Truth

The last of her story tumbled from her mouth. Seconds earlier, these words had been swarming, shoving, tearing violently for escape. Now, they drifted between the two...awkward and aimless outside the confines of her soul...waiting for him to take them in. Her fingers twitched, longing to protect them, to keep them safe, to pull them back into her heart where they had been growing for so long.

And that's when it happened. So quickly it was nearly imperceptible...his hand raised, quick and careless, to swat the words away. It was less than a second, maybe half a second, but it changed everything.

She watched him then. Really, truly saw, for the first time in years. She saw how he plucked the weakest and tiniest ones from the air - the ones who had no power alone - and stuffed them greedily into the gaping hole between the tense lines of his lips.

His teeth clamped gracelessly around that handful of sickly beings, and he was done. Thousands of the creatures hung there...glowing, sparking, dancing with the essence of her being. She had imagined that he would savor them...that he might feel the love she had for each word as his tongue pressed against them...She had thought that he might experience the years of nurturing she had given them before trusting them to the world.

Instead, he used his open hand to swipe the creation away. They plummeted to the ground with a horrific and glimmering beauty...like the tangled and glowing pieces of metal from a plane's carcass in the night sky. He stamped them out, hastily, already mangling the words he had swallowed.

As they regurgitated, fell from his mouth dead, she cried out at him...pleading for the words he had destroyed - the words she had

Flying Fish

It started slowly...complaints of frizzy hair and soggy pants-legs floated through offices and schools. Flip-flops and sandals became distant memories - lost to the sucking maw of our lawns.

April-Anne found the first one. Teetering precariously on the slime-covered porch - cold hair sending streams of salty water over her face, pruny fingers fumbling with slippery keys - she struggled to unlock her door. A huff of frustration escaped her lips as she wondered why (after so many months) she was still unused to the particular difficulty of entering her own home now that the heavy weight of water seemed to permeate the earth.

It stared up at her, its mouth moving in such a way that she might have guessed it was bleating at her...had she not been thoroughly occupied with the fluid stream of curses that spilled from her mouth at the shock - and her subsequent tumble into the soaking pool next to the glistening creature...