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Capt. Futvoye Halfnight, D.D.S, popped his dropped eye into its socket. "Ahh." What he saw ahead was not reassuring. "Ohh..." A great gnarly man was leaning against a tree and staring at him. He was naked but for the skin of a tiger which he wore nonchalantly over one shoulder.

"You pilgrims should carry rearview mirrors. You leave an inventory of lost lesions and dropped appendages all over the landscape," said the man.

Two of Swords

Teaberry Balcom held the marble between a thumb and forefinger. He squeezed; the marble dripped like an overripe grape. There was a roll of distant thunder and an aurora borealis blazed in the cloudless midday sky. “Oops, too tight,” he said.

“Hold on a minute. You're pretty much like a god, right? Then how come you have to use FedEx to deliver your miracles?”

“Competitive bidding.”

The Diplodocus Effect

It was Sunday, after their customary turkey dinner, and the Kunkle family was gathered around their living room radio. The Kunkles had fallen asleep in various poses of cultural uplift, for they had popped in their earplugs to keep the music out.

They turned the radio up loud, for the composer lived two blocks down and one house over from the Kunkle family and it would have been rude not to listen.

Magnetic Betty

A tall insect with feathery antennae and a nervous tic paused before the mirror of a machine plastered with multicolored blurbs announcing it as a dispenser of a popular brand of chewing gum. The walking nightmare spoke to its human companion, “Harry, you wait with the bags; there’s a good fellow.”

Evenly modulated tones carried the force of a command. The pair wore the colors of Adepts of the Fourteenth Circle.

The Beewolf

Ben Neptune saved his potato water. No waste in Ben’s crib. Even in death, Ben looked to the future. Be prepared. Fingers of frost joined in a tight lacing of intertwining branches across the surface of the stewpot.

"Had he been depressed?" they would ask. Depression, suicide resulting, would appear on the coroner’s report. Case closed.

The Moose in the Noösphere

"Where is the bear when the bear is not where the bear should be?" asked Frankie Jelinek's husband with sweet reasonableness. "Ever think about that?"

"No," said Frankie, "I don't. Wherever teddy bears go. Maybe a picnic." Supernatural phenomena were not in the baby care books. Yet...

The Last Teddy Bear