#5sentenceproject

The voice of God, or a saint, or a demon - who could tell - thundered across the cavernous waiting room in heaven, calling his name, reciting his many sins, and banishing him with a final shout, so he was blown out the doors and sent hurtling through space until he crashed down in the middle of the rubble of his house. Everything was a blur, but he remembered an explosion and thought of the shady men whose money he’d taken at the gambling table the night before, who’d promised revenge as they slinked away. It was Halloween, and the man’s friends were surely at the party, unaware of his death, probably wondering where he was. His body was horribly disfigured, so he stole a sheet off a laundry line, cut two holes for eyes, and made his way to the party, thinking of every time he’d stacked a deck, every time he’d stolen a pot. Now he silently took his place at the gambling table, nodding at the vampire, the zombie, the nurse, and the cowboy, hoping to pay every debt by midnight and try his hand at heaven again.

Even as my lungs begin to burn, my heart shatters, for all I’ve ever done is to love her in my own, pathetic way. Each night when she walks home in her grocer’s apron, threading her way along the canals, I’ve leapt from rooftop to rooftop, keeping watch over her perfect raven curls. Tonight I tripped and kicked a tile loose, sending it plummeting into the water, and when she noticed me, she shrieked and ran. I scrambled after her, arriving at the edge of the next roof just in time to see her twist her ankle and flail into the canal. Without a moment’s hesitation I dove down to save her, but now her cold hands are clamped around my throat, keeping me under while she screams for help.

The slender tree sways and crackles in distress as his colleague shoves him, growling, “It’s either you or me.” Only six months ago the two of them had labored side by side, creating a zombie army to strike fear in the country’s heart and bend it to their control. But the plan had gone wrong almost instantly when their undead horde ripped open the bars of their cells. Their entire team of scientists had fled into the wilderness, picked off one by one, until the last dozen of them had clambered into these saplings while the zombies lurched into the field. Now the branch snaps, and he plummets to the ground, feeling the cold snow for just a moment before he is devoured.

She abandons the shards of statue and tries to run back to her tent, but her feet crumble away at the ankles, and when she falls, her hands disintegrate into dust. She had only made it to the mouth of the tomb in the volcano when she dropped the ancient relic and it shattered. Tremors shake the earth, and she screams as bones break throughout her body. She had been desperate enough to believe the legends about the healing properties of the statue, but now all she can think about is her daughter dying from a rare cancer on the other side of the world. Engulfed in the brittle remains of her body, she waits for the volcano to bury all that is left of her.

All he wants is the perfect mannequin to keep in his basement and display the pretty dresses he makes. Flying down from the chandelier in the restaurant, Myrtle remembers how he had cursed himself when the needle slipped into her neck. Here he is, waiting until the blushing woman looks away long enough for him to slip the powder into her martini. Myrtle settles into the woman's body, drops her napkin, and while he stoops for it, switches the glasses. Later that night he opens his eyes under the flickering bulb as the two women fasten the first dress on him.

Her husband lunges at her ankle as she dances through the air and hisses, "We talked about this before we left the house!" In the ballroom, the starched waiters had been refilling the guests' crystal champagne flutes for hours. At dinner she had stifled yawns as the string quartet droned on, but now her feet begin to lift off the floor, and after her second lap around the room, her head grazes the chandelier. All she had to do was flash an artificial smile and say, "What a lovely party!" to absorb the intoxication from each bewildered guest. Her husband gives up and rushes over to his boss, saying, "Why don't we get some fresh air?" as she delicately steps over the heads of the upper class.

I stumble around the dark, barren room, breathing hard, trying to remember how I got there, while random bits of black-and-white pictures swirl around my head. "Calm down," I tell myself as my breath makes clouds in front of me, "this must be a dream," but suddenly, the bright floating fragments coalesce into an old man with a bald head and a chain around his neck, and I gasp as I recognize my father. "I'm sorry I left you," he says, pulling a locket from the chain; "this is your way out of here." As he disintegrates into a thousand pixels of light, I see a door on the far side of the room, and the key in the locket fits the lock. I open the door and wake up on a table in a lab, and I struggle against the restraints while the scientists try to figure out how I got back.

As water drips from the reddish-gray stalactites in the cave under the extinct volcano, we are inserting the sharpened hollow nail into our captive's skull to extract his teleporting abilities. After three generations before us failed, we finally found the elusive teleporter, crawled under his house to cut the power, and then broke into the den where he had been watching TV with his family. Through our night-vision goggles we found him in the darkness, opened the lid of our containment tube, and sucked him inside so he couldn't teleport away before we got him back to the lair, while the rest of his family crashed around in the dark, yelling, "Did they get him? Where is he?" Now, our power extractor seems to be malfunctioning because nothing is happening, when suddenly the entire cave begins to shake, and a million little pieces of light coalesce and flicker like a television screen to form the man's family. We reach for our stun guns, but the family waves their hands and explains through their laughter, "You got the wrong guy, but you can have him because he wasn't ever going to be one of us anyway."