Dear Star

I didn't start out wanting to hate you. You have to understand: everything follows from that. You were brilliant, you know that? In every movie I saw, in every TV series you briefly guest-starred in – even when you looked like you were slumming, you slipped into characters like other people did pants. It was amazing. Understand, too: you didn't make me want to be an actor. You made me think the art was a Calling, and too high for me to reach.

And I was okay with that.

Until the interviews. Until I read about you on the internet. Until I found out what you thought about certain people, and why. No matter how good you are, I can't forget that now. In every movie, when you smile at the woman and say, "of couse I love you," in a voice women would drown in I hear under it the exceptions. The people you won't love. The ones who think aren't worthy of love.

You slummed in the TV shows; I see it in the movies now. Lowering yourself down to our level. You have enough money not to need to, but someone has a favour – maybe photographs, if I'm being ugly – and so you end up in another movie, and another, and in each I can't forget what you are under the masks you put on.

You would hate me if we met. I can't forget that. I wish I could. I wish your smile was more than artifice. I wish you could be more like some of the character's you play.

I wish I could watch your old movies again without knowing the kind of person you really are.

The Magician's Tale

Every morning Marcus Tull opens his mail and expects to have been found out. Every day he leaves his small apartment is another chance someone will know him, that word will get out. It wasn't his fault. That's what he told everyone, but no one believed him. On really bad days, he didn't even believe himself.

Most of the really bad days stopped when he ceased drinking. Not all, but most, when the bottoms of bottles terrified him and he worried it might happen again. It never had, but it could. Surely? He had no idea and no one he could ask. He had tried, but those he asked put things together, asked the internet. He got discovered and driven out from town after town until there was no one to rely on except himself.

All he did now was shop when he had to, remain home, read books. No computer or TV, no interactions with children. He would have killed himself rather than visited a park or school. The police believed him when he said that, but for all the wrong reasons. It had only been five years but it was too long and not long enough.

Stage magic is simple, you understand? He did illusions, worked tricks. The audience played along, laughed, made jokes: as jobs went, it wasn't bad. He'd had a flair for the dramatic, played up the spookiness with the kids. And then the birthday party. It wasn't Emily Horne's, small mercy. But he put her in the box, waved a hand over it along with his cape: the usual trick.

He'd distract, she would slip to the side, the box would he empty. Only that time – just the once – no one had left the box. A child got in, no one got out. Abracadabra, hey presto! and there were screaming parents and police officers, the press and federal investigators. He could not explain it. Nor anyone else.

She'd been an ordinary child, not the sort to play jokes like this. Not that anyone could for five years, surely? The ground has been solid, the box's trip door unopened. And every day he went to get groceries he'd find himself studying boxes, listening to stories, half-hoping he wasn't alone. He'd tried magic after, a few times, desperate and terrified, scared and angry. Nothing.

He didn't know if that was bad or worse. He hoped it was good, that it would never happen again. He did no tricks anymore, not for himself or anyone else, but the old instincts remained. He sometimes made coins vanish from his palms, but they were always palmed by him. Nothing strange. Nothing unusual.

Just another day of waiting for the horror to end.

Ah, writing prompts (intentional or otherwise)

Before the medication, the author wrote. People read, damning with faint criticism. It was beautiful, what he wrote, but had all the non-sense of a poem half the time, his words as verse, filled with gaping holes left for the reader to fall into.

The kind compared it to sex with strangers. The rest — most — simply turned away. It was both too small and demanded too much of them.

Time passed. Words came at the expense of all else. Lives fell apart. It did not matter. Words happened; next to that nothing mattered. Money fell away. Things were sold, lost, defenses weakened by cheap diets. Friends and family gathered, circled like kind vultures.

The author was taken to a place that was cruel to be kind. Electroshock had been replaced with pills, they explained, and it was another death of imagination. There would be no great story to come from this, no real moment to twist into fiction. Just exercises and pissing in cups. Eventually the pills stopped making his urine smell, soaked right into the bones.

