The anxious hush behind stage was beginning to be overpowered by the muffled buzz of the audience filling the seats in the auditorium on the other side of the curtain. It was nearly time.

My mind went to all manner of fairy tales and fantasy monsters that lurk in such places…wraiths and dementors and who knows what else. But I have always prided myself on being a rational person. There’s no such thing as monsters.

She walked through the hall and felt the floorboards creak beneath her feet, like the bones creaking inside her body. They were the same.

You needed to drink covfefe quickly, otherwise the resin would stick to the cup. Everyone knew this, but you’d still occasionally see some poor soul tearing their paper cup apart with their teeth and hungrily eating scraps of it to get at the residue.

His traditional straw hat was adorned with the long stalks of brightly colored gladiolas, making him look a bit ridiculous. But Rama was always the showman, and balancing authenticity with eccentricity was a key to attracting foreign shoppers. So ridiculousness was really a business tactic.

It was a beautiful, hefty-looking sundial, a deep greenish-turquoise color like ancient copper. It sat horizontally on a vine-choked concrete pedestal whose base had long since disappeared under years of leaf litter decomposing around it.

Olivia attempted to sigh but it involuntarily came out as a groan. So much for that nice bubble bath and bottle of wine she had planned for the evening. That scene in her mind evaporated and was replaced by an image of herself drinking lukewarm coffee and working from home late into the night.

She knew it was there, she could feel it staring back at her. She stared back defiantly, trying to will the monster to see she wasn’t afraid.

Morwenna was finally being assigned the mentor under whom she would apprentice for the next ten years, in order to become a witch. She was elated, as the Matching Ceremony was the rite of passage that signified her graduation from the Conservatoire. And she couldn’t wait to leave the school behind.

The thing I remember most vividly about it all is my bright red sneakers with the white laces I was wearing that day, as I looked down and saw them drifting above rooftops and treetops and tops of all kinds.

It gleamed in the distance, on the large concrete launchpad. The starship Terra IV was so massive you could see it for kilometers.