The Fountain

The boy lived in a quiet town where dreams walked barefoot and sails leaned lazily against the docks like old men waiting for stories. No one questioned it—how the sails rustled when you passed, how dreams hummed low lullabies as you slept. They were part of things, like wind or fog. But not everyone heard them speak. One morning, a dream named Elias tapped the boy on the shoulder. “Today,” he said, “you sail.” A tall sail beside him nodded, its canvas shoulders broad, its mast like a spine proud and unbending. The boy climbed in without a word. The sail whispered his name, caught the wind, and off they went—beyond the jetties, past the reach of land. Elias sat beside him, eyes full of skies not yet born. “This is where we become what you believe,” he said. By twilight, the sea shimmered with stories. The boy, now quiet with knowing, leaned into the sail’s embrace. Elias smiled and faded like mist. When the boy returned, the people said he looked older. But he hadn’t aged. He’d simply ...

The workshop breathed. Wood curled in shavings at its feet, metal whispered from the walls, and the old lathe thrummed like a sleeping heart. He moved through it like a priest in his chapel, not with reverence, but with a familiarity that bordered on love. Every drawer, every notch in the bench, every scarred mallet told a story—not of victory, not of fame, but of showing up. Day after day. Year after year. Until the room knew his rhythm better than he did. Outside, the world glared with blue screens and glass towers. Inside, the oil-stained rags still smelled of effort and time. He sanded the edge of a chair leg he had been shaping for weeks, watching the grain come alive under his hands. It was the kind of quiet miracle no one noticed anymore—a thing being made, slowly, honestly, without shortcuts. He liked that the wood did not care for noise. It only asked to be understood. Night pressed against the windows, and the overhead bulb hummed into life. In the reflection, he saw the line...

He arrived just after dusk, when the heat still clung to the pavement like a ghost reluctant to leave. No car, no dust trail, no footfall before or after. One moment the porch was empty; the next, there he sat on the top step, hat in his hands, watching the last of the sun burn out behind the trees. The dog didn’t bark, the wind didn’t shift, and the air didn’t so much as stir. He looked like he belonged, in the way some old trees do—without explanation The townsfolk whispered, as townsfolk do. Said he spoke gently but never of himself. Said he fixed things that no one could fix: a wristwatch frozen since ’89, a radio that hadn’t caught a station in years, a boy’s heart broken by too many goodbyes. He worked with quiet hands and eyes that saw too much. No one ever saw him eat, or sleep, or weep, though something behind his eyes made you think he remembered how. Then, one morning, he was gone. No goodbye, no sign, just the wind brushing the porch like it was trying to remember him. The ...

It happened on a Tuesday, just past five. The sunlight had settled into the kind of gold that made everything seem eternal—the porch rails, the wind-chimed hush of the breeze, the woman smiling across the table with a teacup in her hand. Time didn’t stop, exactly. It just softened. Slowed enough for him to feel the weight of her laughter settle gently in his chest. The dog at their feet sighed like even she understood: this was a moment worth remembering. No one said anything important. That’s what made it perfect. A nod, a sip, a shared glance that didn’t ask for anything more. The world, so often cruel in its rushing, had chosen mercy—for a breath, for a heartbeat. The air tasted like honeysuckle and something else he couldn’t name, something old and good. Later, they’d forget the date. They’d remember the angle of the sun, the glint of her earrings, the sound of a distant train winding through the trees. They wouldn’t know how to explain it to anyone else, not really. But both would...

