A successful woman is convinced a female lead marriage is the best path forward and as her career is taking off, her unemployed husband is expected to fill traditional female roles like homemaker and nursing mother. In this chapter...It's a new day and Julia wants to have an open and honest discussion with Eric about where they're going. Is it too late to go back?

My week as a mermaid continues: My young human friend and I surfaced and sat on a rock, where we could talk without having to use her underwater message pad. I was hoping she might start making sense now, but Valerie's strange stories were growing progressively stranger: Reagan and Kennedy on Mount Rushmore... A transsexual woman giving birth... Peace in Iraq but a war in Antarctica...

I might have decided that she just had a wild imagination, except she also had all this impossible hardware---like the artificial gill she'd been breathing underwater with---which had me wondering if I'd somehow wandered into an alternate universe. Given the kind of week I'd been having this didn't seem like such a crazy notion, but these mysteries had a different explanation that I would eventually discover. It was just a matter of time...

The first thing every mermaid learns is that if you see a human you're supposed to swim away as fast as you can. But the girl in the pink wetsuit was right here in front of me, and there was no way she would think she'd been mistaken about seeing me. My best recourse seemed to be to convince her not to tell anyone about meeting me, and as we talked (or rather I talked, while she typed her words on her neat little electronic message pad) this seemed to be working. But there were things Valerie was telling me here that made absolutely no sense. Either this girl was crazy or the whole universe was. Given the kind of week I'd had, my money was on it being the universe that had gone...

Today my sister decided to take me landlubbing, which the mermaid equivalent of the human sport of snorkeling- a low tech way to see all the pretty sights of a world that isn't your own. Except that instead of gliding almost effortlessly along through the water, our version has the tortoise-like pace of crawling + squirming over the ground + through the brush, and in some places you're basically rock climbing without feet. It isn't easy. But the little island Anemone had brought me to was so breathtakingly gorgeous it made it all worth it. It had everything you'd hope to find on a tropical isle- from coconut palms to waterfalls. And being uninhabited we could explore it all without running into any humans...

Or so we thought. Until that big white boat pulled into our perfect island's perfect bay, and things got super intense as our pleasant outing turned into a desperate game of hide and seek.

Our pleasant dinner had degenerated into a loud fight between my mermaid sister & our mom; Anee yelling, “How can you keep harping about how awful land people are if you never even met one?!”

Mom stated flatly: “I know all I need to about them.”

“You think you do, but Daddy liked humans. And he had experiences with them, not just a bunch of ignorant bigotry!”

“I've had dealings with humans before.”

“When? When was this?! I've heard all your stories and you never mentioned-”

“I prefer not to discuss it.”

"Now there's a surprise! 'Ewww, it's unpleasant! Let's not discuss it!'" mocked Anemone. She kept goading Mom, relentlessly, stopping just short of calling her a goddamn liar: “No Mom, I wanna hear this! Tell us! Tell us about your encounter with the horrible evil hewwww-mons-”

“I FELL IN LOVE WITH ONE!” roared the Queen, slamming her fists down on the table.

She froze there, stunned; like she'd just blurted out a secret she'd intended to take to the grave with her. Then she sighed, composed herself + told us her story...

“Mom said supper’s almost ready, but I think I’ve got time to scrub the toilets...”

 

“Already?”

 

She shrugged. “They’ve been used several times since this morning. And Craig has terrible aim.”

“This name origin stuff isn’t as helpful as I thought it might be. About half of the names seem to mean ‘good’ or ‘pretty’ and it’s one thing for parents to name their precious newborn something like that, but it would be arrogant for me to call myself ‘Agatha’ or ‘Jolie’ or whatever. Not that I like the sound of ‘Agatha’ anyway, but, you know.”

“The usual punishments don’t work,” Steve said. “No sense giving her extra chores when she’s already doing way more than her share, or grounding her when she doesn’t want to go anywhere and she’s quit playing games or watching TV on her own. I said we should stop her from cleaning something, but —”

“Seriously, the street gang of Techno-Mage wannabes? That Union? They were kindehackers, as I recall, more into the flash and fun than real running. How the hell could they be behind this and didn’t they vanish about ten years ago?

“They did vanish about ten years ago. The Union I knew couldn’t be behind this but the Union I knew is gone, replaced by street ghosts and phantom whispers of unstoppable Runners and assassins, wraiths in the system so deadly they scared the megacorps and world governments.”

“Come on, Mary. I saw some of those kids with their tophats and steampunk crap, Victorian-era costumes. There is no way they could be remotely involved in this. The kind of tech this body has? If the corps and govs can’t field this shit than how could a former street gang?”

“Understand that what I’m about to tell you is what I’ve heard from people I consider pretty reliable sources, people that have since gone tits up or vanished completely, you copy? Someone is covering their tracks hardcore.”

I looked at her. “If they’re that hardcore how come you’re still drawing breath?”

“Simple: I used to be one of them.”

