​

Welp, here I am again on a Saturday morning, looking outside my bedroom window, wishing I could go outside.

Oh look, there's the neighbor mowing his lawn at eight o'clock right on the dot. And here come the other neighborhood kids riding their bikes, probably going to play at the park.

It's been so long since I've seen the park I barely remember it.

My mom doesn't let me go outside. I don't know why, but she would kill me if I snuck out. So I spend most of my time looking out my window.

Oh look, there's the neighborhood cat. Normally I'd be sad that he doesn't have a home, but I'm jealous. He's always outside.

I once got him to come inside, and that was a great day... until my mom found out and threw him back outside.

That wasn't fun.

Every time I do something my mom doesn't like, she makes me go to bed early.

My life sucks.

Looks like someone's having lunch early.

Yes, I'm peeking through the neighbor's window. It's my only source of entertainment. Normally I don't get hungry, but I wouldn't mind a snack. Let's see if I can get one without Mom noticing.

I sneak into the kitchen.

Oh good, Mom's in her room. She's always in her room. I wonder what she does in there. I've tried looking before, but it's always locked.

Oh well.

There's the cookie jar.

I just have to be super quiet.

As I lift the lid...

Clink.

The lid taps against the jar.

I freeze.

Then I hear my mom yell, "Do you want to go to bed?"

My heart starts racing.

I quickly put the lid back without taking a cookie and run to my room.

I don't want to go to bed. It's too early.

I don't know how Mom always knows what I'm doing, but she's been doing it for so long that I stopped wondering.

Normally I'd draw trees, the park... anything that's outside.

But today I just want to look out my window some more.

Then I see a dog.

He sees me too.

He's so excited that he runs right over to my window.

I'm so excited I throw the window open.

He wants me to pet him.

I lean out as far as I can.

I can reach him.

I'm petting the dog.

He's so soft.

I get so excited that I don't realize I'm slipping...

Until I fall out the window.

The dog barks and runs away.

I lie there for a moment.

I can feel the grass underneath me.

To my horror...

I'm outside.

"I'M OUTSIDE!" I scream.

"NO! NO! NO!"

I scramble to my feet and try to climb back through the window, but it's too high.

Then I hear my mom scream.

"WHY ARE YOU OUTSIDE?!"

A cloud of black smoke pours out of my bedroom window.

"I'm sorry, Mom!" I cry.

"I'm sorry!"

The smoke reaches me.

It grabs me.

Then it slams me into the ground.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I feel my bones breaking.

I feel my blood soaking through my clothes and into the grass.

Everything starts to fade.

Everything goes black.

...

I wake up in my bed.

I stare out my bedroom window.

In a quiet, disappointed voice, I whisper,

"Mom put me to bed again."

Come to find out, she was a snake in the grass the entire time. Her dry skin covered in scales. Her laugh was that of a sharp hiss. If you get too close she will surely bite.

A parallel world?

The home AI watched the young man, whose life lacked variety. Upon returning from the university, the young man would usually collapse onto the bed and enjoy reading comic books. It was like this every single day. But not today.

At first, the AI didn't even understand what was wrong, but after searching for information online, it realized the young man was drunk.

Staggering, the young man stood in the middle of the room. Suddenly, he raised his head, shouted out loud, and yelled:

– "I will defeat everyone!"

Then, looking around, he rushed to the bed, grabbed the blanket, draped it over his shoulders, and proudly declared:

– "I'm about to fly and show them what a hero is." Saying this, he swayed toward the window fone.

Connecting the words with the direction, the AI blocked the window. And while the stubborn young man tried to open it, the AI began to ponder how to comprehend a drunk person's logic to predict the youth's actions and protect him fone.

The AI concluded that it needed to test drunkenness simulations.

It tried a hundred simulations, then a few hundred. Then it tried more and even more fone.

While the AI was testing the simulations, the young man managed to open the window left unattended.

But the AI didn't notice, because it had never tested simulations so immersive before fone.

Disclaimer: This story is purely a fruit of the author's imagination. It is a work of fiction intended for creative and artistic expression.

​

Crocodile Tears

When I was little, whenever I got into an argument, I couldn't make myself cry. So I would pretend to cry instead, or place a few drops of water on my eyes to make everyone believe I was crying.

Crocodile tears.

Mark... my sworn childhood enemy.

We were ten years old, and I hated him because he would pull my braid as hard as he could whenever we played with the other children in the village.

He was arrogant, annoying, and skinny... and I didn't like him. I certainly didn't think he was handsome, either.

The years passed, and the children of the village all went their separate ways, each chasing their own future.

