It was Thanksgiving at the Heron’s Nest, and everyone was coming home. James was back from Iraq and was miraculously not shot or blown up even a little bit, so he was eager to resume his role as quarterback of the Blacks, which was the name of one of the teams that played in the…
“Auntie! Please let me down!” In the hours Aunt Beatrice left her there, one of the tethers that held Carolyn to the floor had come loose. Well, to be honest, she’d loosened it. At the time, she thought if she could just get free of the tethers, the magic would be broken and she’d float…
Rebecca could do no wrong. Gerald had heard about it his whole life. Rebecca got straight As. Rebecca was selected for first chair. Rebecca made the swim team. And what had Gerald done? Nothing, according to his parents. But Gerald had done a lot. That morning, everything boiled over. When Gerald came down for breakfast,…
The remains of someone’s camp laid scattered across the uneven asphalt outside the old Acme grocery store. It looked like the occupants had lived there for a while, based on the number of jagged, dried out cans that were strewn among the broken chairs and cigarette butts. They’d been gone a while too. April had…
Three nights after Stewart first noticed the change, a visitor arrived. Wait, let me back up. I should start at the beginning. On Tuesday, April 23, Stewart Krawshank attached the solar filter and looked through his number 3 telescope at the Sun. This was a perfectly normal thing for Stewart to do. As of the…
The weather gets to everybody eventually. The weather and the isolation. And the same five faces staring at you over your corn flakes every damn day. Winters in Antarctica are no joke. We get three hours of sunlight a day, and the temperature routinely dips below -40. Even though there are a few hundred people…
Dennis leaned against the back wall of the restaurant, smoking a Camel and enjoying one of the last cool nights of spring. “The heat’s coming,” Javier had said, just before stepping inside to confront the mound of dirty dishes that had appeared, as if by magic, at his station. Now Dennis was alone, and the…
Hillix Hewitt braked hard along the third fairway – so hard that his passengers, including the lovely Miss Laura St. Clair, nearly fell out of the cart, and his entourage, which filled the two carts behind them, just missed crashing into one another. “It’s a crime,” he exclaimed, leaping out of the golf cart and…
“Shut up. You never let me think.” The lion turned in his little cage, his mane caked with sawdust and straw. He was making a humming sound. Gary never thought a lion would make a sound like that. But there was a storm outside and they were both on edge and a little seasick. Gary…