[#048] Last Requests

Imagine my shock when the old man pulled his reeking, dirty cap down low over his face, plopped down next to me, and whispered "Got any last requests?"

I glanced around at the other folk on the bus. Our closest neighbor sat a few seats back, staring out the window with the blank expression of a man used up. Behind him sat a pair of children fighting over a tablet, and their mother sat chatting with a group of people in the back.

I turned back to the gross stranger and studied the way his ratty windbreaker closed across his chest. A decade working private security made it hard to take a personal threat seriously, at least when made by a man half my size and twice my age with no hint of a weapon. Still, his sheer gall took me by surprise, and I had to ask:

"What's your deal? You just hop on the bus and drop your crazy cards on someone for fare?"

He angled his head down, and all I could see beneath the brim of his hat were thin lips pulling back to reveal a row of yellowed, nasty teeth spotted black near the gum line. I drew back involuntarily when he opened up to speak again and I realized the stench of decay rose not from his sooted clothes but from his breath.

"Everybody gets one last wish before they die," he said. "Go ahead."

He didn't look like he could really hurt anybody. I should have called the cops right there, but the thought of him pulling this crap on some naive kid or something on another day and another bus pissed me off so much I had to speak.

"What are you going to do? You got something folded up under those pencil arms you're going to stick me with?"

The old man's smile faltered. He glanced at the cracked face of his old watch and sighed. "You know, I try so hard to help you little shits and I never get any respect for it. I'm running out of time now, and you just blew your shot."

He began to rise, and I instinctively grabbed his wrist. Every hair on his arm seemed to bristle at once, and I found myself letting go and leaping back in my seat when something rough and ropey rippled visibly beneath the flesh of his arm.

The stranger sneered and stood, pacing back to the depressed man and slumping into the seat next to him. For once I had no idea what to do or say, and I could only watch him whisper in the poor guy's ear. I craned my neck to listen as the new victim's head swung slowly in the old man's direction, and I heard him say: *"Just make it quick."*

"Finally," said the old man. "One I can do." He waved a hand in the air and pointed towards the front of the bus.

I glanced over just in time to see the truck speeding head-on toward us.

[#047] Sometimes They Don't Follow Him

I wish I were as brave as Master.

He walks right through them sometimes, like he doesn't even see them. Sometimes they'll hang above him all night while he sleeps, dripping claws and eyes and all, just waiting for him to notice. He turns over, sliding his cheek across the tip of one of their poison nails, and then he'll wake up in the morning and pretend it was a bug bite.

But the worst is when he leaves. I start to whine every time he grabs that coffee cup and the little stick he puts in his computer, and he just scratches my ears and heads up to his office. I try to tell him they're behind him, above him, clutching to the wall, but he just won't listen. And sometimes, when he leaves, they don't follow him.

Sometimes they climb down the wall and stare at me for hours, like they're punishing me for warning him. He has to notice on his own, I guess. I've tried to take a cue from him and just pretend I can't see them, but now and then I'll still catch myself watching their corner of the living room.

Good thing he remembers to act like he can't see them. I wish I were as brave as Master.

And I wish he wouldn't leave me alone with them for so long.

[#046] Whirling Lights

Whirling light and cotton candy stained the night blue and pink above the boardwalk. The music of the carousel and the clanking of the coaster anchored to the cove meshed into a siren song of shouts and laughter echoing through the beachside park, and every face passing under the entrance marquee lit up with happiness found or anticipated.

But that was memory now. Only ghosts tread the planks of the boardwalk tonight.

Legends always layered over the Baywalk Bonanza park: Rumors of death on the ferris wheel or monsters swimming under the Tunnel of Love, stories of kids who disappeared from the mirror maze inside the Paladin's Castle funhouse, sinister yet dubious gossip about the old fortune teller... These were the trails still walked in the park by echoes in the schoolyards and whispers in the taverns.

