010

   Joel stared, wide-eyed, at the screen. He could not believe that Sandra had written such a provocatively flirtatious message to ... him. Not that he considered himself undeserving of female attention - he just wasn't used to it. He went to bed wide awake, and completely uninterested in sleeping. His thoughts swam circles around the sensual image of her following him into a dark room, racing through his brain like a thundering river current. He couldn't resist the urge to gratify himself in the intoxication of such a fantasy. After half an hour of unparalleled erotic fascination, he was exhausted enough to go to fall asleep, certain that his dreams would hang on her sexy, unanticipated comment.

009

   But that would now be impossible. In frenzied desperation Loretta flung herself down the hillside. As she tumbled and rolled, bits of grass and a thin coating of dark soil accumulated on her rotund form, and by the time she had traveled barely fifty feet she resembled a green, forested planetoid hurtling through space.
   Along the way she overtook the old Labrador, who was sprinting down the steep slope, narrowly avoiding a disastrous collision with him by launching her heavy body away from the dog. This would ultimately prove to behoove her, as she managed with this new trajectory to avoid hitting the small stand of spruce at the bottom of the hill. The ground leveled back out, and her catastrophic (but lifesaving) tumble approached its terminus. There, in the middle of the dusty lane, and under the frantic attention of the startled Lab, she came to a stop, sore and bewildered.

008

   He caught it, but when he curled his fingers to seize it he turned the blade toward his palm. It gashed across the  meat of his thumb, and deeply. He raised his hand quickly in pain, dropping the knife as he did so, and surveyed the wound. It bled steadily, and several trickles of red ran down his wrist and forearm. It was beautiful.
   Suddenly it was all very real. It was happening. No longer an image suspended in his dark, cloudy imagination. No longer a last resort, or a hypothetical. No longer a threat. It was time for his escape. He picked up the knife again, in his shaky, but unwounded, left hand. Stepping into the bathtub, he sat down and began searching his right hand and arm for the blood vessel that looked largest. Unsure which one to target he resolved to play it safe and cut vertically all the way down the inside of his forearm.
   The point of the knife was hard - harder than the unfeeling words echoing in his memory: Freak. Faggot. Loser. Idiot. Weird. Creepy. The entry of the tip into his skin made him wince and jump, and he ultimately stuck himself three times attempting to begin the incision. This hurt enough to make him falter, and drop the knife again. It lay benignly in the bottom of the tub as he began to sob.
   He had failed. It hurt too much - he couldn't hold the knife steady. And the relatively small cut he already had was bleeding very slowly now. He knew immediately that he wasn't going anywhere. That was worst of all. He had one way out and he couldn't even do it. The perfect failure. It was with this realization that he remembered his parents. The only people that ever really loved him. They thought he was in Breckenridge for the weekend, skiing. He couldn't do this to them.
   The 911 call began with eight feeble, trembling words: "I need help ... I'm bleeding. But I'm alive."

007

   As the end credits of "From Russia With Love" rolled lazily up his TV screen, David snored abrasively in the otherwise quiet dorm room. The sound was coarse, like a cinder block dragged across an expanded steel grate, if you can imagine that. Even if you can't, that's how it was. Loud is one thing, but this was another - in fact, such was the snarl that it completely covered the sound of David's alarm, which had been going off for fifty-six minutes.
   In Room 211b, Professor Dorothea Dix was passing out the midterm exam for her Etymology class. Each was unique, and printed with the name of each respective student. As she came to the row David Mosser customarily sat in, and drew from the stack his exam sheet, she looked to his usual seat, then down the row, then around the room. David was nowhere to be seen. Through the murmur of the classroom a low suggestion of a sound echoed in her mind, as sounds sometimes did. Was it ... the James Bond theme?

006

   Roger ran blindly through the blustering storm. Newspapers, flower petals, posters, hats, and every sort of airborne flotsam swirled and flew past his head as he ran, squinting to see through the torrent. It is said that the odds of a hurricane striking on a given person's birthday are astronomical, and of this Roger had no doubt. In his life things had always had a way of surprising him. But he would have it no other way. He loved the suspense. However, there were certain events (such as this latest development) that in his heart were never relished or welcomed.
   Halfway down Ruxton Avenue he passed the old grocery store where he had met his late wife, so many years ago. She was a pretty little thing then, dressed sensibly but fashionably no matter where she went or when, and just as petite as a china doll. Once on a fishing trip to Lake Francese, he had a wonderful laugh when he saw how much their little rowboat listed toward the sight he sat on, and he suggested that she ought to gain some weight to balance out the little vessel. Little did he know to what extent she would eventually take his advice.

