee.  He hadn't given me a straight answer, I don't think, but he had sighed deeply.  Spreading his hand out to take in the files and papers, he had said something about always having too many cases.  I had laughed, I think.  I didn't know if it was a joke, but I laughed nonetheless.

I glanced up at the clock.  Just past 11:30 PM.  Closing time was still a half hour away.  Shifting uncomfortably, I reached back and picked up the pot of coffee, circling around the counter to head along the diner's narrow aisle.

He always took the booth at the end of the diner.  By now, I knew his routine like clockwork.  He would arrive shortly after nine, just after the sun had finally given up and dropped below the horizon.  His time varied slightly, probably due to traffic, but he would always arrive, shed his long black coat, and sit at his table at the end.  No one was ever in his seat.

One time, when the diner was empty, I had decided to rest my legs, dropping into the nearest booth.  It wasn't until I was seated that I realized I was in the lawyer's booth.  But after I had sat, I knew it immediately.  It felt wrong, somehow; I couldn't shake the feeling that somewhere, just beyond the edge of hearing, somebody was dragging their fingernails down a chalkboard.  As soon as I stood up, the feeling vanished.  It was probably nothing.

Coffee pot in hand, I approached the last booth.  Still several feet away, I could see that he still had a half cup, but there was nothing else to do.  He had probably already heard the click of my shoes on the cheap linoleum.

I stepped up to the table.  "More coffee, sir?" I asked politely, managing to muster up a small smile.

Lowering the sheaf of paper he had been perusing, the lawyer gave me a smile in return.  I felt my own expression wilt slightly.  I held back from looking over my shoulder at the kitchen, wishing hopelessly that Cookie would manage to rise from his drunken slumber.  I knew that the lawyer wasn't going to cause trouble, but I was still scared about basically being alone in this diner, miles from any other towns.

The man shook his head slightly.  "No thanks," he said.  I thought I could hear the slightest hint of a Southern drawl in his voice.  "I think this will last me up until close, dear."

The lawyer always stayed up until we closed, at midnight.  I gave the man a wordless nod, backing away slightly.  I had turned to return back to the relative safety of the counter, but the man spoke once more.

"I've got your file here, too," he commented, his voice sounding calm.  I turned, to see him holding up a thin sheet of paper.  "Not much substance to it, though.  Not really worth my time to consider, at this moment."

I should have said something.  I should have confronted the man, asked him what he was talking about, demanded to see that single sheet of paper.  But I didn't.  I retreated back, escaping to the other end of the diner, waiting for my shift to end so I could leave, as if I wouldn't see the man again the next night.

As I walked away, I risked a single glance back.  The man was still sitting in his booth, his face half turned so one eye could follow me.  A thin smile played about his lips.  After a long look, he returned to sorting his files, sitting alone, beneath the glow of the neon sign.

Unravel, part III.

Part I.  Part II.

That morning, when I headed off to work, I had a smile on my face.

Seated at my desk, however, I couldn't focus on my work. All I could think about was Muriel's face, staring straight ahead as she unraveled. My fingers, always anxious for something to occupy themselves, found a string somewhere on my desk and began tugging. I sat and replayed the memory in my head, while my fingers tugged and teased at the string. When I finally shook myself out of my trance, it was nearly time for lunch, and I had unraveled my keyboard, reducing it to nothing but a black pile of thread. Before I left for my mandated half-hour break, I stopped by a neighbor's cubicle to liberate another keyboard. I dumped the black string into the garbage.

By the time I was headed home, I had already unraveled two computers, one of the two fridges in the break room, and my boss. Of the items, I was most upset about the fridge; my lunch leftovers had still been inside. Oddly enough, after I had tugged on a string emerging from the bottom of my boss's pantsuit and watched her collapse into a pile of string, nobody else in the office seemed to notice her absence. Indeed, no one even acknowledged that we had a boss at all during the afternoon. Any mention of her to my fellow office drones was met with nothing but blank stares and shrugs.

