A Story and a Picture

I am addicted to change. It’s horrible. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I remember the time that I spent changing channels on the television, ever more rapidly, until I was rocketing through all 200 channels in 30 seconds and I had gotten up to pace around my apartment. Everywhere I go I want to look at new things. I want to see something new every time I blink, every time I move my eyeballs, every time I turn or walk or run. I want new cement blocks…

Disbelief and snickering met the press release, but headlines were duly changed and lead stories were updated. The President was declaring the third to last week in his term of office the Week of Love. The President’s premise was simple: seven days off to find the one you love, to throw yourself at that person without excuse, to surrender yourself to youthful reckless abandon and chase the intensely human and American dream of finding the one you were meant to be with. The President hoped the measure would raise the…

Let me tell you how everything changed. Especially New York City. The earth is mostly the same. It still has blue oceans and if you saw it from space, you’d still see the same land masses. Everything in its place. For now. When I looked in the funhouse mirrors with you, I knew we looked wonderful together whether we were fat, skinny, short or tall. The city changed when two guys accidentally discovered how to teleport; that’s what started it, at least. The two guys were named Ptolemy (his nickname,…

Benny is the type of guy who always has loads of money. He never needs to think about it. Here’s an example: Benny and I were in a restaurant and I was telling him about my Mom and getting real choked up about it – she died a couple years ago and I don’t really think about her as much as I should – and he paid for my dinner, and his dinner, and then he had everyone leave the restaurant for an hour. I didn’t even notice it ’cause…

The three pigeons arrived on Lyndon Street and strode down the right side lane in unison. There are many names for pigeons – flying rats, trash birds, dirty parrots. But no one called these three pigeons what they were: Harbingers of Doom. In fact, people didn’t call them anything at all. Everyone on Lyndon Street kept doing exactly what they were doing before the three birds began their strut. A baby might have noticed the three birds, but the gurgles and burps of babies are regularly untranslated and forgotten. Not…

The traveller sat down on a bench, his body’s heater working so hard it had turned his nose red. It had forgotten about his fingertips though. He shoved them deep into his pockets to steal some of the warmth from his spoiled lower body. It used to be that it took lots of math and meteorological mumbo-jumbo coupled with knowing where Mars was in the night sky for him to know what the snow meant – but now he just had a feeling, located along his spine, that would send…