Inside the dead of winter
Curls a fiery soul
A little bear that sleeps defiant
Waiting out the cold.

Perhaps an existential crisis
Shook the universe’s mind,
And sent out blasted aftershocks
To certain human vines--

A gallop through the forest without stopping under the moon, but you don’t know how you know such a thing. You angle your neck and groan and scratch your budding antlers on the tree. They grew from your head in moments like a handshake at a stockholder meeting, in the second it takes to snatch a champagne glass from a waiter and what is a stockholder?

The shaft of sunlight through the far barn window spun the hay dust into a different kind of gold. The colour lent the old barn a sense of prestige and solemnity, like a king’s robe draped over a farmer—lifting his hollow cheeks, straightening the wrinkles on his brow.  

“The Wind has not changed its pattern since the tumble of the world. It tears across the surface, weaponizing the cold weather so no one can live in it, and then it vanishes for seven days. It brings down branches, yes. But it’s never left such marks before, like—like a beast! Why has it changed, now? What else could it do?”

“Where the Wind sleeps,” Teren said, “Is not a mystery, though.”

The house-thief strikes
When I lay the scissors down,
Vanishing them under whatever scarf
Is most forgettable.

The air stagnated in the streets. No, it rotted, like so many leaves in a compost pile. Siran grabbed her oxygen mask off her bedside table and clapped it over her mouth.

The chip salesman lurks in the dark corner of the superstore, handing out three and a half of the Product at a time.

The wolves waited with baited teeth, the leaves dripping onto the forest floor stopped mid-drop, and the little mushroom people called Caps scrunched close and still against the loam. Nothing could move under her shadow, for Bright equaled motion.

Four-year-old Selka tipped her chair back and fell for a half-second. Half of her soul poured out before she caught herself. 

You amble outside of your in-laws’ house, the one they’ve had for thirty-four years of married life, the one you’ve driven to approximately 784 times if you count all the late-night stops when you dated your now-husband in high school. The air wavers like a mirage in a desert, and this clues you in that a dream has begun.

When the Thwaites glacier thawed, the news prattled /
about how stock in plastic water bottles fell /

The exterminators wove their bags from the vodka strength of the noonday sun, killing the shadows straight off when they stuffed them in the bags. But Culver wove his bags from the strands of dawn, from when the first few beams trailed across the fields, not too bright, but just bright enough that they couldn’t slip through the stitches.

Hailey, startled, fell backwards on her rear. She was ten, and mushrooms had never deigned to talk to her before.

You’ve scribbled, “Not at this address” on the supermarket advertisements and set them back in the mailbox to send them back. You’ve even waved the mailman down to explain. He is apologetic and says it won’t happen again. It does.

She wondered if she could transform into a bear, or an ant underground, something that could burrow into the depths of the soil or rock and stay there for months in the winter, unconcerned with the cold or with cages.

Victim One: 56-year-old male Gary Beary. Balding, supervisor. Assaulted with a desk on the fourth floor of the insurance building on 10th street.

Every autumn, the billions of maple trees turned the entire surface of the 27^th moon a vibrant red. It had happened every year since the settlers of New Earth had landed 362 years ago. Except, this year, Tiradel’s trees had no leaves.

When Jan reached four years into sixty, his daughter and her son flew off into the glorious first exploration past the Milky Way to somewhere called Z-1.

Something in the way their too-small heads bobbed on their long necks stirred a primal, instinctive fear inside Georgie, like an ancestral memory passed down from a coelacanth had lit up in her brain.