One of my neighbors was outside when I pulled into the driveway. I waved back to him, nervous that he would mention my missing wife. Fortunately, he did nothing of the sort. He did make some comment about how sad it was that I lived alone. His statement confused me; I had always thought that Muriel was the more noticeable one. Still, I was nervous. Fortunately, I was able to spot the piece of string hanging from his gardening jacket.

The next morning, after a sound night's sleep, I noticed that there was a large “For Sale” sign planted in my neighbor's front yard. It unraveled nicely, coming apart with a single pull. As it broke down into white thread, I saw that the end of the thread continued backward, towards the house. One good yank, and the entire house collapsed into a tangle. I spent several minutes trying in vain to coil the string into a skein before giving up and pushing the entire pile off into some bushes.

Things went downhill from there. Wandering through the downtown area, I left several city blocks free of buildings. When I turned around and started my walk back, there were already trees and grass covering the empty holes where skyscrapers had previously stood. People who had worked in the unraveled buildings were milling about in the street, looking vaguely confused about why they were downtown. I wondered what had happened to the people who had been working inside.

As I was getting into my car, a black string coming out of the road caught my eye. Hmm, I thought, as the highway came apart into a mess of tiny black lines. I'm going to have to take the back route to get home.

This story is definitely escalating.  Stay tuned!

There is a crack in my ceiling.

There is a crack in my ceiling.
Sometimes, late at night, a light shines through.
In the dark, trapped below, my eyes are drawn upward to that eldritch haze.

From where does this light emerge?
Soft, what light through yonder crack breaks?
The hue is different.  This light is ancient, tired, has traveled across dimensions to reach this place.

At times, I am overwhelmed.
Deadlines at work, issues at home, familial and familiar frustrations.
At these times, I gaze up, into that baleful glow, and am relieved.

The light doesn't care about my problems.
The light doesn't care about day or night or deadlines.
The light doesn't care about time, about eons passed between the lonely galaxies.

Once, overcome by a fit of boldness, I fetched a ladder.
I put my eye to that crack, staring out of my prison into the light.
My eye, wild and desperate, drank in the sights it beheld.

Perhaps someday I will give up on my mundane life.
Climb up, break open that crack in the ceiling, and unleash what I saw upon the world.
For on that ladder, staring across time . . .

. . . I saw dragons.

And the dragons looked back at me.

Unravel, part II.

Continued from Part I, here.

As I lay next to her, gazing without interest at the pages of a magazine (no pictures, especially not of women, Muriel was very clear on that), my eyes strayed to her neckline once again. This time, I saw the thread once again, hanging tantalizingly around the back of her neck.

Ever so carefully, I lifted up my hand, reaching for her neck. Muriel, engrossed in her novel, didn't even notice as my fingers closed around the string. With the ease of years of practice, I carefully tugged, pulling just hard enough to smoothly extract the thread without causing the line to snap.

The thread slid out smoothly, piling up in a thin coil of thread on the bedspread. Muriel kept staring straight forward, not turning. I kept on pulling. I stared at her, trying to figure out to what was connected to the thread. It was still the same light color, the same color as Muriel's skin.

Suddenly, as the I pulled, I saw Muriel's face seem to collapse, folding in on itself like a dropped handkerchief. I gasped, held back a scream, but my fingers continued to tease forth the thread. Managing to pull my eyes downward, I now saw that the line of string led directly up into Muriel's face; I was unraveling my wife!

Still acting as if they had a mind of their own, my hands continued to pull on the string, now coming out in big handfuls, efficiently reducing my spouse to a pile of tan thread. The entire process was surprisingly fast, taking no more than a few minutes. At the end, I was left with nothing but an empty bathrobe sitting next to me in bed, a dropped paperback novel, a loose pair of reading frames, and a large pile of loose thread.