A cured status was pronounced, like a wedding ceremony gone slightly south. The author was bundled out into the world amid quiet warnings to never come back: the cured could not fall away from their new state. It was an issue of funding. Kindness, you see, comes at a price.

The author returned home. It did not matter where: it was a place to write from. Words came, and were understood. Praises were sang, a book deal offered — out of pity? the author did not know. Months from the world had shifted the author out of gear. The writing was distant, removed.

Polished, some said. Better, others opined. But better than what? And why? They would not say.

Everyone understood what the author meant now when he wrote. Everyone got it. Even he did, much as he didn’t want to.

The ending was inevitable.

This could be a parable. If you're into that sort of thing.

"We are the 1%," the zombie crowed. "The only zombies with brains!"

"Brains?" the other zombies said.

"Yes, we can think and will rule over you sheep!"

"Brains!"

"No, don't eat m –."

A very short story.

He bolts from the car a mere three steps to the office door. Winter sunlight brushes skin, his scream ancient and awful in a language too alien for words.

The door slams shut behind him, the doorman offering up a glass-eyed smile, lips twitching into an attempted smile. “Good morning, Mr. President.”

the last spamfighter

The world has never had much use for superheroes. He just sat behind a desk most days, had created a forum on the internet. People joined it, because people will join anything, but he only paid attention to the spammers, tracking them back to their sources, hunting them down the information highways.

He took down computers, reported companies, all from a third-hand office chair and a computer he could barely afford. Authorities noticed a decrease in spam and were quick to praise companies, to even praise consumers for wising up to old frauds. The superhero tried not to care, tried to tell himself he was only doing the right thing, that he didn't need fame, that he didn't need fortune.

But every day it became a little harder.

this was his suicide note you know; it told the police nothing

He stopped writing the day he realized every story he'd written was a thing of hope, and the world was never that at all.

In the back garden, flies landed on the corpses.

Reasons that can only make sense

The doctor drummed his fingers on the desk, staring down at the boy. "This is the third time you've broken your left leg in four years. This time your were lying behind your car when your father backed up in the driveway. Why?"

"I'm 17 now." The boy didn't smile. "I have to avoid school dances somehow."

3 boys, one moral, several lesssons

The three boys played paper, rock, and scissors with the real deal, to make it more fun. It ended tragically when, beating Joe's paper, Henry stabbed him in the eye with the scissors. Then Alphie went all Cain and Abel with the rock.

If there had been four of them, they would have added dynamite.

Why

Why?

It is one of the first things we wonder. For some, the only thing we ever really say. But there is never an answer. We think there is, or should be, but all we have is this life, and then death. It's all we know we have, all we really get. Everything else is guesswork, desperation, faith.

We pray when the dead are dying, when we're in pain, when hope has fled us, when we have nothing else -- prayer is what is left when there are no other options., no other changes, no other hope left to us. That's the only time faith comes in. We only mean then when they're all we have left, when everything else has failed us and we can only hope for miracles or gifts, or rewards.

We offer anything, then. And those we care for still die. Nothing changes that. Not magic, not will, not power. In the end, our god fail us as much as everything else does. We end, and we die, and our story is over. no matter our goals, hopes, desires, dreams -- in the end it all comes to naught, nothing, finished.

We finally learn that our desires cannot change the ways things are. But this is not the worst thing, no, not at all. Even outliving those you love is not that. But part of it is in there. They die, and we go on. They die, and the world goes on. We who have lost so much, been so deeply shattered, waken to realize it means nothing. The world continues as it was. As if nothing happened.

So, to the why, there is nothing. We will die as well, and the world will continue. People wll get up, and go to work, and laugh and love and hate, and we will be only the past, and they will all look to the future. We will learn that the world doesn't break when we do, how insignificant we truly are.

And I wonder, walking, if old people wonder this, with eyes still clear and hands close to the triggers of bombs. If they think they would matter, if it ended with a bang and not a whimper. If they ask why, and all they get back is

"Why not?"