Monthly Archives: July 2010

Crackle! Snap-crick! Ka-crack!

Sara winced at each individual snap as she lowered her foot, imagining them to be fallen autumn leaves. She was glad that it was pitch black in the cave so that her eyes could not tell her otherwise.

“Hurry up,” Nathaniel’s voice seemed to come from three different sources around her.

Crick! Snap! POP!

Sara moaned in disgust, “I can’t!”

Nathaniel grabbed her by the arm and pulled her deeper into the cave. “Just pretend they’re crunchy leaves. We’ll soon be through.”

“How big are they, Nate?” Sara asked by did not really want to know.

“They’re leaves.”

“It’s easy,” says the one with the gills and webbed toes. His name is Gilbert, and he doesn’t know why everyone laughs when they first hear it.

“Are you sure you know what ‘easy’ means?” Miranda asks. She is of a shapely and attractive form, but she is also made of solid marble, enchanted statue or golem or some such creation.

“Sure, just one arm over the other,” Gilbert explains, “and you let your swim bladder do the rest.”

“I don’t have a regular bladder, much less a swim one,” Miranda says. “What about the bridge?”

Gilbert shakes his head disapprovingly.

It was a horrific scene. The crash was mostly a mangled heap of steel and fire. It was a miracle that anyone was found alive. Well, technically no one was alive when they were found.

Thanks to modern medicine, two people were brought back from the brink of death, two decapitations reattached to bodies. Never before had anything been attempted. The results stunned the world.

The heads and bodies were swapped.

There were two different surgery teams. One team thought they were dealing with a particularly ugly woman with a thick mustache. The other team thought it strange, but didn’t ask.

Broken glass cracks and pops beneath my feet, a thousand shattered memories are scattered beneath the floor. All I see is destruction, a desolate landscape. It surrounds me, encompasses me, envelopes me.

You sit a far way off, purposefully looking the other way, ignoring my presence. I try to speak, but my throat is dry and cracks. You disappear before long anyway.

I sit down amid the grass where we once sat, and try desperately to make new memories. It is a futile effort. Thankfully, with time, the memories fade.

The broken glass still cuts my feet, reopening long forgotten scars.

“The best new author since the last one I wrote a review for, which was immediately prior to this.”

“Eric is able to weave a tale like a master weaver weaves things that are woven: Adequately.”

“It’s as if he replaced his own brain with the brains of Shakespeare and Einstein combined and it became one super-brain. That is the only possible explanation for this book.”

“I literally shot myself in the head after reading only two paragraphs, because I knew then and there anything I wrote would never compare even if I had a thousand years to perfect my craft.”