For several minutes, I sat, staring blankly at the pile of thread that used to be my significant other. A hundred thoughts were warring in my head. In the end, however, I brushed the pile of string off the bed and turned over, clicking off the light. I had no trouble falling asleep.

I awoke the next morning, at first unsure if I had merely dreamed the events of last night. The large pile of tan thread sitting on the floor beside my bed told me otherwise. I glared at the string. Even in death, Muriel had found a way to drag on me, to bring me down. I swept the pile of string up into a dustpan and threw it away. A fitting end for my wife, I decided.

As I sat and ate my breakfast, munching on my toast, I worried whether the authorities would come calling, questioning me about my missing wife. As I sat and thought, however, I realized that there was no one else to worry over Muriel's disappearance. She had no close friends; indeed, I couldn't remember the last time she had invited friends of any kind over to the house. She sat at home while I headed off to work, and aside from occasionally composing shopping lists, she didn't seem to do much at all. If I didn't report her missing, I don't believe anyone else in the world would ever notice her absence.

Now, things are starting to get interesting!  Stay tuned for the next installment!

Unravel, part I.

Muriel always told me not to pick at them.

I remember her telling me that, too. We would be sitting at one of her tea parties, and I'd notice a thread hanging out from the couch, or my jacket, or those ridiculous lace doilies that she insisted on always setting out. Drifting above the sea of mindless conversation, I would start tugging on that thread. They always seemed out of place, an unnecessary addition that really ought to be removed.

Without fail, Muriel's sharp little eyes would spot me, and she'd cut off mid-sentence to order me to drop it, to leave it alone, to “stop picking at that thing.” Those eyes of hers were ever watchful, ever observant. Beady, too, although I don't think I noticed that until long after we were married.

I remember one day, sitting in my car at a red light on the way home from work, looking down at my shirt. There was a string hanging out the bottom, just waiting for a tug. I'm ashamed to say that I looked around, as if Muriel would be in the car next to me. With a single tug, the string slid out easily, offering just the slightest resistance to my fingers.

I kept on tugging, not stopping until the angry honks of the cars behind me showed that the light was finally green. By the time I reached the house, there was almost nothing left of my shirt but a single sleeve and a wonderful, beautiful pile of thread.

Of course, I was admonished for that. I had to sleep on the couch as punishment for ruining a “perfectly good shirt.” But that feeling, that satisfaction as my shirt came apart into a single long, twisted thread, was worth the punishment.

Muriel says that she thinks I have a 'compulsion', that I should go see some sort of head doctor about it. I've managed to brush off these suggestions. It's not doing any harm, is it? I just like to pull at the strings, to watch things unravel.

But this is all just background, I suppose. The main event, that really started that one morning at breakfast. I was sitting in our usual, comfortable silence, eating my toast. Muriel had managed not to burn it too badly today. Normally, I kept my eyes down, reading the paper or just gazing into middle space. Today, though, as Muriel turned to open the fridge, I spotted the string.

It was protruding from the back of her neck, just above the neckline of her dressing gown. My first thought was that it was a part of her gown, somehow sticking straight up towards her hair, but it was a lighter color, looking almost like skin. Just at seeing the string, I felt my fingers twitch, wanting to tighten around it and gently tease it out.

I didn't do anything, of course. I got up and went to work. But throughout the entire day, that string was on my mind. I couldn't seem to stop thinking about it, and I'm sad to say that my work definitely suffered as a result. By the time I was driving home, I had constructed a plan to examine her dressing gown while she was in the shower that night, to remove that string. Just to keep her gown tidy, of course.

That night, as Muriel was using up all of our hot water with her usual forty-minute shower, I retrieved her dressing gown from its usual hook. No matter how carefully I searched, though, there was no string protruding from the back of the neckline. Before I could conduct a third search, the sound of falling water ceased, and I hurried to replace her gown before she emerged to claim it.