Andrew McKenzie is a junior in highschool when a strange incident sweeps the world. In the aftermath Andrew is left confused and unsure what's happening to him as he slowly begins to notice changes. How we he and his family find the silver lining?

Andrew McKenzie is a junior in highschool when a strange incident sweeps the world. In the aftermath Andrew is left confused and unsure what's happening to him as he slowly begins to notice changes. How we he and his family find the silver lining?

“Jack, it’s Mindy. Tim has — gone through a Twist. You promised you’d come if — when — it happened...”

 

“I’ll be there.”

Andrew McKenzie is a junior in highschool when a strange incident sweeps the world. In the aftermath Andrew is left confused and unsure what's happening to him as he slowly begins to notice changes.

Andrew McKenzie is a junior in highschool when a strange incident sweeps the world. In the aftermath Andrew is left confused and unsure what's happening to him as he slowly begins to notice changes.

Way back in another life---before I was kidnapped by pirates and jumped overboard in the dead of night and almost drowned but got turned into a mermaid by a genie from a bottle---my friend Pepper used to say how I was lucky to not have any siblings. Every visit, texting or phone call had at least one epic tale about the latest fight with her sister or how the little brat would borrow Pepper's things without asking, and then lose them or just leave them laying somewhere half wrecked...

But I could never quite believe that having a sister like Ginger wasn't good at least as often as it was bad. After being an only child for all my life, being twins with a mermaid princess was.... WoNDeRfuL!!!!

Maybe if Anemone and I had grown up together it wouldn't seem so special, but I was too new to this life to take any part of it for granted. It was hard to feel like there was anything worth fighting about when just brushing my long soft golden hair put me on a total high, if I wasn't already on one from having woke up in my clam shell bed that morning to discover: “Yep, still a princess!”

Anemone had been an only child until now too, and she was loving us being sisters as much as I was. We went everywhere and did everything together, and all the ocean's dolphins and whales and sea turtles, the fish, the stars, the shrimps and lobsters (but not so much the crabs...) and even the unbelievably stupid sponges were our friends.

71 year old John Dodge, retired military, now sits in a nursing home, his body riddled with cancer, waiting on the grim reaper to come for him when he is given another option.

“Good. You're awake,” said a girl's voice.

“Huh? Whah?” I burbled groggily at the pretty fish-girl I saw hovering in front of me. She looked about sixteen and was about the cutest girl I'd ever seen. Definitely the cutest mermaid.

I was in a beach chair in the seashell castle's courtyard. My legs felt weird and fat and there was something sitting on my chest. She said, “Please don't panic, but in order to save your life we had to-”

Of course when she said don't panic like that it's exactly what I did do, but only for a second. I looked down and saw what was on my chest. It was my chest. Beneath these two rather impressive breasts my waist narrowed and then flared out into girlish hips that were covered in beautiful jade green scales, which continued down the long sleek shiny tail I now had for legs. I wagged it back + forth experimentally. And this stuff floating around my face wasn't some kind of seaweed but my hair, super long and shimmering like gold.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God,” was all I could say. “Oh my God! My God! My God!”

This summer vacation was turning out to be the strangest week of my life. Or maybe of anyone's...

71 year old John Dodge, retired military, now sits in a nursing home, his body riddled with cancer, waiting on the grim reaper to come for him when he is given another option.

Where does one person end and another begin? Usually not a difficult question to answer as each mind is confined to the brain it inhabits, but as our ingenuity enables us to overcome the barriers nature would impose on us, so we discover there are unforeseen consequences.

Nietzsche famously said that when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. I'm not sure this is what he meant by it, but it fits. Physics predicts that you can't observe something without changing it, and as you exert an influence on it, so it responds by exerting one on you.

Not in any way a Valentines story, but it's finished, so it might as well go up.

Sparrow sat at a table in the cafeteria reading the girl’s diary. She was quite the information gatherer. If the diary was anything to be believed, Kiranim grew up in another world. Homeless but still finding a purpose in life. This thing call Free Running. Which, up till now, kept her safe and out of trouble. This Jeril seemed to have a positive effect on her. The more she read, the more engrossed in the girl she became. Until the point she didn’t notice Hawk behind her.
“You’re really into that diary.” Hawk announced his presence, causing sparrow to jump. “Sorry.”

Here is another older story I thought I'd knock the dust off of.

******

"You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of the imagination. Next stop: THE TWILIGHT ZONE."
- Rod Serling

Chris Blake had one wish, to appear on stage in front of a large crowd and experience the thrill of their applause and adoration. Chris is about to find out what happens, when you open the door to... THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

He wanted stardom, and headed west with Hollywood as his destination. Hoping all of time and money spent on singing, piano and acting lessons would surely pay off. Confidant of his abilities, he decided that the time was right for the move.

Motoring along a dusty back-road, Chris happened to glance down into a small tree lined valley and spied what looked like an old town. His curiosity being what it was, he began to look for a way down into the well hidden little town.