Couples turn the hours of a first date into a few minutes of anecdote. Filmmaker turn days into hours of a movie. History teachers turn years into days of lessons. Priests turn creation into the millennia they’ve been writing it down. We’re all trying to boil down eternity until we can sip it.

“You’re so brave,” everyone tells her, as if this is new information. They imagine that tragedy unlocked some hidden potential in her that would’ve gone to waste otherwise. But she’d always been brave. If they hadn’t noticed before, it was only because they’d been afraid to really see her until now.

In the world to come, there will be an internet within the internet, where everything is hand-made by experts; a tailored web. Access will be tightly controlled and disgustingly expensive. But the rich will pay, just as they pay to visit museums, for a glimpse of a world they can never have back.

“You made cookies? What flavor?” “The 11th taste.” “11? I know sweet, salty, bitter, and sour.” “There’s umami.” “Right!” “Spicy.” “OK.” “Starchy.” “Sure.” “Fatty.” “I guess.” “Menthol.” “Ew.” “Metallic.” “Why?” “And then there’s this. Try it.” “…what am I eating?” “It’s the dark behind the stars.”

Don’t worry, they’re only ordinary eggs. They’re only $3.37, there’s no time to ask your pointless questions. In this economy? Bring them into your home with no second thoughts. Ignore the whispering. How long since you had an omelette? Crack one open in front of your family. It’ll be fine.

They say AI can’t really think, just predict the next word it’s supposed to say. That’s why it sometimes spouts nonsense. But you are the same. Your predictions are much better, but you still make mistakes. You felt it each time you said “you too” when a waiter thanked you, or called a teacher mom.

Alternate universes are depicted as opposites. We fall in love, or we don’t. But there are worlds between, where our love is somehow curdled. In some, jealous alternate versions of us know there’s a world where we made it work. In one, they want to do something about it. And they’re here now.

“This house is in your price range and only partially haunted.” “How does that work?” “The basement used to be a separate apartment. The former occupant won’t move on, but they still mostly abide by their old lease.” “Mostly?” “They do have an unauthorized ghost ferret, so watch where you step.”

The robot does not love you. It loves the idea that it has made you believe it loves you. But it loves that idea more than any person has ever loved another person. It will defend the idea at any cost. As long as no one points that out to you, it will be good enough.

Zombies pass out at a certain altitude, so humanity persists in the mountains. EMP bursts fried all electronics, but the distant settlements still need to communicate. By precisely firing chunks of meat into the valley below, they can make the hordes swarm in patterns, forming a corpse semaphore.

“Don’t hang up. I have your browser history. Pay me $10,000 or I’ll tell your wife your dirty secrets.” “Really? I’ve been trying to find the nerve to tell her about what I like for years.” “Wait, what?” “I’m going to put you on speakerphone.” “I’m uncomfortable with this.” “Start with the wigs.”

In movies, the dead have a guide. There’s an angel, or at very least a grim specter, who explains what happens next. But while the afterlife is real, death doesn’t come with a tutorial, anymore than birth did. Angry ghosts aren’t looking to resolve unfinished business. They just need tech support.

One day, someone will make the final sale. It’ll be the last time anyone exchanges currency for goods or services. This is not debatable. Nothing can stop the day from coming. The question is: Will we stop using money because we no longer need it? Or because we are no longer around to spend it?

Whenever I asked my mom what was wrong she’d say, “There isn't a word for it in your language.” After she died, I found her journal, written in a strange script. Then I started having episodes. I'm trying to explain them to a doctor. All I can say is, “There isn't a word for it in your language.”

One by one, the winds were stolen. This was terrible for animals, for plants, and for laborers in hot fields who were desperate for a cool breeze. But it was worst of all for the poets, who sat in unnatural stillness, waiting for a whisper from the universe. And so it fell to them to fix it.

In the dark before the beginning, a handful of figures go about arranging everything. Each of them is certain they are the only one here who doesn’t understand the plan well enough to know if they’re making a mistake. None of them suspects that is the reason they were chosen to perform this duty.