Muriel emerged from her shower and settled into her side of the bed, putting on her reading glasses as she reached for her romance novel. I didn't even bother bringing up the idea of actual romance; breaching the subject would merely bring on another one of Muriel's lectures.

Story slow so far?  That's okay, it will pick up with the next update!

The Last Heart of Darkness, Part III

Part I.  Part II.

Our hike took the better part of two days.  We were given a lift by Jeep for the first leg of our journey, but rough roads and the need for stealth quickly forced us on to foot.  Jarrod led us through deep valleys, narrow caves, and dense jungle, somehow managing to annoyingly vanish from sight a few feet ahead, only to pop out from behind a tree to wave us onward before disappearing again.

It was the morning of the third day, and the sun was already half risen in the sky when we reached the mouth of a large cave, sunk into the side of a hill.  Jarrod stood at the stony entrance, wearing his usual manic grin.  "Come, come, we are nearly to the beasts!" he cried to us.  "Simply through this cave, and we shall see them!"

For once, Jarrod remained close to us as we ventured through the cave, and I soon understood why.  The cave was a labyrinth of complex turns, narrow passages, and pitfalls, waiting to swallow the unwary traveler. My sense of unease was screaming at me to turn back, but I knew that I would be hopelessly lost.  So instead, we pushed onward, our lights doing a poor job of cutting through the darkness.

After what seemed an eternity of wandering slowly through the cold darkness of the cave, we emerged, blinking, into bright sunlight.  On a small ledge in front of us, Jarrod threw his hands wide.

"Behold, my friends!" he cried.  "Look upon nature, in its beauty!"  We both looked past him and stared in amazement.

We were gazing down into a huge valley, covered in long grass and spotted here and there with small clumps of trees.  Mountains rose sharply on one side of us, while plains stretched off into the distance on the other side.  The scene was beautiful.  But my eyes were fixed on the animals.

Fewer than a thousand feet away, a herd of rhinos was making its way through the tall grass, down the side of a hill.  A herd.  I counted no fewer than fifteen adults, and half as many juveniles.  All of them sprouted both horns.  There was no sign of guards, or indeed, any other humans.  This was impossible.

Beside me, the American's mouth had dropped open.  I felt like I had the same expression.  "This is impossible," I muttered.  "There's no way that a herd of rhinos that size could still exist in the wild."

The American shook his head.  "I think it's more impossible than that," he replied.  When I turned to look at him, confused, he extended a meaty hand to point skyward.

As my gaze rose, the meaning of his words instantly became clear.  Despite heavy cloud cover, the scene was still brightly lit.  Although clouds obscured one sun, the second sun, hanging slightly lower, was still shining down brightly.

There were two suns.  I took a step back, trying to comprehend what this meant.  "We aren't on Earth any more," I said hoarsely.  "Somehow, we've gone somewhere else."  I turned on Jarrod, confused and angry.  "What have you done?"

Jarrod merely shrugged, still looking infuriatingly unconcerned.  "It is a different place," he said, "but it is still Nature, yes?  And there are still the animals you seek, free and in the wild!"

"Not quite," cut in the American.  He had been peering now at the rhinos as they traipsed their way through the tall grass.  Now that the first ones were emerging from the tall grass on the side of the small pond at the base of the hill, we could see that they had six thick gray legs, rather than four.

Other than these small differences, however, I realized that the scene still looked uncannily like Africa.  The trees seemed fairly normal, as did the grass.  The blue sky and white clouds were also reassuringly familiar. Next to us, Jarrod spread his arms.

"It is not quite the same, but it is still the quest, no?" he said, grinning at us.  "You against the wild, to bring down a great beast!  It is the hunt!"

I had to admit that he had a point.  I didn't understand how we had come to this other world, but Jarrod was proof that we could theoretically return.  And here, the great horned beasts before us were unguarded, ready to face off against, to challenge.  I unshouldered my pack, sliding out my Mauser.