005

   Flor stood silently in the the vast, empty nave, waiting to hear a saving sound in the unbearable silence. "Speak to me, Father," she whispered. The vaulted stone space was completely still, save for the flowing red curtains which hung behind the pulpit, from the towering baroque apse. She cast her eyes up the gilded wall to the image of Christ, and studied his eyes. They were sad eyes, reflective but deep as if filled with water, and laden with the ponderous burden of responsibility. She would never have thought it before, but how like her own struggle seemed el Salvador's now. How familiar his heavy load was to her woeful mind. She prayed.
   "Padre Celestial, Dios, dame fuerzas, por favor," she began in Spanish, as her mother had so many times in her childhood. Unable to remember enough of her mother's language, she carried on mostly in her father's and her country's language, as she always did: "There is so much pain, Padre. It feels like fire - fire in my lungs. Mi viaje ... my journey is not complete. I have not found the truth. I have not awoken the people, as you have asked me. Please, Dios. Give to me the will to do what I must, before the sickness sends me to you, my work unfinished."
   The twitter of a sparrow on the windowsill was the only reply she would hear in the tacit old cathedral. A gentle draft from somewhere swayed the red curtains above the dais where she half-knelt, half-lay. As the bells a hundred feet above rang for evening mass, a violent cough seized her, and she remained on the granite steps for several minutes, hacking and gasping vigorously. As she pulled the hankerchief from her face, she thought she observed in the delicate droplets of blood the shape of a cross, and looked once again at Christ. 
   "Gracias, Dios mio," she whispered.

004

   It was nearly five thirty before Karl was ready to depart. He couldn't find the binoculars, but after half an hour of looking for them he resolved to carry on without. His prey was easy enough to find if one knew where to look, and one could expect to get fairly close to the game with little danger of spooking it. Taking up his backpack, lunchbox, and various field equipment, including a new piece he acquired for long shots, he set out.
   After a hike of about four miles, he found a likely spot and prepared to settle in. Spying a suitable tree in which a proper stand could be built, he collected the necessary branches and foliage and built a quick shelter high in its branches. Then he climbed up with his gear and began taking the lay of the land from his perch. It was a fine morning, sunny and warm. Casting his eyes several hundred feet down the hillside, he beheld a familiar landscape - the clean, golden sand of Madre Elena Beach.
   It would not be long until his object wandered onto the scene, so he quickly assembled his newly acquired instrument, a Canon 5D with a telephoto lens. He waited for nearly forty minutes, eye held close to the viewfinder, before at last the game was afoot. Arriving via the lagoon, around the small cape to the south, came a pristine, humming forty-footer, chugging along in the gentle waves. And on its bow, basking in the loving sun, was a gloriously nude Heidi Klum, accompanied by friends and entourage.
   Click.

003

   Like chariots charging into an invisible battle, the cars thundered in scores down the freeway, whooshing past Jennifer's first-floor window all through each night. For several weeks after she moved in, she made the effort to complain about the noise, but eventually resigned to the truth that there was nothing she could do to change it.
   Patrick called one Sunday afternoon, inviting her to attend some sort of concert at the Marquis Amphitheater. It was a metal band called Unkle, and while she was sure they probably raised a damnable din like every other metal band, it was nonetheless preferable to the unrelenting noise of the traffic. Plus, she liked Patrick, his taste in music notwithstanding.

002

   The rain slowed to a halt, and Alan was left alone with the sounds of the room. The respirator: whish - click - whoosh. The EKG - beep, beep. The dull hum of the machinery's cooling fans. And the delicate wheezing of his wife's lungs, heard  even through the chest tube and mask. Her hand had not moved in four minutes.
   Inside Alan's chest, a pain not unlike the feeling of being crushed under a stone was building. It was near the point of breaking his sternum in two, he thought. A harsh sting in the back of his throat turned into a tremendous choking pressure, and his vision blurred through swelling tears. In the time it took for the first tear to roll from the corner of his eye to his trembling upper lip, her heart beat for the last time.
   It cannot be known when the last time was that a man cried so. It was like dying himself and being born again instantly, into a world of tortured solitude. Suddenly he was alone, and he no longer knew happiness, hope, or love. He had lost everything that he was, and now was nothing he could identify. Lost to the lucid agony of tears, and without himself, Alan ceased to be.

001

   David knew there was no sense in staying. His family was dead, the village burned to the ground. There was nothing for him there. He mounted Churchhill and rode quickly down the old gravel road to the southwest, seeking to survey the damage to the rest of the countryside.
   On the road he passed a small child walking along a stream, singing a nursery song and picking flowers -  as blithe and pacific a scene as he could imagine. Could it be that the attack was all in his head? Surely such a bombardment would have roused the whole of England, if it were real. But is was real. He saw it happen. He saw the fighters come screaming down out of the clouds and lay into the little town like hungry dogs. He watched his family, his friends, everyone he knew die. He had not imagined it.
   But he knew, as much as the world gave him evidence to the contrary, that he had.