It was nighttime when she came across the cave of blue crystals. The air was moist, the compass in her pack pointed east and she followed the blue glow further into the tunnel of rock, until she found herself ceiling and earth surrounded by the blue crystals.

One fit into her palm. She grabbed, tugged it away from the stone and found the stone soft, looked on the crystal’s impossibly clear surface, suspiciously non-organic, and found her face broken into a thousand dimensions all tainted with blue.

“What?” Said herself to the thousand reflections, the thousand reflections to herself.

A sad girl in business clothes and rubber shoes, pushing a grocery cart filled with fruits.

An alien traveling with distant alien acquaintances, to visit Earth for vacation. After a thousand flea markets and delicacies, they find themselves stranded, passports stolen, waiting for retrieval from the home planet—an indefinite amount of time, please await further notification.

A student finds an anthill on campus, whispers to it, follows the little man who lives in the anthill as he goes from the Sunken Garden to the post office. He is mailing a letter to his daughter, telling her it’s worth the pain of knowing.

“What’s worth the pain of knowing?” asks the student.

“You’ll understand later on, but not now,” says the little man.

She leans against the glass of the café and looks up at the clouded night sky. She left the party early without saying anything. She’ll see him again in five years, or not at all.

A patient in line at the clinic, coughing. There’s something crawling at the back of her throat, a large wad of phlegm, but it is writhing and pulsing, struggling to free itself; perhaps she will hack up a dinosaur, teeth and jaws and tail, and science will cry tears of joy.

The old woman removes the teabag from the tea and pushes the cup towards her new assistant. They are in a white office. “A collection of fond memories. Drink.” The assistant takes a sip and gasps, grows confused, begins to cry uncontrollably.

I heard some noises outside my window and it was 3 am. I couldn’t sleep, so I went outside in just my shirt and pajamas, and found a small animal scratching at the screen door. It didn’t look like anything I’d seen before. It’s in a cage in the back. I don’t know if I want to keep it.

“Hey,” she says, and her voice streams through the fiber optic cables, sails over two seas, broken pieces of land, vast expanses pushed together, cities cradled in the mountainside, a scattering of lights.

His name was Robotnik, Ezra, Julien, and for a hundred years he was only a dream until he was born. “You will be king someday,” whispered his tired mother, before closing her eyes and being pulled violently up into sunshine of the waking world.

The job interview lady has an orange crystal stuck in her skin, just below her left eye. She asks you to choose, but you don’t completely understand the options. Lady-in-waiting or brewery rat? Dragon-armor polisher or assistant bard?

“Something’s wrong,” says the teacher, looking at her. She isn’t his student. The cat paces around the stone bench they are both sitting on. “I need help remembering,” she says softly, looking down at her fingers.