"He's right," I said, making up my mind.  "And I plan to meet that challenge."

Wrong Connection

Author's note: Inspired by real life events!

To quote Gob, I had made a terrible mistake.

This realization slowly dawned on me as I sat in my rather cramped seat, staring out the tiny window and trying to ignore the wailing baby ahead of me in 17E. The ground had long since disappeared below us, and clouds obscured my view. Probably too late to turn around, I thought.

The realization hadn't started to set in until after I had frantically dashed through the loading bridge at the last minute, after I had settled down into the first available seat (thank you Southwest Airlines for your lazy different methods of arranging seating), and managed to regain some semblance of my breath.  Only once I started looking around did I notice a distinct lack of heavy coats and other insulating clothing.  For a flight into the Minnesota winter, that was very odd.

Instead, everyone seemed to be in shorts and sandals.  In fact, several people seemed to have garlands of fake flowers strewn around their necks.  That really should have tipped me off earlier, shouldn't it?

I was on the wrong flight.  I, of course, took the most logical course of action.  I waited for the drink cart, currently three rows ahead, to roll up to my aisle.  "All the alcohol, please," I said politely to the waitress, a blonde in her late forties.  

She stared back at me, looking confused.  "Um, we have rum, vodka, and tequila, for five dollars a bottle," she began hesitantly.

"Yes," I cut in.  The woman still looked confused, so I decided to clarify.  "I would like six of each, please," I said.  I fished in my wallet and pulled out my credit card, waving it enticingly.  The woman didn't seem happy about the purchase, but she rang me up.

"Anything else?" she asked.

"Yes.  One coke, please.  Diet, if you have it."  She scowled and passed me a Pepsi.

And I had thought myself so lucky!  After having my bags pulled aside at security, I had heard a final boarding call for my gate, and sprinted across the airport.  I was the last one down the jetway, and even though my electronic ticket had stubbornly refused to scan, the flight attendant had been gracious enough to wave me through.  Now, of course, I realized why it hadn't functioned properly, and wished that he would have been a bit more of a jerk to me.

I reached up and pushed the call button for a flight attendant, hoping to not get the angry drink lady.  Fortunately, a young and plump female stewardess tottered over.  "Can I help you, sir?" she asked, not unkindly.

"Yes, hi," I said.  "I'm not quite sure how to explain this, but I think I'm on the wrong flight."  

The young lady stared back at me.  "Here, look," I continued, pulling out my phone to access the boarding pass.

She stared at the phone.  "You know, all your personal electronics are supposed to be turned off right now."

"Oh, give me a break," I shot back.  "Everybody just puts theirs on airplane mode, if they do anything at all.  We've all seen the Mythbusters episode and know that they don't interfere.  But look," I pressed on, holding up my e-ticket.  "I'm supposed to be traveling to Minnesota right now!"

The stewardess examined the ticket with caution.  "Sir, this plane is traveling to Honolulu."

"Yes, I have realized that," I said, gritting my teeth to hold back any sharp comments.  "That is why I am asking you what to do."

The stewardess headed off to confer with some other people on the airline.  I sipped on my tiny bottles of booze while I waited for her to return.  

Eventually, she came back to my seat, looking uncomfortable.  "I'm afraid we can't turn the plane around," she said, looking genuinely sorry.  Whether she was sorry for me, or simply that she had to be the bearer of bad news, I couldn't say.  "However, I've spoken to an airline representative, and they agree that they should have caught this mistake.  So we'll put you up in a hotel in Honolulu until the next flight out with connections to Minnesota."

"How long will that be?" I asked.

She shrugged.  "Probably about three days."  

As she tottered away, I sat back and took a long pull of alcohol.  Three days!  Three days stuck in Honolulu before I could fly back.  Three days, stuck in Honolulu, on the airline's dime, in the warmth and sun... a smile slowly grew across my face.  

Maybe my day wasn't going so badly after all.