Category: fiction

Two women came before King Solomon. The first woman said to him: “My Lord, this woman and I live in the same house. I gave birth to a child and a few days later, she gave birth too. No one else lives with us, only the two of us were there. This woman’s son died during the night, and she arose and took my son from my arms while I slept, leaving her dead son in his place. When I awoke, I believed my son was dead, but when I observed him later on I realised he was not the one to whom I had given birth.”

The second woman responded: “It is not so! It is my son who lives and yours who died!”

The first woman replied: “It is not so! Your son is the dead one and my son lives!

King Solomon watched them argue for a little while, and then spoke to the second woman.

“So, you claim that your son is the live one and hers the dead one.”

She agreed. He then spoke to the first woman.

“So, you claim that her son is the dead one and yours the live one.”

She, too, agreed.

King Solomon then spoke again: “Bring me a sword!”

He gave the sword to the second woman and said to her: “You may cut the child into two. However it will be her choice which half to take.”

The two women saw that he had ensured they would each recieve an equal portion of baby. They left and spread the word of his decision. All of Israel heard of his wise judgement and held him in great awe.

The storm was so heavy last night. I couldn’t sleep. I got a glass of water and gazed out the window as the wind and rain beat against it. That was when I saw it.

At the edge of the field, a rain-soaked figure stood silently. A flash of lightning cast it into eerie relief for an instant. For a moment I thought it was a large, emaciated dog, standing on its hind legs and staring mutely towards the house, its shaggy fur hanging wetly. But then I realised the gaunt figure couldn’t be a dog at all.

Despite an odd feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, I went outside to see if they were alright, being out in elements on a bitter night like that. By the time I opened the door, the figure was gone. The next morning, with the storm clear, I walked up to the edge of the field to investigate and found muddy footprints. The rain had beaten at them and I was strangely unable to tell if they were left by a human or an animal.

The manager of the advertising company stood before her employeees.

“Alright everyone, we have a strange request.

Either it was a typo by our client, or else we’re going to have to be more creative and hard-working than ever before. I choose to believe it was not a typo.

No one has ever done anything like this.”

Several weeks later, the advertisements were displayed on the world’s first Tele-Bison. The applause was thunderous. The Tele-Bison was startled, and rushed into the night, never to be seen or heard from again.

Are you happysad? We have this brief moment, pointpoint, timetime, nothing else.
Is that enough?
Are we chasing the horizon or is there a goal? Define a culture by consumption by excess by decadence by ondemand whenyouwantit asmuchasyoucanafford. No wonder it gets heady when it ends. Hard to tell. The finality of choices make it fragile. Long moments endure. Hold them. Choose them.

He was the best of mimes, he was the worst of mimes. A routine he’d learned well as a child was his only act, and he knew it, down to his bones he knew it, but it grew thin in these colder times. Seemed as how he’d always been dancing to his silent tune, but the boy he’d been had cast a different shadow and walked another path. It was the little things, mostly, that he couldn’t escape from. No, it wasn’t something that a person should be feeling responsible for, just the changes wrought by time, and the influences he didn’t know he’d felt. He wasn’t the same boy – mind you, none of us are really the same – and his silent little play had modulated, grown wings you might say, or lost its nerve you might say, and neither truer than the other.

You’d hardly call him a commercial success – not him, not a mime, his only stage the street and his props department conjured with gestures and dismissed with flicks. Yet he still had this feeling, with him for some time now, that he had lost something back there which he wouldn’t be able to find again. The crowd liked his show more, now, but he’d left something behind to find that place. It itched in his memory, so much as you’d call it a memory, fragments of a song once heard on a radio. It replayed the same few words, like a misshappen haiku, that seemed to float in the realm just behind his movements. He couldn’t quite tell what it was. The shape of it eluded his fingertips.

Only, he had this sensation like it had been something important.