The narrow dirt streets, between the brown and towering chimney-like housing, were very quiet this morning, absent the odor of the combustion motored vehicles and the sound of the mechanical gear-shifting and handlebar bells of the hundreds of bicycles, but 11-year-old Xi Yang paid no attention to this. Nor did he think much about the increased number of guards that patrolled back and forth outside the district walls.

His attention though, was drawn to the absence of his favorite statue, the one where images of all the worlds children held hands and appeared to be moving in a circular, clockwise motion. In fact, Xi began to notice how all the statues along his way were no longer there.

“Hello, Acant,” he called out as soon as he say him.

Acant was easy to spot. He stood taller than most kids his age and his multi-horned head was darker and did not match his back-shell or his six thin and jagged exoskeletal legs.

“You should not have come here, today,” Acant gargled, his mouthpiece more suited for his native tongue, a clicking.

“No? Why?” Xi asked.

“You should not have, that is all.”

“But I don’t understand. We played here yesterday and we still need to finish the ramp for your bicycle.”

“That will not happen anymore. You should go. Bad, bad.”

“Is it the stupid war?”

“Bad, bad,” Acant repeated.

Xi watched his friend. He looked neither sad nor angry, but then he also knew that Acant’s type have very little in the way of facial movements, so any real emotion was in the eyes or in their speech.

“Is it because your people are winning?”

“We are not people.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, you go. Trouble.”

“But what about the ramp?”

“Forget ramp,” Acant’s voice rose sharply.

It wasn’t until then that Xi realized that a crowd was forming. Smaller and larger, older and younger, all of Acant’s kind.

“Okay,” Xi said, disappointed.

Somewhere in the gathering crowd he heard the slur, ‘grub.’ He’d heard it used on ‘district enforcement,’ but had never been called it before.

“I don’t understand,” Xi said, “I was born here, like my parents and grand parents and their parents, but suddenly I don’t belong here, suddenly I’m a — grub?”

“You always been grub,” Acant said.

The claim stung Xi deeply. And though angry, he felt more like crying as he tried figure out what had changed between now and yesterday afternoon after class.

He knew Acant had learned the same lesson in history that he had. On Earth, nearly two-hundred years previous, America and China were at war with each other.

As they battled they learned of a bigger threat, that there was a need to move humans off the planet. That’s how Xi’s family, now called Terrans and no longer Earthlings, had come to the planet Dalis and met the Dalisians.

At first the Terrans enslaved the Dalisians, forcing them to work long hard hours with little food or sleep. This had been more than 150-earth-years ago, but things had changed.

Though separate species, the Dalisians eventually earned their freedom and became equals with the Terrans, who eventually began calling themselves Dalisians as well. But then a war had begun a dozen years ago, before either Acant or Xi were born, between another race of Dalisian-type species and human exploring for new colonizing grounds and mineral enrichment.

A stone flew from out the growing crowd that now surrounded the boy, striking Xi on top of his right shoulder and he fell down. This was followed by a din of rapid clicking, some which Xi understood was about him — including grub, kill, feast.

He felt the kicks, clawing, scratching and stabs from the many legs of the crowd that seemed to surge over him. Thankfully, Acant stepped in and stopped what was happening.

“Go! Bad! Trouble! Not wanted!” Acant garbled before falling into a guttural clicking, that sounded far more threatening than Xi had ever known.

Bloodied, Xi got to his feet and turned to leave, only to find his way blocked by other bug-like Dalisians. Another stone sailed from the gathering, smashing into Xi’s left temple.

The boy’s vision swirled into nothingness as he toppled to the ground.

He died from the blow, never understanding why he’d been turned on by Acant and his kind. District enforcers came a few seconds later, but by that time there was very little left of Xi, as his body had been picked clean.

Judy took her dog to the park to run and play, burn off some energy so that he might sleep the whole night through.  ‘Ralph,’ was named after a cartoon television sheep herding dog that he didn’t resemble in the least.

At the park, he raced back and forth and wrestled and rolled with the other dogs, all there for the same reason. After an hour or so, Ralph found himself alone, and in order to while-away his time, he found other things to do.

“Come, Ralph!” Judy called.

