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.

I have encountered Conquest /
A herald seraphim /
A harbinger of sacred fervor /
Wrapped all up in righteous sins /

Let’s talk about science fictional concepts. Imagine a Utopian world where all creatives like writers get paid fairly for their labor. 

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. 

The streetlight blinked, and Laura fell towards it. The gravity on Planet F1SR, or “Fissure,” felt like dream falling, except you never woke up from the jolt.

Living in Nebraska isn’t so bad. The straight shot highways, predictable squares of countryside, and comforting warmth of the dimpled sun all have a kind of beautiful consistency. And though the air vibrates wrong inside my gills, and I gargle salt water to keep my throat from closing; safety keeps me here.

She could see the ones that had come before her, and after, that had perched in the chair in the waiting room of the auto dealer shop. They superimposed over her body like layers of frosting on a cake, a finger here, a curly bit of hair there.

Poppy rambled along the highway, nodding to the bunches of Queen Anne’s lace on the road’s shoulder. They bobbed back to her, the legged flora goddess; she who had pert yellow lips and red limbs to fold up at night.

What if all the stars worked a 9-5 with-
out healthcare or matching 401(k)s?
Would they shine so bright or
their long light arms reach Earth?

The secret compartment in the bureau slid open with the self-assuredness of a French word pointing out its silent vowels. Libby’s jaw dropped, her lips popping into an ‘o,’ and stood there with the museum’s identifying tag in her hand for a good five seconds.

Elsie skipped over the bridge in the yard, the tiny thing constructed for rabbits and mice. She pinwheeled to a stop, then dashed back over it and told her mother about the ‘black fairies’ she’d found.

Lobsters don’t die from old age /
They just get tired of moulting and shouldering /
All the necessary sadness a being needs /
To move from shell to shell /

The whistlers wheel through the sky /
Those skeleton birds, the wind /
Playing a dirge through their bones /

Yima acquired peoples’ broken feet, stuttering hearts, and even little things like their split ends and displayed them on her wall. Once collected and dead, they morphed into their true form of a curse, a clawed thing.

The tally-marked stop sign waited at the top of the Frankfurt street hill. Six tally marks. Police had tried cleaning them off and had even replaced the stop sign at one point, but the marks always reappeared.

The cicadas sizzled in the summer afternoon, spiraling in an erratic murmuration through the yard, and Fen dropped her sidewalk chalk to cover her ears.

Cover your ears, child /
Hear only the trees now /

The sky rotated into a yellow-green, the kind where the sun strove to shine through. Cindy stayed out in the yard. Her son texted hide in the basement! A siren wailed through the empty street. But Cindy waited. 

Rory slogged through the field of plastic, swinging her metal detector like a divining rod. If she dug up just a dollar fifty more in change, she could buy a full week’s worth of rations instead of three days.

For our part, we love being discovered. Frieda matches us with the perfect reader, that one who holds us with interest and turns our pages with excitement. Sometimes, that person comes back to read us again, and again — for, of course, they can’t take us out of the café.