Wake me up when September ends, dear," she said, and then my mother rolled over and fell asleep amid a drift of comforters and overstuffed pillows. A single red-orange leaf lay beside her pillow, like an alarm clock promising to wake her up when her season came around again. As it happens, this had been one of the better summers that I could ( Read more... )

"Due to the nature of the child's parents, it would seem to make only good sense that her custody is divided equally between the two parents, given what the medical professionals involved have explained regarding her...particular...needs. They assure me that with time it will become evident with which parent she should reside, but until that time, ( Read more... )

"Time is what you make it. Never feel like you're going to break it, because if you feel that you might--well, then you might. But if you don't feel that you might, then you never will. And we hate having to go in and clean up after broken time. It's inevitable, I suppose, with us teaching you young ones how to take care of it, but that doesn't ( Read more... )

We live on the edge of the Cliff Over Nothing. I know, I get massive cool points for saying that. I also know you just took massive cool points away for me using the phrase "massive cool points." It's okay. I like watching old shows from Before and reading teenager's books from Before, and unfortunately that means I think things are hip or tight or ( Read more... )

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"Wake up, time to die!" boomed the overhead speakers at 6 AM. We all groaned and threw pillows at the video monitors--that joke was old before we were born, and we knew it. Cultural induction meant that we got to watch all the pop culture from the twenty years before we were born and most of the current stuff, too, though we knew they censored ( Read more... )

Drifting through the trees, weightless in real time, while around everything else moves in slow-motion. I move slow, but if you glance up, all you'll see is leaves rustling quickly or maybe a flicker of white. It is a frustration, I tell you. I understand why some ghosts start zooming through people, or deliberately creating cold breezes. The ( Read more... )

Being mauled by a small purring ball with very sharp claws and a difficult-to-pin down outline was not how she'd expected to spend her first day of veterinary school at the University of Intergalactic Medicine, and to judge by the confused, shocked, frightened, awed, or jealous expressions on her classmates' faces, they hadn't expected it either. ( Read more... )

Living on the rooftops with the gargoyles and taking care of them was a life, and it was much better than some, he thought. Cleaning moss from their teeth and mildew from inside their ears, reading aloud to them some of the novels people threw out in their trash, and generally keeping an eye on things during the day. Scaring off kids from drawing ( Read more... )

She caught the nightmare with a carefully baited trap: her little sister after she kept her up really late watching Halloween with her. It worked, and it was totally worth it, even if it did make her mother ground her for a month. And her little sister's constant nightmares for the next week gave her something to feed the nightmare colt with while ( Read more... )