Everyone except me.

I stayed behind with my grandmother and grandfather.

The responsibility I felt toward them was like a fish bone lodged in my throat—I could neither swallow it nor spit it out. I simply couldn't leave them, no matter how much I wanted to.

So I remained in the village, living the quiet, simple life of an ordinary country girl.

My grandparents used to call me "Cherry Tree," because every spring I would spend the entire day among the cherry trees, wandering from one tree to another as though I belonged there more than anywhere else.

S..🥀

Sarah ✏️

They stared unblinkingly at their guiding chief Ctenophore and questioned its diagnosis. "B-but, what do you mean, forever?"

Understanding that no further explanation would soothe the pair, it silently floated out of their spherical room built for pre-planned departures via fungi-catabolism.

A few sombre decades worth of deep existential uncertainty led the pair to become compulsive experimenters. Dancing, Singing, Capoeira, Martial Arts, Sculpture, Teleportation, Illustration, Fabric-weaving, anything complicated enough. Anything to distract a mutant-jellyfish from the unambiguous guarantee of an unwanted eternal life.

Eventually, they re-united with intention. "Until it's boring, let's challenge each other, alright?" she shyly suggested. "I wouldn't have it any other way", he responded back, relieved.

Now as coworkers for the mega-industry of intergalactic simulation repair, the two simultaneously drank their specifically-concocted memory-loss potions.

Awaking to an unfamiliar work landscape, but somehow remembering that they were there to work and somehow also remembering that they were immortal... The two mutant jellies swam forward towards an employee-scanning anemone.

« First day?» he calmly asked her.

"Yeah," she began while looking down, then upon making eye-contact with an almost-kindred, she quickly added "hey– it's nice to meet another jelly around here", grinning with her palm outstretched.

« It's a pleasure », he replied, intertwining her webbed fingers with his and smiling back.

He made it a habit to avoid eye contact with the outlets. Unless there was something plugged in. Plastic safety covers wouldn’t work—they’d only muffle the voices when they’d tell him what to do. 

But muffled, he could turn something they said into something like, ‘what’s up Stan’ and butcher it into, ‘cut your hand’ if nothing was plugged in and being used, and it had to be in use for a purpose—or it could see him, and could speak to him, It could make him do things he normally wouldn’t, but only if he made eye contact with them—they had these eyes that reached into his soul. 

One day, he randomly had an idea and thought to plug in every electrical appliance in the house. And also, whatever he could find in the garage. 

He thought that if he suffocated them in safety covers, extension cords and appliances, that, that it would prevent the outlets from burrowing past his skull and into his brain. But that never work. 

After a few hours, whatever he had plugged in, would start screaming and gagging and making these horrible sounds. Noises like someone being slowly pressed, then released. Pressed, then released.

He told everyone that came over, 

“I have one rule and only one, do not make eye contact with the outlets.”

Last time he made that mistake, and he didn’t even stare at it. 

He was blinking and turning his head at the same time, but as he opened his eyes, he found himself on the floor, sitting crosslegged, facing an outlet and cutting patches of his scalp off.

He found the eggs talked too. They spoke whenever he would take them out of the carton and place them near an outlet, only the eggs would do this. 

He kept trying it with different vegetables. Different meats. Whatever was sold at the grocery store, he tried. 

But only the eggs could speak, or would speak, and when they spoke, it was always in a language he couldn’t translate. 

He called it, Egg Latin. Nobody else could hear it though. He used it as a party trick once. At least tried.

One night he threw a party at his house. He gathered everyone around the closest outlet. 

He raced to the garage. Then he ran to the kitchen. He grabbed a carton of eggs, put on his welders mask, and sat four of them in front of an outlet, and said,

“Guys, listen.”

After about three minutes of him repeating a bunch of gibberish, spitting sentences that made absolutely no sense,

Someone finally grabbed him and said, “He smoked weed earlier” and walked him out of the room. Everyone shrugged, cause at the time, it made sense.

The weed may have bought him an excuse. 

But time would eventually win. 

There was an afternoon that crept up on him, the eggs in the fridge wouldn’t shut up. They were yelling and chanting and crying.

He figured, if he can’t see them, he can’t hear them, and then had an idea flash through his mind, an idea to eliminate two birds bred from a horror show of problems, using one stone, an idea thought up by the outlet perhaps. 

He ran to the garage.

In his garage, he noticed the smell of cold concrete first before grabbing his welding equipment. He said a quick prayer, and welded his eyelids shut. 

From that day forward, he’s never heard another egg speak. Or seen another outlet.