Right at the End of the Party.

I looked up to the grim hollow light that topped the hill: the last shot of cannon and a black throat of silence. Around me were corpses, 2,000 head, just tumbling along down the slope like balls of red ice marbling away. All dead, my friends rolled past. I threw down my pen knife and swore, never again. Never.

A dog showed up with a dumb lolling tongue, and it led me to Jesus who was astride a gay mare. I fell to the ground and slaughtered the thing to a spigot of blood. The birthday party had ended.

A heist's close.

Simon got down on all fours and started barking, just like the man told him to. He barked at the girl who had been running the cash register; she was affecting a soft, starry mew interspersed with jagged hisses. The man emitted a little stone of a laugh as he watched the pair in the aisle. Wave a gun around, Simon thought, and you can turn people into any kind of animal you want.

Last Days of the Valley?

And looking up from the field, across the hill, there came to the valley and new sight: a long line of giant gorillas, down from the mountain at last to feed. Tam watched them as the entered the village and began picking up women and cattle. The days were new, and short, and she felt a pain in her chest; the dreaded Nights of Banana had begun once more.

In the Days of Captain Osterparks

The captain raises his glass and takes a sip, then spits his wine all over the table. “This is poisoned!” He cries.

The first mate rushes up. “Poisoned, sir? How do you know?”

The captain throws the glass to the floor. “Because it tastes the same as it did yesterday when I put poison in it to experience the flavor first-hand!” He shouts triumphantly. He knows he has outsmarted someone, listening somewhere, but in his shining moment, when he expects his crew to cheer, his only prize is a sea of blank stares.

Night at Parkapus Hill.

“My god!” the doctor shouts. “It’s breathing!”

Everybody in the emergency room turns to look. In shock, they watch as the tortillas and cheese begin a steady expansion and contraction. The quesadilla is breathing, and God only knows what it will do next.

Derek wins?

Derek narrowed his eyes. This was it. He felt it: his moment of truth, of glory. He gripped the peg, steeling his nerves. “B-8,” he said.

Alma slumped, deflated. “Christ. That’s it,” she said. She looked out the window and the squirrels in the trees looked defeated too. A long line of losers, stretching back through the history of walnuts and oaks and hibernations. “You sunk my battleship,” she muttered.

Derek stood, triumphant, and slapped Alma in the face, as hard as he could. She took the blow in silence.

“That’s for Louie,” he said, and kicked the table over, spilling pegs and plastic ships everywhere. “This is for all the Louies." Later, much later, years even, when he thought about it, the scene had changed; he recalled Alma shaking with anger, red, whistling like a tea kettle.

A mysterious ending...

Janice sat there, clutching the opened gift. "It's a hairdryer," she said to Peter. "I got a hairdryer."

"Well that's not so bad. You're hair's always wet, isn't it?" Peter said.

Janice bit her lower lip. "I wanted my baby back," she said. "That baby was mine." She looked at the hairdryer, and then at the floor, and then at the crumpled up wrapping paper; they all seemed to be the same color, and she wondered, what, really, was the difference?

Jimbo and the mouse.

Jimbo sat the tiny cage on the ground and opened the door. The mouse left the only home it had known, bid farewell, and dashed off singing into the field. Jimbo stood there until long after his little friend had disappeared. He knew that this age would pass, like all others, into memory, that most fragile of histories.

The end of an affair...

And after all, Susan’s chest heaved, despite her attempts to suppress it. “This isn’t love,” she said. “This is no romance at all.”

She was right. It was motocross.

A Happy Ending.

At long last the head mistress looked at Muriel with something close to approval. Muriel dared to think that perhaps, before returning to the commons room to be with the rest of the children, she would recieve a cookie. She was not wrong.

Lenny's saga draws to a close.

"Now that's a funny lookin' baby," Lenny said as a woman with a stroller passed. She frowned at him. All his life, all the way back, Lenny remembered frowns. Then, he remembered sandwiches.

Thad rubbed his wrists

Thad rubbed his wrists, red from the ropes. They had set him free at last. He said a prayer of thanks as his gaze followed the long procession of birds moving inexorably west. The turkeys were returning, as always, to some impossible source.

Janice looked up...

Janice looked up at the vaulted ceiling of the train station, with its crystalline, fractured pattern of tiles. "Well that was a pleasant train ride, don't you think?" she said.

Phyllis groaned, and dropped to the floor, shuddering, moaning, and vomiting up pieces of rubber and food the size of eggs as she spun, legs working frantically, in wide circles on the floor.

"Phyllis! Not again!" Janice cried, dropping to her knees.

A man in a hat walked by, then another. "Spadooby," they all muttered.

Harvey laughed.

Harvey laughed. The boy was fat, but strong. "What a good strong, fat boy," he said. The window open at last, he leaned back into the breeze.

Daniel scratched the dog behind its ears...

Daniel scratched the dog behind its ears. "Good dog," he said, meaning it. He took a step back. The forest grew hushed as the dog's wiry legs tensed, coiled springs grown tight. The dog leapt, and Daniel watched as it climbed, twenty feet, thirty feet, sixty feet, ninety feet. He stretched his hand, fingers splayed, toward it, as it rose into the pale arch of the heavens.

She sighed...

A sigh of wind blossomed into the leaves; the trees shook around her. The night was over, the fairies, gone.