He told her over coffee, under the flicker of a fluorescent bulb and the buzz of a tired ceiling fan, “I’m a cyborg.” She didn’t flinch. Maybe it was the way he said it—like someone confessing they couldn’t stand jazz or preferred cloudy days. His left eye twitched faintly, a shimmer of circuitry beneath freckled skin. “They replaced the parts that failed,” he added, shrugging, “and a few that hadn’t yet.” It wasn’t shame. Just fact. Outside, rain hit the window in soft metallic rhythms, like fingers drumming on steel. She looked at him, quiet for a beat, then said, “That’s why you don’t sleep.” He blinked. Once. Twice. “That’s part of it.” And then she laughed, not unkindly, more like a sound that said she’d already known, in some unspoken corner of her. She reached across the table, her hand warm over the artificial ridge of his wrist. “Well, I’m an insomniac,” she said. “Maybe we’re just built different the same way.” They sat in silence after that, the kind that doesn’t ask for any...

The last man wandered the skeletal remains of the city, where trees grew through windows and the wind played long-forgotten songs on rusted swing sets. He moved like a ghost with a beating heart, brushing dust from doorframes, straightening toppled mailboxes, whispering apologies to broken things. Each step was a liturgy for the world that had been. He carried a weathered notebook bound with twine, and in it he wrote memories like spells: the taste of cold lemonade, the sharp joy of catching fireflies, the way a lover once said his name in a whisper just before sleep. He wrote not to remember, but to keep something warm in the windblown hollows of his soul. At times he believed the city breathed with him—shadows curled in ways too gentle for coincidence. On the hundredth morning of his wandering, he found a candle flickering in the basement of a collapsed museum. A small circle of warmth in all that ruin. A girl sat near it, watching him like a ghost might. He said nothing at first, ju...

Death came to dinner wearing a borrowed tuxedo and a crooked bowtie. He knocked politely, shoes polished, scythe left respectfully at the door. The family, halfway through a pot roast, looked up as he entered and offered him the folding chair near the end. “You’re early,” Grandpa said, dabbing his lips with a napkin. “We were expecting you next Tuesday.” Death cleared his throat. “I got ahead of schedule,” he muttered, “traffic was light.” No one seemed particularly fazed. The dog sniffed his robe and lay back down. Aunt Trudy offered him a slice of lemon pie, which he accepted, despite never having had dessert before. “So what happens now?” asked Mom, pouring him sweet tea. “Do we all keel over or is it more of a raffle situation?” Death shrugged, mouth full of meringue. “Honestly, I just came for the company. Most people scream. This is nice.” They played dominoes after dinner, and Death lost every game. When the clock struck ten, he stood, bowed, and said he’d come back when the pie...

He was always chasing time. From the moment his feet hit the floor each morning, he moved with a kind of frantic precision—checking lists, scanning calendars, returning messages while brushing his teeth. To the world, he looked driven, successful, tireless. But inside, he felt the slow crush of a clock that never paused, a sense that no matter how fast he worked, he was always behind. At night, staring at the ceiling, he counted not sheep, but the things left undone. He told himself rest would come later—after the next milestone, the next win, the next invisible finish line. Now and then, time offered him quiet invitations—a boy with curious eyes at the fence, the soft hush of early morning light through the blinds, the way steam rose from coffee he never drank. He noticed them, felt the pull, but always turned away. There was too much to do. Even as his body grew weary and his spirit thin, he convinced himself this was what life demanded. The work mattered. The pace meant progress. So...

In the far corner of the old cemetery, where the polished stones gave way to weathered markers and then to none at all, the land sloped gently toward the river. That’s where the pauper’s field lay, unmarked but not unloved. No names, no dates, just earth and memory. But every spring, as if Heaven refused to forget what man had, wildflowers erupted in bloom. Coreopsis, Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod. They shimmered in the breeze, spilling joy across the forgotten like laughter returned to lips long stilled. Caretakers said nothing. They let the field be. Even when the rest of the grounds were trimmed and prim, the pauper’s patch stayed unruly and radiant. Children on school tours would ask why that part looked different, and the docent might say, “That’s where the poor are buried.” But the wildflowers whispered otherwise. They seemed to say,   Here lie stories, too. Here lies a father, a sister, a soul who sang once. And so the field became a kind of chapel. Not with pews or altars, b...