There’s always that moment, coming home. Sometimes when I get to the gate, sometimes stepping into plane itself. The moment I realize that that no one around me looks like me. The flight is long. I stare out the window at the cloud layer beneath us. These trips always feel like I’m in a haze. I put music on earlier, but it just sounded like noise. Something in my mind just couldn’t parse it.

At first it was a small thing, a discrepancy, a set of coordinates not logged in the main computer. Someone had taken this ship somewhere, and they hadn’t wanted their bosses to know. It could have been anything really. But then I saw it again, buried in some circuitry down long halls in the depths of a cargo hauler, the same coordinates. I checked the star maps and found nothing there.

They came when all the world was sleeping. Busy as we were with the disasters and crises of the day. Then one morning they were there, bright strokes of red against the blue sky. The preachers on the radio that morning made short work of it. This must be a sign. All the carnage and disaster in the world and now this. Bright red rings encircling the earth. Rings of blood they were called.

It was winter, when the icicles collected themselves that I first had the idea. It had been a long time coming. One by one they came clattering down under the relative warmth of the winter sun. I am going to go home. I said it to myself first alone where the idea could have just as soon flown off into the distance. But then, again, in close company around the glow of artificial light, again the words came out, shattering against the ground.

Sometimes life gets choked up and slows to a crawl. Sometimes it runs free over a smooth bed, and sometimes a single hour matters more than days or weeks. This is a short interactive piece called Run. You can play it here on itch.io

“I feel like time is a ball of yarn that I’ve dropped unspooling beneath my feet. Every time I try to pick it up it comes undone more and more.” “What?” she says, but her tone implies no desire to hear more We’ve crawled and scrambled up here year after year, knuckles bloodied on the rock face. Sometimes you’ve just got to be sure that what you buried stays buried, that the ground stays tightly packed and that forgotten things remain forgotten.

They found god in the front closet of a suburban home in Lincoln, Nebraska. They said god was lying upside down under a bin of legos. They say a lot of things these days. The men who were called were serious. The kind in white lab coats with guns and gas masks. How do you get into something like that? Probably the military. Men who are paid to know things and be really vague when anyone asks.

The first time I saw it, I just thought it was cat hair. Sometimes I brush my cat and tufts and tufts of fur come out of her coat. I didn’t think about the fact that I hadn’t been brushing my cat lately, but then again there were a lot of things I wasn’t thinking about. And the next few days were just like any other. Cereal for breakfast, reading the news hunched over my laptop nearly curled up in a ball.

A man wakes up in small brown house. It is his house, in so much as a house can really belong to a person. He is a man of his word. He was often quiet, but then again nobody is listening. But on this morning, it is different. He thinks about how it is different as he shaves the hairs on his face, one by one cutting them with his razor.

Author’s note: despite sharing the same name the characters of Zoe and Robin are most definitely not me. She was lucky that I even answered the phone. “Hello,” I said, still half asleep and squinting at the bright column of light pouring in through the window. “Now listen to me very carefully because it is damn hard to make a call like this,” her voice cut sharply through the background static, “You’re me, and I’m you but from a world where things go just a little bit differently.