Metaphysical Furniture

  Firefly Night  by Stephanie Analah Chapter 17 – The Rule Nobody Explains The oldest rules are usually the ones nobody can explain. Don't whistle in a theater. Throw spilled salt over your shoulder. Never open an umbrella indoors. And don’t get me started on the “unwritten rules” of baseball. Ask people why they follow those rules and they’ll tell they that’s just how it is. Ask them how many still follow them anyway and you'll understand something important about being human. By Friday afternoon I'd interviewed children, parents, retirees, and one psychologist who kept jars of summer smells on her bookshelf.Every one of them knew the same rule. Never stay until full dark. Not one of them could tell me why. I found Arthur McCreary sitting beneath the same old maple tree outside his house. He was repairing a fishing reel with the kind of patience usually reserved for watches and marriages. "I've got another question,” I told him before even sitting do...

  grave of fireflies by Masuk Nourin Day 16 – The Window Doors exist because someone intends to go somewhere. Windows exist because someone hopes to see something worth looking at. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they simply reflect whoever happens to be standing on the wrong side of the glass. By Thursday afternoon and after too many sleepless nights over this case, I'd stopped thinking of Laurel Lane as a neighborhood. It behaved more like an archive. Something—what, I wasn’t sure—was being stored here. Memory, maybe? But what memory? And whose? Somewhere beneath its sidewalks and freshly poured driveways, fifteen years of ordinary life had settled into the ground like rainwater. During the Firefly Hours, some of it rose back to the surface. The trick, I was beginning to suspect, wasn't finding the memories. It was avoiding the temptation to step inside them. Dr. Calico Verde arrived carrying a camera a battered 35mm Nikon that had clearly lived a full life before ei...