Some say the Bonanza still lives late at night, when the last light dims over Main Street and the last window shutters on Clyde. Adults pretend they don't hear it, but kids who live near the edge of the sand still sit up late at their windows pressing ears to the glass and listening to the music pouring in from the beach and wondering...

Who runs the machines at night? Who rides them? Who's voice is that we hear on the wind, whipping through the sky on the Whirlpool coaster or dropping from the top of the Vertigo Tower with a mouthful of shock and joy? Who's popping corn on the walk if nobody goes to the old Bonanza anymore?

And every now and then someone fed up with the lies will pull up their window, climb down into the street, and walk out to let the park swallow them up. Parents stand at the gates the night after and watch for them, listening for their laughter in the spinning gears of the Ferris wheel or the roller coaster.

But they're never seen again.

Until the day the lights came on before dusk, and the wheels spun up and the coaster roared and all of us could see it from the crowd in front of City Hall. Scents of cotton candy and buttered popcorn and pizza filled the air as we gathered before the gates of the Baywalk Bonanza, brothers and sisters and parents of the vanished all staring at each other and yearning for the temptations of the boardwalk and our missing children, pleading with ourselves and with each other:

Do we wait and see if they return? Or do we run ahead and join them in mystery?

[#045] Woke up in the Stars

My eyes froze shut ages ago, but I can feel it all around me: The endless, frozen void of our solar system, remnants of an age before the great silence. I slept on a rock spinning through the cloud of debris I used to call home, long before the last ship blew. I haven't moved because there's nowhere to go. I haven't moved since the end began.

I was thirteen years old when a horse trampled my grandfather in the meadow behind our barn. He struggled for days, hooked up to all kinds of machines that just couldn't keep him alive the way his organs did. In the end, the doctors decided he was too old to heal, and they took the machines away. I stared up into the sky that night and wished on the brightest star that I would never die, no matter what.

Later I turned fourteen, and twenty, and thirty after that, but I never looked a single day older. My ninety-second birthday saw the dawn of a new era of  interstellar warfare, and my hundred-and-third saw the dusk.

After that, it was just me. I lay on one of millions of rocks swirling in the silence where the Earth stood, and I waited for absolutely nothing. Nobody ever came for me, because nobody else survived. No aliens ever showed to pick up the pieces or finish me off. The sun is burning darker every year, and soon even that will leave me. And then...

And then nothing will remain except for me, drifting through space for thousands, millions, billions of years, alone.

Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Oh well. At least I still have my health.

[#044] The Door at the End of the Street

Nobody else screamed when the door suddenly appeared in the air between 221 and 223 East Baxter Street. A few people turned at looked at me, and my brother scooted quickly down the bench to get away, but the noise of the town's Independence Day parade and the brass band playing on the pavilion a block away all served to drown me out in a wall of sound.

People near me turned back to the show, and I was left alone with a mystery just a hundred yards away.

The cherry red door stood straight up in a frame of some dark, expensive wood. It wore a polished brass knob and a matching knocker shaped like the face of a snarling gargoyle, looking for the world like the front door of some renovated Gothic house minus the fact that it bore no locks.

The crowd roared when the varsity football team charged down the street around a parade float teeming with cheerleaders. Not even my brother noticed when I slipped from the bleachers and stepped into the street, darting around gleaming helmets and leaping over barricades. I thought at least the cop standing on the other side would stop me, but I ceased to exist as soon as I chose to engage the door.

I reached it in a matter of minutes, and I pondered my options a moment more. Nothing special stood behind it, yet a cold draft seemed to pour out around the frame. The salty reek of fish and ocean waves filled my lungs as I drew closer, and I found myself freezing up as I reached for the knob.

A strange door had appeared in the middle of a parade that only I could see. Even if I could open it, did I have that right? What lay on the other side? What came to visit my little town and what were they here to do?

Could I live with myself if I didn't try to find out?

The high that day was 93 degrees, but the metal handle felt like it had been submerged in ice. I wrapped my fingers around it and shivered, and I braced myself...

Just as something knocked from the other side.