Onada crept towards the garden in silence. Fallen branches bent under his step, but did not break. This forest knew him, and it would never give him away.

He paused at the edge of the clearing. Hundreds of leaflets littered his crops. There had been an airplane the day before, but Onada couldn’t tell if it was Japanese. He hoped it was, hoped that his commanding officer had come to relieve him. But of course it was not, orders were not dropped from passing airplanes. They were given in person, face to face. They were accepted reluctantly and obeyed completely.

Onada retrieved a leaflet and retreated back to the forest. It wasn’t safe out in the open, in the garden that he came to only when he must. If it were too well cared for, the enemy would know he was alive, so he let most of the crops wither, even when he was hungry.

The leaflet read: LIEUTENANT HIROU ONADA, THE WAR IS OVER. JAPAN HAS SURRENDERED TO THE UNITED STATES.

Did the Americans think he was a fool? That such an obvious trick would coax him out to be captured? His name was misspelled, his rank was incomplete! Such poor forgery! No protector of Japan would ever accept such shame as surrender! Never would the mighty Empire of Japan fall!

Onada remained vigilant. Here, on this island, to this soldier alone, the war raged on for thirty years.

When scientists discovered what came to be known as God, they found the explanation simpler than they imagined. Some argued over the definition of God and questioned if this being fit that definition, but this was irrelevant. When God arrived on Earth — and He did not come alone — it was impossible to question His dominion.

Almost 72 years before His arrival, an outside planet was discovered that we came to call Heaven. Its unusual orbit around our sun was equivalent to 3741 Earth years, and because of its unusual trajectory, it was only visible to us for 218 of those years when it was closest. Its atmosphere was like ours and a race of sentient beings existed there, in many ways similar to us. We called these beings Angels, and among them — an Angel Himself — God was their representative.

Millions of years earlier, colonies were sent to populate our planet. They died almost immediately. However similar Heaven and Earth are, its geological differences were still too drastic for their species. Only their basic DNA structure remained on Earth, and over time, Angels guided its evolution into a similar species that could withstand Earth’s atmosphere and gravity. This, we learned, was the origin of humankind. No longer a marvelously unique and intelligent being in the Universe, but a primitive version of a species far greater than ourselves.

God arrived on Earth violently. Heaven was no longer habitable, its luxury stripped and its beauty polluted. The Angels came to our planet as conquerors, all of them our masters. We built their enormous cities. We built the cages we were kept in. We could not resist them.

And like that, God reined over Earth, our Lord.

The 30′s had a lot of hard-working folks who just couldn’t find honest work, but then there were guys like me who avoided honest work completely. That’s why I moved to the coast, it’s the easiest place to live without really trying.

I’d been in town long enough to know who the strangers were, and one day this ship came in looking for crew, a guy I’d never seen before. Says he’s looking for two men, three nights, no questions asked. The pay is great so I get a friend, and no questions asked, we load the ship up around midnight and set sail before sunrise.

Right away I get into it with the boss. Won’t tell us where we’re going or what we’re carrying. Big heavy crates, no labels, doesn’t even say which end is up. I must’ve asked a dozen times what was in ‘em, nothing. Could be dangerous, I tell him, allergies and all that, but he doesn’t care.
Continued…

When the General came into the shop, he came with thunder. He was an arm of the President — the arm with the sword — and his questions were commands to be followed without question.

“Printer!” barked the General. “Will you make posters to hang in the city! Will you tell the people the truth about their glorious President!”

Work was slow and money hard to come by. Food was nearly impossible to find anywhere, every market was empty. The Printer was shaking, he had so little to eat.

The President was generous to his few loyal supporters. His General was ruthless with the rest. It was unwise to disagree with their requests, and really, what bother is it to anyone if it’s truth being printed or not? And what was truth anyway? Truth is printed all the time, by anyone! Let the people do as they will!

At the end of each day, he returned home and in the abundant food for his family he found truth. And each morning, it was lost, and he entered his shop a liar. When the door closed behind him, it sounded like thunder.

And so it went each day for months and years, his hands covered in the dark ink of the government. He could not care what horrible shapes the ink took. He would not look at it any more than to check the coverage. Day after day, he laboured.

The colour was the richest black. It was his pride.

Emma stopped eating meat when she was seven years old. Two years later, she stopped eating milk and cheese, and three years after that she stopped eating processed food. None of this was for ethical or health reasons. Emma just had bad luck with food.

When she was seven, Emma’s t-ball team was going out for hot dogs, and when she bit into hers, she also bit into a severed pinky finger. (It belonged to one of the workers at the factory where the weiners were made.) As soon as she pulled it out and saw it pointing right back at her, she refused to eat meat ever again.

When Emma was nine she found a gelatinous gob of something icky white on top of the butter, and a little while later there was an incident with chocolate milk that she never talked about. On her tenth birthday she found what she thought was a frog’s eye in her ice cream cone. (It wasn’t actually a frog’s eye, though, it was a completely different animal.) This is when Emma stopped eating dairy.

Finally, when Emma was thirteen, she stopped eating processed food. This was an unusual year, actually, even for her. One time she found a little green worm in a fruit bar, another time a hornet’s nest in a bag of chips. A can of pop she nearly drank out of was full of nails, a donut was actually an angry coiled-up rattlesnake, and she found a paint-soaked sponge in a package that was supposed to be her favourite organic tofu. Who knows how these things happen, but they did, and they happened to Emma.

One day, Emma is going to stop eating most fruits and vegetables, all rice and beans and nuts, and everything except for a specific type of apple that she will grow herself. And then one day, something will happen, and she’ll stop eating even that.

