Sandro sat on his usual bench in the park, across from the duck pond, and watched a man tap his way along the path with a white cane. He was pulling a large wagon, the kind landscapers used to move plants around. It was empty.
Kieran sat unmoving in his equally motionless kayak, the bright yellow plastic divided in two perfect halves by the mirror of the water’s surface.
The fishing hole looked almost too good to be true. The current would slowly carry the lure right past the submerged trunk, where hungry fish might be hiding. “Catch and release,” Brent muttered…
He felt no pain. Not yet. He could see the pain there, of course…he knew what it was, and knew that he could take it out, pick it up, allow himself to feel it…
Heltia had left Palloren as prepared as any warrior could be for the long journey to the Infinite Armory. Now, as she finally stood in the fabled Hall of Implements, she feared it would come to naught…
The headless corpse of a chupacabra lay in the mulch below the lion topiary. “Third time this month,” grumbled Tom the gardener, prodding at the thing with his foot as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.
“But what about all this? Your ranch, your dream of running a Christmas-themed coffee shop right here in a small New Mexico town? And what about the people of Elephant Butte?”
Gn’thiv smirked at the image carved into the face of the stone monument. He often marveled at what ancient beings would do to protect their treasures.
Lunette imagined the sound of the metal spade swooshing down. She imagined their wails and it made her smile, made her hand hurt less.
The Archives was the fever dream of a second-grader with a box of crayons and an architectural CAD program. It was a library built by M. C. Escher and furnished by Salvador Dali; it defied description and taste and possibly some of the tenets of Euclidean geometry. It was the heart and soul of The Center.