bookcrusher

Myrtle is an Atlantean through and through. Or she was one, back in the day. Her once-flawless blue skin is now wrinkled with age, her piercing silver eyes half-blinded by cataracts, and the adventures of her youth across the Seven Seas remain only in her own head. Until today, because Myrtle has decided she’s had enough of lying around in her anemone bed. “You what?” Aquila, her youngest granddaughter and the only one still living at home, balks. “I’m going above,” says Myrtle. “If I spend one more day in this room I will go crazy. What was I thinking? Retirement is not for me.” “Above?” “Stop repeating everything I say, honey. You’re only 16. At this rate, you’ll be deaf before me.” Myrtle zips up her favorite seashell bag. Aquila reaches for her grandmother’s hand until she sits back down. “But there’s nothing up there.” “Well, they only ever checked from the surface. Nobody has truly ventured far out.” “It’s just empty land and air. And there’s no… water. ” “No, duh,”

“Who wears a suit and tie in the middle of the apocalypse?” The guy who pulled the trigger, that’s who. I pushed a button, actually, but same difference. Besides, I’m heading straight to my thesis defense once the sky falls and the last creature perishes. It was pretty epic. I think I’m getting an A+.

You are the last one without a chip in your brain. The last human without inorganic nano-robots in their organs. It had become the norm when you were born, but your parents were poor and stubborn. They pitied you, and for a long while, you pitied you too. But now, surrounded by your ageless friends, you have no regrets. You don’t envy their cancer-free cells or their enhanced brains. You feel oblivion tightening its grip around you, and for once, you don’t fight it.

The spider perches on the tree, watching. It weaves your days into memories, working in silence from the moment you arrived. The fibers started out weak, unsure and confused, but as the lattice grew, so did the complexity of the webs. In the end, it will have built an empire—a beautiful, tangled mass of laughter and heartbreak, of discoveries and losses. There is the thread of your high school sweetheart, and here is a strand of your strained relationship with Mom. You will not meet your spider in your lifetime. But in the very last moment, in the split second between this world and the next, you will see it: the unseen creature who has kept watch, day and night, to knit meaning into the fabric of you.

They call him disaster man. The antithesis of Midas, or bad luck personified. Yet I’ve never met a more cheerful person. “How do you stay so happy?” I asked. “It’s easy to smile when things go your way,” he said. “But when life’s constantly trying to bring you down? This is me saying fuck you.”

I took my first surf lesson to impress a girl I met for two minutes. I was 27. You would think that I was old enough to not do things like that anymore, but god was she special. May wasn’t really a surfer. She’d picked up the sports out of sheer curiosity and only went into the ocean once every three, maybe four, months. It’s just impressive, she said during one of our texting conversations. She had used the word ‘impressive’, so I wanted to be that. I immediately booked five lessons at the local beach, four of which were scheduled for before I would even invite her out for the second time. * “It’s not you,” she began. My heart dropped. I’d heard it a million times before. It’s me, the words echoing like an overused line from a bad Hallmark movie. But she did not say them. “Contrary to how put together I seem, I’m a mess, John. You told me you’re ready for something serious. I’m not, and I can’t ask you to wait.” “Can we stay friends?” Usually, it was a sure way to extinguish any

Daddy is dead. But by dead I don’t mean not alive, by dead I mean I buried him in my head along with the fridge magnets he liked to use to buy my silence. There’s the sombrero-wearing cactus from when he missed my birthday the ninth time in a row. The smiling sumo man he thought could make me unsee the fingers around Mommy’s neck. Unhear the sound of his screams, her begging, the I love you’s that were whispered but somehow not said. And here’s the London telephone booth with its unsmiling guard—I wonder what sort of secrets he kept, and if he, too, had a wife he greeted with his fists and a daughter he raised on cheap last-minute souvenirs. * Daddy is alive. But by alive I don’t mean not dead. I just mean he’s breathing air that is not his and taking up more space than he has any right to, inhabiting places where happiness should be and watching us scrabble over frail slivers of hope, that maybe this time he’s changed, or it will be different when he comes home next. And so we keep

Parkinson came in the night. He confined Grandpa first to a wheelchair, then to his bed, and finally to a wooden box. But the old man never liked being told what he can or can’t do, and now he’s sailing out at sea, bobbing up and down the waves, sometimes with the current, but mostly against it. Parkinson pulled up and made himself cozy even though we put up a no parking sign. He splintered Grandpa’s old nerves and put down invasive roots, pilfering the coins of self-control, one trivial bit by one trivial bit, until there was nothing left but the hardened, wrinkled shell of a man—the grandfather I knew trapped inside his own skeleton, limbs not his anymore, muscles not his anymore, tongue not his anymore, mumbling words that were still his but we could not understand. I could not understand. Except when he grunted an animal sound, I want to die. Just let me die. Those we understood. Parkinson was a guest who was never welcome but overstayed anyway, stretching our hospitality thin as

Harry’s head hurts. He has been seeing things lately, and not the kind of visions he used to have when Voldemort was out terrorizing the world, but ones that are less clear and more disturbing. Ginny stirs beside him. “Nightmares again?” “No,” Harry said. Nightmares would’ve been fine. They were horrible, but at least they make sense. Outside, the sky is starting to lighten. Ginny rolls on her side to look at her husband. “What is it?” “I’ve been having strange dreams, except they feel… real, somehow. There are books about me. About us.” She frowns. “But don’t we know that? What you did was nothing short of heroic, Harry. Of course, they will write about you.” “Not they. Her.” “Skeeter?” “Joanne.” “Who?” Ginny sits up, concerned by Harry’s perturbed state. They don’t know anyone called Joanne. “The author,” he stares at the ceiling. “And it’s not just the War or the Battle of Hogwarts, it’s everything. Magic, the creatures, your family, our whole world.” “My family? What

The brothers stood back-to-back. A speaker in the corner rustled to life. “WALK TEN PACES FORWARD. ONE.” The older brother took one step. The younger one didn’t. “Ray, we don’t have to do this.” The red lights turned into a deeper, more dangerous shade. A beeping started. “SUBJECT B, WALK.” “Walk, Frank, or we’ll both blow up.” “No, please, there has to be another way,” said Frank. The beeping became louder and faster. “ROOM WILL DETONATE IN EIGHT, SEVEN—” Frank started crying, but he didn’t move. “No, Ray, come on. Please—” “FOUR, THREE…” Ray’s heart hammered. “Just do it, Frank! Walk!” “TWO—” Frank took a step. The beeping stopped and the lights returned to a gentle red. The speaker blared again. “GOOD. WE ALL UNDERSTAND THE RULES. NOW, TWO.” Frank didn’t fight it this time. The brothers took their second step. “Ray, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I’m sorry I lied about the drugs and everything. I swear I didn’t know—” “THREE.” Ray snapped. “What? You