Scatter-shots and Oddities

     The reclusive Zoozelsox rarely emerges from it's cave like home, and only in the hours of the night when nothing else is stirring. It always wares a scarf, claiming the colours keep unexpected things from happening. The Zoozelsox does not leave tracks.

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     A women without children adopts an odd collection of discarded stuffed animals. They are repaired and tended, filled with new stuffing and love. In a fit of jealous anger her partner bundles them all into the closet. They do not like the dark.

The Secret's Keeper

     A woman has a secret, but it is not, as the people illegally searching her apartment imagine, hidden in the army of shoe boxes filed in rank under her bed. It may not even be a secret she is aware of knowing, as secrets are her business, and she keeps them like breathing. Interested parties find it difficult to determine just how much she really knows, and she uses their confusion to her advantage, pitting one against the other until there are only two left. But of course they are the most dangerous. The ones who will not simply stop at asking questions, but who will take the answers.

    I am inserted into her life like a deadly shadow. Dogging her steps and anticipating the movements of her enemies. My soul purpose is to guard the secret no one is certain she even holds. It is a balancing act on a very real edge.The next fatal visitor who comes calling finds me at the door in her place. The sharp blade he wields leaving his hand for mine as I disarm him fast enough it's as if it were by magic. A very confused assassin finds himself invited in for tea and cookies, and a chat. I pay little attention to the words they toss back and forth, instead I focus on the visual cues, watching for a sign that will require my reaction. 

     The woman has come to realize that the only way she can be safe is to share the knowledge she holds. Or convince the parties involved she actually knows nothing. As I sit watching she is in earnest negotiations to do just that. She wants this whole inconvenient incident to be over and done with as soon as possible. When assassins stop knocking at her door she can be rid of me and back to her normal routine. I cannot entirely blame her. I too wish to take my leave. There are too many secrets in this place... too many shoes.

Small Defiance

     It starts as just a spot of seeming mold on the old broken deck chair shoved in the corner of the garage. Were it something so simple, there would be no cause for alarm, but no one bothered to look closely. No one had any idea what lay in the small green blemish until it was too late, far too late.

     It continues as a patch of rust on a bike that hasn't moved in years. Long outgrown and abandoned it leans against the deck chair as if for support in its old age. The scab of sand coloured dryness eats in, spreads out, hungry and impatient. No one notices as it devours the bike they've forgotten. They'll wish they had remembered.

     It ends in the seemingly harmless puddle of water. It collects on an old warped window sash at the back of the little used garage. Within easy dripping distance of the chair and the bike, and it is this last simple thing, a drop of water, that gives rise to the end of the world as we know it.
     The mold is nothing so simple, but is actually a viscous, teaming rainforest in miniature. The rust is a desert so parched, so deadly that it renders even metal into dust. The puddle of water is the ocean, the rain, the flood. And here in this forgotten space where no one notices them, they cease being quite so small. The trees grow, the sand blows, and the water flows. First the garage is lost. By the time anyone notices, the house is gone. Before anyone takes action the block has been devoured. Before they find an effective weapon the state is gone. Before humanity can manage to unite against these most unnatural of natures invaders, the planet is lost. Or perhaps it has finally been won.