dreamszilla

Patrick says goodbye to his best friend, who is heading out to university, and wonders if he is doing the right thing by staying home; by Lara Hahn. The sun burned relentlessly from a cloudless sky and the smell of heated tar wafted through the air as I climbed the steps to the platform. The station was a brick building with ornamental gables atop the "golden hill", so named after the barley fields that grew there, and which, in fact, was only a mound overlooking the village. The place was deserted except for Toni, who was sitting on the only bench; his right ankle resting on his left knee, his arms stretched over the backrest in exaggerated confidence. A holdall lay like washed-up wreckage on the floor next to his feet in shiny white Nike trainers. He had his head craned back, giving me an unobstructed view of his face, which was as familiar as the one staring back at me from a mirror. I was convinced that I was already seeing a strangeness that had settled around his f...

David W Landrum's tale of a romance between a reclusive physicist and an anachronistic thespian echoes Shakespearean themes of predestiny. Min Yuan liked working for a physics laboratory. She had trained diligently, mastered her subjects in undergraduate and graduate school, and taken the job she had always dreamed of having. She did mathematics to calculate and describe the dynamics of sub-atomic particles; occasionally she traveled to the east coast and helped with experiments that involved a cyclotron. She had just turned thirty-two, was still a virgin, and had not gone on a date since graduate school six years ago. She lived, she told herself with bitter amusement, like a Buddhist nun: apartment as plain and spare as a room in a serenity house (the Buddhist term for a convent), no sexual expression, a simple diet, and devotion to her calling in life, which, in her case, was the advancement of science. One of the things the lab focused in its on experiments was the passin...

A few months ago, I read a quote that said, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” It made me stop and think. Recently I bought a yellow rose bush. I am working on creating a small rose garden in front of our house since we removed all the Juniper bushes. The yellow rose bush reminds me of when my sister visited me in Texas. I had started to prepare a flower garden in front of our new home but hadn’t decided what kind of flowers I wanted to plant yet. When she got out of the car, she was holding a rose bush with one yellow bud ready to open. “Hey, sis, I brought you a housewarming gift, and it looks like I’m just in time!” I hugged her and asked her what she meant. She nodded toward my empty garden and said, “You can’t plant a garden in Texas without a yellow rose bush.” “Oh no, I can’t grow Roses. They are too difficult.” So we walked over to the overturned soil, and she set the rose bush precisely in the middle. Then she said, “Don’t you remember the beautiful roses d...

Stuart Stromin tells a devastating tale of frustrated lovers in Jo'burg. One It was already after midnight when Linda Badenhorst was startled by a sharp knock at the door of her one-bedroom apartment in Hillbrow, the densely-populated district with the highest violent crime rate in all of Johannesburg. Half-naked and alone in bed, she was too terrified to even turn on the night lamp. A friend, who worked as a waitress in an expensive seafood restaurant in Plein Street, was attacked one evening on her way home. Two men followed her for several blocks and, suddenly armed with blunt pangas around her, they demanded her handbag. One of them, a short man with swollen knuckles and bulging bloodshot eyes, pressed himself against her. Flinging her handbag to the ground, the woman fled with a scream. She ran out into the street. A car squealed to a stop, and a big passenger jumped out, holding a golf club, but the thugs had vanished. The very next day, she bought a small pistol at a...

Sato-san is the embodiment of hope after a nuclear tragedy; by David Lanvert. Sato-san walks down the middle of the road, a fishing pole over one shoulder, head tilted back and eyes scanning overhead, seeking the source of a low thrum, felt but not yet heard, before the air-raid siren sends us scurrying for safety. We watch him from either side of the road, squatting behind charred wood or lying under the lip of a water-filled crater, our keen eyes and youthful fingers seeking the buried treasure of a spare button, an intact shirt, a forgotten locket. Morning mist as ephemeral as hope rises in the distance as we see him, shoulders back and chest out, a giant, strutting towards the water. He's singing now, low and indistinct. The roosters in the road mimic his walk. The siren wails, Sato-san sings louder. Hate is upon us, raining down, a destruction heaven-sent to avenge the actions of others who look like us. We rouse ourselves and bend at the waist, eyes down, shuffling towar...

Nikolaus yearns to learn the secrets of the shapeshifter, so others can finally see him as he sees himself; by Henry Moraja. In the town of Neunburg, legend says a shapeshifter lives in the woods. A will-o'-the-wisp, a trickster, a murderous beast too clever for humans to comprehend. There are stories about it, told around the fire at family gatherings; and paintings and songs, and they all tell the same tale: a wayward child snatched away, a clever creature, a harbinger of the end times, unavoidable. Someone must have seen it, ages ago, but now it's nothing but a myth told over and over, meaning distorted with every repetition. Nikolaus Sauer believes in many things, foolish things and wise things and everything in between, but he does not believe in the shapeshifter. He wants to, so desperately it makes his chest ache, but the truth of its existence would be far worse than its mythos. Still, the shapeshifter is all he can think about on the train ride home, staring out t...