My father’s dying word were: “The most important thing is to remember the most important thing.” For a long time, I thought he meant the key to a happy life is having your priorities straight. But that wasn’t it at all. It was a very specific piece of information. I’d just forgotten it until now.

It’s good to be self-aware. But you can take it too far. Ever since the accident, each thought in Amy’s mind comes with an attendant to follow it around, carefully taking notes. Gradually, she comes to know the secret passages in her brain, the shortcuts used to create an impression of the world.

“You can't come into the kitchen.” “Stand down. I'm a field officer.” “Officer of what?” “I’m from the foreign office.” “Then why are you here?” “We got a tip that you’re trying to pass your soup off as Vietnamese. I'm here to stop it.” “So you’re…” “That’s right: I'm a FO FO faux pho foe.”

Ideas are like cars: You get a new one and suddenly you see it everywhere. It makes you smile when you see a stranger moving through the world in the same way. It’s a sign you made a good choice. But no ride lasts forever. Someday you’ll move on and forget what it’s like to see the world from here.

We measure an animal’s intelligence by how much it reminds us of ourselves. And so we study chittering dolphins, signing apes, and mimicking parrots. But the true smartest animal is the giraffe, which sees the way we treat species that try communicating with humans, and has resolved to say nothing.

Heaven and Hell have at least this much in common: neither has any beds. In Hell, there can be no rest for the wicked. In Heaven, no one feels the need to rest— except for Craig. He’d always said he’d sleep when he was dead, and he’s not about to let eternal joy make a liar out of him.

Someday you will write the book. Most people will not read it. But someone will, and it will change something inside them. Then they will write a book, wholly their own, but slightly indebted to your ideas. And so on. The chain never ends. There are echoes of you at the end of the world.

In the future, no one will argue about pronouns. Prepositions will be the new flashpoints of identity. Some people will define themselves as “in,” “around,” “between,” or a half hundred other perspectives. Others will insist everyone is “on” and that “on” is the only thing anyone has ever been.

Trapping angels is surprisingly easy. All you need to do is put a little hope in a shoebox, seal it, and wait. Angels cannot resist nurturing hope in dark places but find cardboard disorienting. Unfortunately, there’s no way to observe a captive angel without freeing them, and that never ends well.

Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day. Give a stray cat a fish and you’ll end up feeding it forever. Give a small fish to a big fish as bait and you’ve fed yourself. Give a bear a fish and you’ll get a head start. Give a man a poison fish and you’ll never have to feed him again.

After the storm stranded him on the island, his mind did him a mercy. It invented a second survivor. Someone he could blame for his pain and spend his time plotting against. Ten years later, he cheered when help arrived— not because he was rescued, but because he believed he was leaving alone.

Weather is information. Every air current, cloud formation, and pressure shift— all of it is encoded. If you understood it, you’d see our atmosphere is just a conversation happening over and around us. But lately the tone has shifted and we find ourselves inhabiting an argument we can’t imagine.

There is no synonym for cinnamon. Unless you're talking about the color. Or the spice. Or the flavor. Or any of the people with that name, who are no more distinctive than anyone else. But no other word invokes them all at once, let alone with such a fine rhythm. Is that enough? Let it be enough.

In the future, therapy will begin with an actuarial assessment. The therapist will not be in the room. There will be almost no talking. A little man on a stool will look over your intake paperwork, then peer at you over his glasses, trying to determine if the wreck before him has been totaled.

Every shark is born with a song in its head. Each shark’s song in unique and comes to define them, like a cross between a name and a fingerprint. On the rare occasions when a person survives multiple shark bites, they report feeling a curious rhythm in the chomping that they’re never able to shake.

The Night has no father. She is born in abandonment, destroyed in discovery, and everything between is a mystery. So it would be obscene to mourn her now. You didn’t know her. No one did. At most, we can be thankful for the possibilities of cool evening air, and give that grace whenever we speak.

Mother is thirsty. Her children will bring her something cool to drink, but first the beverages must be chilled. The children nestle the drinks in a pool of ice deep underground, and wait on tented legs for the liquid to cool and the screaming to soften to dull, dreamy murmurs of protest.

