Real Life

The Thunderstorm

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She caught me looking out the window.

All around us, everyone else seemed totally focused on the moment, the dance, the thumping bass music pumping out of the cheap, slightly tinny speakers. It was enough – almost – to drown out the sounds of an angry Nature from outside the hall, her breath howling as she mustered up her weapons to break the tenuous peace with the surface below.

She saw me looking out the window, listening less to the female singer shouting about how she needed to get up on the dance floor and more to the rolling thunder, approaching like the pounding of hooves from an onrushing stampede. She reached out, caught at my hand.

I looked up, surprised and ready to defend myself – but she just smiled, tugged me away from the dance and the other people, the sea of humanity. She led gently, but it was enough to encourage me to follow. Continue reading →

The first romance convention – Romanti-Con!

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I stood in the midst of the chaos, at the eye of the storm. “Sorry, can you repeat the question?” I asked the reporter standing next to me.

She didn’t seem to mind, and both of us paused for a second as a very toned and muscled man passed by, dressed in little more than a white loincloth and with a spray-painted gold bow and arrow set slung over his shoulder.

“Er, right,” the reporter said after another minute. “So, how did you decide on launching this whole, er…”

“Convention,” I filled in. Continue reading →

I have a friend I’ve never met.

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Hey, uh, you mind if I share your seat with you? Bus is crowded this morning, and I’ve got, like, 30 stops until mine.

Thanks. Sorry about the bag.

What? No, I don’t have a phone charger. I usually charge mine at the office. Sorry.

Cute? Who?

Oh, on my Facebook. Here, let me scroll back up – her? Yeah, she is kind of cute, I guess. It’s a weird story with her, though. I’ve never actually met her, or really talked to her at all. But we’re friends.

No, it doesn’t really make sense. But it’s sort of an interesting story. If you don’t mind listening. I mean, if you’d rather just go to sleep for the rest of the bus ride-

Okay, I’ll tell it. Continue reading →

“Don’t dig here.”

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“No, sah. Not here.”

Frowning, I glanced over at Attenib. I’d heard a wobble in the man’s voice that I didn’t recognize. He didn’t sound quite like himself.

“Atten, everything okay?” I asked in a lowered tone, taking a step closer to him. Damnable insects swooped down at my face, biting and stinging. I managed to smack one, and watched with vicious satisfaction as it slammed into a nearby tree trunk and then dropped, stunned, to the forest floor.

I returned my attention back to my guide. After years alongside Attenib, I knew his moods well, recognized the minor twitches of the muscles beneath his nut-brown skin. I’d worked with him long enough to trust in his uncanny ability to know just where to dig.

But now, today, he looked nervous, pale despite his leathery, tanned hide. And when he looked back at me, I saw a glint of unexpected emotion in his eyes.

Fear. Continue reading →

They’re “bear goggles”, not “beer goggles”…

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I picked up the cheap-looking pair of glasses from the bar’s countertop, turning them over in my hands. “And what are they, again?” I asked.

“Beer goggles!” replied Dave, standing behind the bar and beaming back at me. “Great idea, see? And they’ve got the bar name on the side, so we can hand them out as a promotion!”

“Well, they do have the name, I guess,” I admitted, trying not to hurt the guy’s feelings. “But they also don’t say ‘beer goggles’ on them, Dave.”

“Yeah, they do! I got it printed on the other side. One side says ‘Dave’s bar’, and the other one says ‘genuine beer goggles’! Isn’t it clever?”

I turned the pair of glasses around, holding them out to him. “Bear goggles, Dave.” Continue reading →

What if aliens didn’t land in the first world?

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“To this day, there’s still arguments about how they chose their landing site. I mean, clearly, we can throw out the whole mumbo-jumbo schtick about the aliens listening in on our television broadcasts. If they’d been listening, they would’ve just come crashing down in the middle of Times Square.”

“Hell, if they did that, it’d probably take hours before anyone even noticed them. Someone would toss spare change at their spaceship. Now that would be a hell of a welcome to Earth.”

“Whole thing’s immaterial, now. They chose where they did, and now we all have to deal with the consequences.” Continue reading →

Apocalypse Love Story, Part III

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Link to Part I.

Link to Part II.

This time, Elizabeth must have known that I was chasing her. Her trail got harder to follow; she even left Goldy behind at one point in a stable, selling her off to some no-good breeder that looked at her like a piece of damn meat.

Needless to say, I got my horse back.

But I kept on tracing her. Elizabeth. I couldn’t get her out of my head, couldn’t shake that tug of her. Every time I thought about giving up the chase, I just sensed her out there, and knew, somehow, she needed my help.

Damn woman led me all the way to Boston before I found her. Continue reading →

The CIA’s first brain swap…

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This, Jimmy Brodes thought miserably to himself, was really bad.

Like, so bad. Like, worse than he even imagined that getting fired would be, which – until recently – had been up there in his list of top fears. Now, however, it barely even made the list.

His fingers trembling, Brodes ran through that list again. Jameson Brodes’ Top Ten Emotions of the Moment – all fears, as usual – included: Continue reading →

“We started dating thanks to Autocorrect…”

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I remember this feeling from the very first time that I got onto a rollercoaster. The train slowly made its way up the first, biggest hill, and I felt my stomach being left further and further behind. With each foot that we ratcheted along, I knew with more and more certainty that I’d made a massive mistake. I could see the drop-off, the disaster, growing closer-

-and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

Now, sitting in my bed and staring at my phone’s glowing screen in the darkness, I felt that same pit opening up in my stomach, that same sense of disaster.

“Oh, shit,” I murmured to myself. Then again, louder: “Shit! Shit!” Continue reading →

I’m moving!

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That’s right!  Not that the blog is moving, but I am moving, out in the real world!  The physical world.  The world outside the internet.

I’m not moving far – just across town – but most of my stuff is currently stored away in boxes.  I’ve got approximately 48 hours to move the contents of a two bedroom apartment, packed into the space of a one bedroom apartment, into a different apartment.

I feel like I’ve been saying the word apartment too much.  Apartment. A part mint.  Like an entire building – but only part of it.

You might be able to tell that my thoughts are a little scattered at the moment. Continue reading →