I still hear Mom’s voice when I pass by Creepy Pete’s alley. He’d peek his scraggly head over the wall, stinking of booze and cigarettes, and say, “Wanna see something interesting?”
“Nothing interesting about his penis,” Mom would say. “Keep walking.”
But last night, I thought: You know what? I DO want to see something interesting. So I stepped onto a crate and peered over the wall …
What I saw changed me. Below the eyeline, Creepy Pete was a marvelous eldritch creature! Below his sallow false face, another face, model-gorgeous, beckoned. Lower still, tentacles undulated. Iridescent scales shone in colors too vivid to be real.
Mom was wrong. Pete’s penis was very interesting.
Love,
Elly
I woke to rumbling and raced to my balcony to see The Mountain shrouded in red mist. Was it lava? Should I flee? I watched neighbors jump into cars and jam the roads. I made a coffee.
Tahoma’s ominous mist crested a hill, but in its wake was no fire-ravaged hellscape—I saw trees as tall as Redwoods, verdant with new growth. Buildings the mist touched dissolved into mossy hills; bears emerged yawning from hidden caves. Cars exploded into conspiracies of ravens, gaggles of geese, boils of hawks. People morphed into deer and foxes and badgers; roads bloomed with wildflowers.
The eruption will reach me soon. I should be afraid, but TBH I’m excited to start my new life as a marmot.
Love,
Leena
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