The Octopus Man
There was no specific reason why Maddy Riverton first went down to the river. She was just looking out her window one day, and she realized that in all her years of seeing the river from her window, she had never actually stood at the shoreline. Her mother was at work, so she told her father she was going out.
The Barbed Wire Boy
There is a child in the graveyard. It’s been there for a long time and it never stops crying.
It lives at the perimeter of the woodland cemetery, in that area perpetually darkened by the canopy of trees, the area that always seems to be shrouded in fog, no matter the weather and no matter the season. That fog at the edge of the graveyard is there to keep the child cold.
Sometimes, visitors to the graveyard will see it. Whether they are the stragglers milling around after the funeral, or kids there to desecrate the graves for a drunken laugh, or just the lonely bereaved visiting their family’s graves, sometimes they will pause in what they’re doing long enough to notice the huddled silhouette in the fog.
The Edinburgh Clock
At the base of the clock, standing in the center of a tangle of clockwork and gears, was Evil God. The information card on the wall identified it as an ancient pagan deity specifically, but it didn’t look like anything else. Taller and larger than all of the other waxworks, clad in regal robes, he was nonetheless trapped by the mechanical prison around him, and he didn’t look happy about it.
His porcelain face was contorted in a vicious scowl. It was a face that might have been handsome if he had been smiling, with its proud, aquiline nose and pointy golden beard and intense, staring eyes. Somehow, the sculptor had captured such smoldering, righteous rage in those eyes that I felt certain it could consume the whole clock tower, burning the hideous thing to the ground, if it were released.
Standing guard to ensure that didn’t happen was the figure standing at Evil God’s feet, a porcelain monkey dressed in a colorful costume. The monkey was turning a large wheel that kept the other gears in motion.
I wondered how long the monkey had been standing there, in the mythos of this great clock.
The Trains
Many years before the trains divorced themselves from the railways and took to the sky like winding snakes, I find myself on a sparsely occupied subway train rattling through the night. In all of my life this is my first foray onto public transportation without the company of adults. Not that I’m alone; I’m joined by my friends, all dumb thirteen-year-olds like me, as we make our way to the other side of the city. It’s that time of year when each day is just a sliver of daylight in the morning, darkening by the time the hour-hand begins its second 180-degree arc across the clockface, and pitch black before it closes much distance.
At the time, it’s late in the evening. And we’re alone in the carriage, except for an old man sitting at the far end of the carriage. That’s the first odd thing I notice; the strangeness of three kids being on a subway train in the evening, and only one other person there.
Extraordinary
She had always been an underdog. She was the kind of person who got up in the morning and the first thing she did was trip over her own feet. Then, the toothpaste tube would only be half-full, and the emptiness of the milk carton would only be discovered after the pouring of the cornflakes. Getting dressed would be an uneventful procedure, by the end of which it would already be raining outside.