Square Peg loves Lightbulb

So when are you moving out? You said last night you wanted to move out, Lightbulb says.
Square Peg says he doesn't really want to move out, that he was just desperate.
Square Peg wishes things would be different is all, but Square Peg's mind is all BSOD and he couldn't describe different to save a life.
Lightbulb says a few more things.
Square Peg has to leave for work.
Traffic is light.

Square Peg loves Obsidian

Square peg is driving obsidian to the slaughterhouse. It's still dark outside, a November dark that swallows headlights and streetlights, and the windows keep fogging up.
Obsidian is crying and they're stuck behind a truck in the slow lane and traffic keeps passing them. Square peg says, "it's all my fault."
He remembers a time back in college sitting in a middle lane at a red light in the passenger seat of a friend's Barracuda, stoned, while fire trucks passed them on either side, red lights flashing and sirens everywhere.
Now that's getting passed.
This is nothing here, square peg thought.
"I just have the bad habit of rushing you in the morning," square peg said. "I've done that all your life. I have to stop doing that." He tried to explain.
Obsidian kept crying. She cried all the way to the slaughterhouse.

Night walk

Where is this going?
I sleep at odd hours, to avoid your dreams; I'm not usually out at this time. It's midnight and I'm surprised to see some of the neighbors are still up, their house lights still burning.
But the streets are empty as I head out of the village. I stagger a little as I walk down the sidewalk.

Safe

We're all doctors here on the moon.

Apery

Butterneck. Jesus.
She just laughed and finished cleaning her revolver and put it back into the box.
You've been talking to my mom, I said.
She locked the box and threw away the key, which was good because just that morning I'd gotten out of bed and made my coffee in the dark, heavy with the knowledge that if I had a gun, I'd stand in front of my easel and finally get something interesting on the canvas.

Sample

Just that morning I'd been complaining to my wife about having no friends; then of course three sent me nice emails at work, and now here I was having sushi with another friend.

"I don't know why," she said. "I just enjoy humiliating people. Is that the word? Humiliate? Insult, whatever. It's just the way I am."

If it weren't a workday

If it weren't a workday and if you weren't sick I'd build you an igloo.

Women in cages

Blake ran the Zipper: sometimes the throttle, but mostly he locked people into the cages and let them out again when it was over. In his camper he had a whole shoebox full of crack pipes and hash pipes and so on that had fallen out of people's pockets. He picked them out of the grass or gathered them from the cages after the people got out.

You can owe me

he thought she would ask directions
and considered flirtatious answers
she was pretty

Tremor

In that apartment up there a young bank clerk read an architecture glossy, and in that one across there a DJ drank Cointreau on ice with a sales clerk from the "Gap" and brushed a manicured index finger along the downy hairs of her ear until she shivered. Next door a man read a box of medicine a Chinese man had given him.

Young Horses

"It's painless," Luiz said to me. "That's the best thing about it." He was standing in the street in front of "Buck's" tavern at two-thirty in the morning, pressing a Saturday-night special to his right temple. "The bullet's in your brain before you feel the pain."

Blood like a sunset after a sandstorm

That stapler on your desk how do you know it's real? Touch it. You can feel it. Someone is watching you from behind your neck prickles. You can feel it. Now that we have the physics out of the way I will tell you where it usually lives: it lives in the walls.

Suits

Pass him on the street and if you notice him at all, he's just an average guy, forties, grey hair, likely as not in a dark suit, ambling along somewhere, in no hurry because he left at least half an hour early to get where he's going and has plenty of time. But he has a secret.

Good way to catch tortoises

1. Learn to play the harp

Arles, 1888

Paul Gaugin: The light here rocks. Doesn't the light here rock? Have you ever seen light like that?
Vincent van Gogh: Lalalala.

One evening he realized he was a ghost

It was twilight and it was raining lightly. Cloud cover was thick and black but thinned towards the western horizon. It is essential to the story that you envision the light conditions this produces:

I have an enemy. No, I have two enemies.

She stopped in front of the crafts shop, examining something in a display basket out in front of the store. I wondered if she planned to swipe it. I walked around her.

Mrs. Marshall

Mrs. Marshall burns a gram of hash in the palm of her hand, catching the smoke in an inverted drinking glass. This is where I realize she's an android, because she doesn't wince.

You don’t know nothing

He cries when he cuts his finger on a catfood can. He don’t know nothing about crying. He should just shut up.

Wa-wa

I finished my coffee and threw the styrofoam cup across the room. It spiraled in a perfect arc from my hand to the trash can, but hit the rim. The lid popped off and the milk foam I hadn't been able to suck out of the cup sprayed across the wall like a spurt of beige arterial blood in a detective show.

Starfish

A million dollars is a sadly small amount next to the ten million that got away, but it’s still a million dollars.

How to enter the forest

A good thing to do, try this, a good thing to do is lay on the floor. Lie there and listen to whatever. The traffic, the hum of electrical devices charging on your nightstand, your even, calm heartbeat.

Spruce

A seed falls on scree, finds soil, germinates. A deer walks past or, this being higher up the slope, near the timber line – a mountain goat climbs past, grazing on spruce seedlings. It misses this one. Profiting from chances such as this, the tree grows straight up for three hundred years.

Yakshi

"Only if you insist," I said to Elisabeth. Way up high silver needles dissected the sky and contrails dissolved into mist and faded.

Catfood and milk

He went to the local shop for milk and catfood. The new sign read "supermarket" but was the same Greissler it had been for a hundred years, typical of any Austrian village: a mom-and-pop market selling everything from mousetraps to lottery tickets, booze and cigarettes, meat and bread.

Ice and violins

"Look out the window," Fiona said from her highchair.
"Eat your cereal, honey," Pendelton said. He didn't say that he'd looked out the window eleven times already this morning.

Electric catfish

After the thing with my neighbor and his dog I slept in my office again. I was tired, and after the thing with my neighbor's dog it seemed like a good idea.

This girl walks into a bar

For a brief time I thought it would be good to hang out in my neighborhood bar and pretend to be like everyone else there.

Wind

The hummingbird feeder was empty again. I was standing in the kitchen looking at the empty hummingbird feeder hanging from the eaves outside the window. It was swinging slightly in a breeze that was beginning to pick up, swinging slightly and I was looking through the drawers for the sugar to mix some sugar water when I heard him in the next room, whispering again.

How to be eaten by a tiger

First, you go into the woods with your small child. You have to go at just the right time of day, late afternoon, and you must make no sound; you might have to remind the child to be quiet, no talking.