But as Emma always said, don’t go letting her stories stop you from eating what you want. She just had bad luck, is all.

Somewhere in the building across the street, in some scattered bit of his confused heart, Marcel admired what his wife had done. He shoved the deed into his pocket and wandered around. Rows and rows of patio furniture, all arranged neatly across the split room, more still in boxes in the back. Each table and each chair had accumulated only the dust since they were last cleaned perhaps two months earlier. Marcel pulled a plastic chair away from a glass table and its collapsed umbrella, and he rested.

When he proposed to his wife so many graying years ago, he promised her everything. They had nothing at the time so everything was easy to give, like a house, a family, food on the table. And all these things, he gave her.

They bought a store together, a little corner store in the small town where they lived. He liked the work but never quite understood the bookkeeping, so she took care of that. And every day, together, they ran the store. People went there for groceries, to rent movies, to enjoy a home-cooked meal. They raised their children there, and their children grew up to raise their own children there, and still, always together, they ran their store.

Looking around the dark room, Marcel wiped his eyes dry. All this furniture ordered from catalogues and shipped here, all set up and arranged and regularly cleaned. He had so many questions. He wanted none of them answered. He wanted out.

Last year, she told him that she was dying. She knew for a while, but she kept it to herself. It didn’t make sense, maybe, or she didn’t believe it, or she forgot. Her mind was getting old, she said. Foggy. She forgot some things, and remembered other things, things that never happened. Sometimes she didn’t recognize where she was.

He thought she was just tired.

She was tired for a long time.

Marcel made sure the For Sale sign was visible in the boarded-up windows. He locked up the building across from their store and put the key that the locksmith made into his pocket. According to the deed, they bought the building together years before she passed away, but this was the first time he’d seen this foggy place. He did not want to come back.

“I’m so sorry, Laura.”

I was honestly crying but I don’t know if I was honestly sorry. Maybe I felt guilty. I definitely was.

She had no idea. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I had to. I had to.

“When we started dating –- actually seriously dating, the second time around –- do you remember when I surprised you? You got off work early and found me in your house and I said I was there to make you dinner?”

“Yes,” she said. She was nervous. Of course she was. She had every right to be and she didn’t even know why yet.

“I wasn’t there to make you dinner.”

We had a big fight at her place, in her bedroom, and she stormed off to the bathroom. I was so angry. I didn’t think I’d see her again, so I took something. I didn’t have to tell her what it was, she knew me well enough now. And then two months later we were dating again, and she gave me a key. I had to put it back.

“Forgive me.”

Her face went dark and unreadable. I didn’t know who she was anymore. She didn’t know who I was. And this time when I left, I had nothing.

In an old tattered magazine was a full-page black and white ad that read: THE BEATLES LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY. Then, in smaller print: ENTER TO WIN. John and Paul were in the ad, but not George or Ringo — who knows why. And underneath everything, in tiny print at the bottom, the part that Dom couldn’t take his eyes off, was the fine print. It read: CONTEST CLOSES MAY 12.

No year was specified. Misprints and errors amused Dom, so what the hell, he cut the form out, filled it in, and mailed it away. He told his girlfriend. They laughed.
Continued…

Immediately from the moment Tay saw the frayed end of string at her bedside, she knew she had to follow it. It intrigued her. She walked beside it out of her room and down the hallway and out the front door. She didn’t have any idea who had left it or why it was there. All she knew was that there was something important at its end.

The string went down the same street she walked every day and it ended at the corner where she waited for the bus that took her to college. When the bus pulled up and opened its doors, the string continued onto it, and Tay followed it to an empty seat. The bus stopped at her school and the string lead her inside the building and to her class.

Many years later, she was used to seeing the string everywhere. It always seemed to be where she was going, always ended where she waited, always went on when she had to move next. At times she wouldn’t notice it for days, but it was there. She followed it to the end of college, to her first day of work, to where she met her husband. The string was there when her kids were born, when they graduated college, when she was diagnosed with cancer. She lived a long time after her illness, ignoring everyone’s urgent suggestions for chemotherapy and instead following the string elsewhere.

Nobody but Tay ever saw the string, and she never told anyone about it. It was her secret.

A hundred years from tomorrow, Cristofer Banks will finish assembling the most powerful telescope yet. With child-like eagerness, he engages the rotator cuff and sets it into position. He hurries to the Observatory Bay and waits impatiently for the generators to warm up. The Earth will be so far below him that he will lose the satellite radio link from time to time, but it’s nothing he will worry about. As soon as the telescope is fully operational, he will stare eagerly into the monitor.

In the drawer beside him is a tedious manual. In it are specifications of the telescope’s machinery and a detailed breakdown of the quantum physics that make it all function, including the photon nanolens. Cristofer will never refer back to this manual, however, because he remembers exactly how he designed it, and of course because it works perfectly.

The magnification of the telescope operates by supercharging and speeding up the wavelengths of light, which travels at infinite speed — (proven by this experiment; Cristofer will win his second Nobel Prize for Physics) — and is affected only by core universal gravity — (which is how he won his first). A supercharged wave, of course, is not stopped by mass and can travel further based on how much energy you apply. This is why Cristofer will find himself zooming in as far as he can through everything, pushing the telescope as far as it can.

Something curious will catch his eye, though, and he will stop for a moment. He will not know what he’s looking at, not exactly, not while he’s dumbfounded and still.

He will raise one of his hands. And the figure in the Observatory Bay of the space station on the monitor will raise one of his hands too.

Cristofer will turn around, then laugh when he realizes that of course he could never see his own face. Of course he can only look out into the Universe in but one direction.