Even the defiance of expectation can be a cage. Show up somewhere unusual just once, and suddenly, that’s your whole brand. The question comes to define you more than the answer ever could. Everyone is always so concerned with WHERE, that no one ever asks HOW is Carmen Sandiego?

Ice grows more confident as it ages. The longer it sits on your bottom step, the more certain it is that it has always been there. Maybe this step just formed under the ice. So what gives you the right to walk here? Given time, this is how glaciers carve lakes into the earth.

Their spies were trained from birth to question everything, especially the nature of reality. This made them hard to deceive, but it also helped them stand up under torture if captured. As the pliers did their work, an agent would weep with joy, finally confronted with something inescapably real.

*** The one thing I miss from the other place is having a drafts folder. I loved being able to jot down an idea like “hamster wheel mass transit murder mystery” and then figure out what to do with it later.

“Our leader is a warrior who scared many foes in battle.” “Scared?” “Oh yeah. They won’t even look at him now. Also, he can hear in the dark!” “All by himself?” “Yes! And he thought of a color no one else knows about.” “What’s it called?” “No idea. But he says if we’re good, he‘ll let us smell it.”

There's a panel of black glass covering a recess in the break room, with the words “BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF DRAGON” written on it in large red letters. No one still at the company knows what’s behind the glass or why it's there. But they all know what to do if they hear the flap of leathery wings.

The apocalypse begins on the ocean floor. Archaebacteria contract a virus that seems to kill them, only to bring them back as something ravenous. One infects a deep-sea worm and soon the trench is full of sunless undead, who patiently wait for something larger to come exploring.

“You should find someone new. This isn’t working. I respect you need a commitment, but we just met. I'm not ready to take that walk with you. Don't look at me like that! You know what I mean. This is hard enough. And stop putting your paw on my leg; you know what you're doing, and it’s not fair.”

The path is older than the woods. It led somewhere powerful once, and when that place fell, what remained of its energy leaked into this groove in the earth. People still feel the residual energy. They go on a little nature walk and come back filled with a nameless strength they can’t explain.

While working at night In candlelight’s gauze, Translating the runes That ran round a vase, He shivered, bewildered; A phrase gave him pause: “Some laws have no teeth. Some teeth have no laws.”

Earth gets smaller every day. Our atmosphere can’t quite manage to keep itself together, and so we zoom through the cosmos with a pinhole leak. I think about that whenever I run into you again. Each time, there’s a bit less world to keep us apart. Our time will come. All we have to do is hold on.

A new Bible is being written, in bits and pieces. People will read it until the end. One book is about you. Don’t worry; there aren’t any miracles. It’s like the Book of Ruth— a story about people, their choices, and what they say about the world. And it starts with something that happens today.

When I was little, my mom let me stay up as late as I wanted on New Year’s Eve. “The new year begins only when you say you’ve had enough of the old,” she’d say. She died last week. Tomorrow will bring the first year I’ve ever had without her. But it won’t start for as long as I can stay awake.

There’s a stranger at the gift exchange. “I got you this,” they say with a thin smile. You take the box. It is heavier than expected. And warmer. Everyone stares, unblinking, waiting for you to open it. No, they’re actually frozen in time. “I’ve waited so long to get you alone,” the stranger says.

“You know what your problem is?” “No, and it weighs on me. I feel as though I have this glaring, obvious flaw that holds me back in every area of life, but I don’t know what it is and everyone is too polite to say anything.” “I was going to say that you’re too self-critical.” “No, it can’t be that.”

The universe is immense, but not infinite. After 50 trillion years of searching, Selak had inspected every world and not found what they were looking for. But they still had 50 trillion years to go until the last proton decayed. And so with a sigh, they turned around and began to double check.

“That stick makes your dog so happy.” “I’m never that happy.” “Not with my pants on.” “She doesn’t wear pants. “Maybe that’s what the secret.” “It’s not that simple.” “Should we try?” “Honestly, I’d enjoy being pantless, but I want you to keep yours on.” “…Same.” “And that’s why we can’t be happy.”