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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kisa wrapped her scarf around herself and folded her knees up against the window. The daytime roared outside like an endless fire, but the lights were coming soon. The black lights.

Every Tuesday they saunter up next to our chicken coop, mustaches twitching in unison, and blast the house full of holes. They always seem surprised when no bodies are there to pile in a heap in the yard because we knew they were coming and are down by the river. Pisses the chickens off to no end, of course.

It's the loudest on windy days. In the spring, when the temperatures swing in Nebraska from 34 to 80 in a day, the wind gusts roar up 50 mph. On those days, the fan squeals like a newborn tyrannosaurus rex. 

Dawn pressed his lips to the horizon and Sky blushed like a schoolgirl. All pink and pastel, she twirled her birds up into the winds.

Panic Attack: WAKE UP THERE’S A BEAR

Me: what no there’s not

Panic Attack: BEARS EVERYWHERE

A swarm of moths, not butterflies—not yellow sunny-sweet nerves, but a gray chill of disquiet—swarmed through her.

The constellation wrapping her torso—Tapez, the Winged Warrioress—flared crisp and bright through her clothes in the darkness of the late evening.

Luce wiped sweat from her eyes. Her knees hurt from kneeling on the skyroof, nailing shingles where the clouds had fallen through.

Lir tapped a rhythm on her leg, reading her magazine on extraterrestrial plants. The plastic rose hanging from her mirror redirected the sunlight, creating a pink gleam on her cheek.

My skin crawled off me onto the washing room’s tile floor, then skittered up the wall.

Nimia pulled her body along the underground tunnel with her muscled arms, one grip at a time. She passed the pods where other Pullers, like herself, worked, their hands plugged into the company interface.

I crossed my arms over my book, the sidewalk cool against my thighs. The emerging summer evening shimmered with a morse code of fireflies, and the orange sunlight smelled like watermelon at the height of sweetness. A perfect bookend to the day if Ranas would just leave me alone.

We point at a field of cows as we pass and say “Cows,” for as everyone knows, the bovine population has a deal with all travelers.