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May 26, 2005
Volume 1, Issue 14
Today's theme: a random line ripped from a random book pulled randomly from the somewhat randomly assorted books on Andy's shelves.
It is difficult to speak of things that have never materialized, of beginnings that never got beyond a "maybe" or an "almost."Run with it, lil'chirrens, run.
Laurence - Doctor Odd
Doctor Odd received the express written consent of Major League Baseball on Monday.
By Wednesday, Idaho was gone. Totally vanished. Nowhere to be found.
The market reacted quickly. Prices for potatoes skyrocketed. "Would you like fries with that?" was whispered only among the wealthy.
Congress held weeks of hearings, but they never did receive an adequate explanation from the baseball commissioner or Doctor Odd.
He said he was just being patriotic and trying to make Syria vanish, but his calculations were off by a bit.
What I found strange was that nobody ever asked for him to bring Idaho back.
Michele: Washed Up
They clutch and roll, ignoring the sand creeping into their clothes, the wind biting at their faces. They kiss, full of fire, and he reaches for her pants, tugs at the waistband.
A glassy wave crashes against the pier and the sound shoots a vision into her head: a capsized ship; artifacts sinking to the bottom of the ocean, trailing an SOS of bubbles that never make it to surface, an anchor settling into a bed of mud and tangled seaweed. The wave collapses, the shore sucks it back, the ocean sighs.
She untangles herself from him and walks away.
The Eschatologist: Epitaph
I almost died that day, pulled down by tangles of river weed and turbulent currents that twisted and turned me until there was no direction. No up or down, just a sensation of everywhere all around me. I saw Jim then, looking just as we did when mom threw us out of the house in the dawn hours, and we would cause no end of mischief until the fireflies danced among the oaks in twilight. I heard mom's voice going hoarse, calling us indoors for the umpteenth time. A voice that faded with Jim's face into the black of night.
Andy: If At First You Don't Succeed
He stepped from the workshop and set down his creation. The others crowded around to see, all clasped hands and raised eyebrows; would it work?
They watched as it unfolded before them. Points of light, like waking eyes, blinked on, filling the inky emptiness. Swirled strands of dust danced, coalesced, and fell into order. Chemicals reacted, became complex; patterns emerged.
It paused.
Trembled.
Collapsed into percolating sludge.
Their disappointment was palpable.
"Next one's a winner," said Gabriel. The angels nodded.
His head fell. He scraped his failure onto the ground, walked to the workshop, and closed the door behind him.
From the Comments: Jeff R.
The first time I went to the Goblin Market, I traded the memory of my first kiss for a statue of a falcon, made from purest gold, with amethyst eyes. Not the best deal I ever made, nor the worst.
The dreams and hopes of what my daughter, dead at seven, might have been, fetched me a candle that burns forever, a box full of sunsets, and a wind-up mechanical toad that catches flies.
Sometimes I wish I never found the key to Faerie's gateway. And sometimes I wonder just what I could get for that desire of my heart.
Ted: The New Gods Part One
"You grow heliotropes?" she asked, wonder in her voice.
She knew the answer. I had the look. I spent so much time tending the sun gardens inside the sun's corona that I had, well, changed. The technology that allowed us to change was still new, only four or five hundred years old. Hell, I could remember a time before there were heliotropes, when that word still only meant a kind of flower.
They sort of are flowers. They grow in the sun and can be bred to specification. My last to bear fruit sent eight ships off with the Exo-Corps.
Stacy: Les Nessman Cop Out #3
(I have mentioned that we're moving tomorrow, yes? Yes.)
"In other news, General Wallace Nasami, head of the emerging nation of Nibia, denied his government was a dictatorship, and promised free elections as soon as each citizen of the small country learned to play a musical instrument." -- Les Nessman, WKRP In Cinncinatti