loneliness
— A lonely guard dragon, hardened by years of servitude, finds unexpected companionship when a starving fox pup steals food and curls up beside him for warmth.
— A sentient radio watches helplessly as carnivorous moonflowers take over the island city of Floracion, turning its inhabitants into mindless carriers of the infection.
— A child imagines friends attending a funeral in Los Angeles, writes herself a letter from them, then greets their actual return with the comfort of her own fiction.
— A clock hanging on the wall in the middle of the night ticks steadily through darkness, lonely without anyone awake to ask the time.
— A solitary dinner becomes surreal when the narrator realizes their guest across the table is actually their own reflection in a mirror.
— A thirteen-year-old questions the contradiction between flinching at physical closeness and yearning for connection, wondering if intimacy is possible without touch.
— A pantoum explores the isolation of depression when others dismiss your pain, repeating lines that circle like the thoughts they describe.
— An ambassador without mind or face sits in a walled place, contemplating his non-existence and the walls that might have hope where he has none.
— A girl waits in a sweltering car while her mother fights with broken gas pumps, her stream-of-consciousness revealing the death of her brother Joel and her parents' bitter divorce.
— After Earth's population flees to Mars, an eight-year-old boy is accidentally left behind. Eight years later, on his sixteenth birthday, he discovers another forgotten teenager.