He was slow to respond as he sat on the ground and chewed with an unending intensity on the item he had found. Again she called him, this time sounding more demanding, “COME, RALPH!”

This time, Ralph turned his head slowly towards her voice, and with bright and unblinking eyes, looked straight at her. Judy literally shit herself before she could even think to holler, “Drop it!”

From now on, ‘Cracker Jacks,’ shall be known as, ‘Caucasian Jacks.’

Another lightning storm and she found a scared Papa standing, his back pressed against the far wall, yet again.

“It’s only lightening, Papa,” the nurse gently coo’d, “No need to be frightened.”

“No. It’s the shadow that comes with it?” his voice quivered.

“I don’t understand, Papa. What shadow?”

“The shadow that wants to get behind me — behind you.”

“What happens if a shadow gets behind us, Papa?”

“Death!”

“Non-sense, it’s only a shadow, that’s all, Papa.”

But she wasn’t looking when the lightning next flashed. Papa pressed himself harder against the wall, eyes closed, knowing what would happen next.

Them: “You’ve got a great personality.”

Me: “Umm…it’s actually a mental disorder.”

All Jerry seemed to do was work and it was never enough. Jus’ ask his wife who constantly told him how worthless he was as a wage earner.

Further, he heard the same thing from his in-laws, who lived with him and their daughter, his wife. Neither thought him the proper husband for their only child.

It didn’t matter to them that he was the soul provider of the family. Nor did they mind the fact that they ate out nearly every night and often wouldn’t even bring him home a morsel from their meal.

One evening after a particularly hard day at the mill, Jerry came home late from work to find everyone asleep. So he decided to pour himself a shot of whiskey, sit on the couch and relax.

Before he knew it, he fell asleep. But sleeping provided him with no relief as he had a nightmare that he’d changed into a cockroach.

When he awoke, he discovered that his nightmare was real and that he had indeed turned into a cockroach. He tried to get off the couch, but fell to the floor and had to scurry away before he was stepped on or the cat caught him.

“Where is that worthless, husband of yours,” the father-in-law asked his daughter.

“Probably out screwing around,” the mother-in-law interrupted.

“Who cares,” his wife finally answered.

Staying close to the living room wall he hurried as fast as his six legs could carry him to the front door, slipped beneath it and onto the porch. The world looked very different to Jerry and he realized he was free.

It would be the best 160-days of his life.

Her: “I like you.”
Him: “Give it five days.
Her: “No, I really like you.”
Him: “Okay, ten.”

Narrator: It would, in fact, take only four.

The charnel oddity envisioned the strange appliance as it twisted and turned within the abject void of space and time. It reached out, not with hands, but with crimson tendrils that drew the darkened thing into itself.

Never had the oddity seen, felt or breathed in such a confusing puzzle. With in it were malformed slips of pulp, dried and repurposed, with vile, disgusting images and ductile rectangles.

It rifled through the object before deciding it would be best to place in the keeping of the great dreaming god. Surely, it would know what it was and why it had been floating unguarded through their reality.

The great dreaming god examined it and concluded that it belonged to a human, that it had once imagined their hideous odors and warm skinned faces in a most pleasant nightmare. The god decided that their must be a human residing, no hidden, within their antiquarian longitude and that it must be discovered and destroyed.

As creature set upon creature seeking to discern the location and to kill this human, the dreaming god further examined the unfamiliar entities shrouded  within the device. One was a hard surfaced, a strange glyph embedded in it that held much interest.

More intelligent than the other, the dreaming god could decipher these unusual and simplistic scribings which read: Taylor Rundel. The hard surfaced thing also held an image of this bipedal mortal, an image far to abhorrent for it to describe.

“This corporeality must be found, then destroyed at all cost,” the dreaming god demanded, waves of energy rolling from it’s massive misshape.

Within time, those commanded would find no human among their aberrant beings, but by then their world was a shamble, death and rot twisting and turning in an abject void of space and time. And not even the commanding dreaming god was above the ensuing suspicion left by a wallet lost from some other latitude outside their now dead multiverse kingdom.

If a novel is a relationship and short stories are love affairs, then flash fiction must be the quickie.

look in the mirror,
whose seeing you seeing?
your own reflection?