Exacting Hearts

Look, you have to understand, I was a hopeless romantic. I guess it was all the weepy movies my mother watched during my childhood, but I thought that it would be a magical moment when I met the eyes of someone and music would play and all that. But obviously it wasn’t going that way, so I gave in and signed up for online dating. I answered all their questions, I gave them all the info they needed, and then they told me.

I didn’t really need to know exactly how many people were more emotionally stable than me, thanks…

A Median Parent

Elizabeth was not your average girl. The fact that she would chide me for using the term average when I probably meant median or mode, that gives you a rough idea of the sort of girl she was.

Not that it made her any less of a daughter. It actually was easy to raise her, she didn’t play sport or do much of anything except travel between home, school and Melanie’s house to study.

She was practically the perfect girl. Until I found out she and Melanie were more than just good friends.

Then she was the perfect young woman.

Accidental Kisses

It started with a kiss.

Wasn’t meant to be anything special, just a peck on the cheek to thank her for having us over for dinner. But she turned and our lips met.

That would have been it too, but we both felt the spark, the moment we moved back and laughed awkwardly, we both knew what was about to happen.

We managed to hold off for a few weeks, but eventually we ended up at a party together, our partners busy.

Excuses were offered, reasons given, we both said that our marriages were important.

They ended with a kiss.

Mistaking Slenderman

The Internet has a lot to answer for. For every good thing it has done, there’s a problem it has caused. Allowing people from across the world to meet and share common interests and ideas is all well and good, but some ideas aren’t ones you want shared.

Take Slenderman, for instance. You know him, everyone online has at least heard of him. Tall, pale white skin, no face, black tentacles, hunts people and children… You know the guy.

Except that, well, you don’t.

For starters, he’s not a guy. I mean, the concept of gender is somewhat irrelevant here, Slenderman is as much male as ‘he’ is a babysitter. And how you visualise Slenderman is not what it actually looks like, it’s merely the nearest thing our puny brains can comprehend to it’s true form.

But the main thing people get wrong is that they see him as a threat, as the bad guy. That’s not true at all.

There are many, many creatures out there looking to take you, take your children. Horrors beyond your and my understanding. Slenderman you can at least visualise in some form, there are others as far beyond your grasp as nuclear physics are beyond the grasp of a housecat.

And Slenderman is trying to protect you, protect the children. It is the good guy here, it’s trying to get you to run away from the danger, but we keep running from it, and into the grasp of the true evil. It’s very sad.

But I hope, one day, you and everyone else will see the truth. Slenderman was very kind to me when we met. I mean, sure he took my eye, but it was a very apologetic about it, I’m quite sure.

Now hold still, this will only hurt a little.

Pawning

Sometimes, he felt sorry for the pawns.

After all, they were people, most of them trying to get out of the gutter that he had put them in. They ran his drug labs, walked his streets, attacked who he said to attack, take the rap when he ordered them to.

He treated them as nicely as they deserved, and protected them to a degree. They were his pawns, and as their king, he felt some duty to protect them.

But then when he realised that he was just another pawn for a queen above him… Then he stopped feeling sorry.

New Message From Gronak! (#4)

“Greetings Fellow Human! May Gronak ask question at you?”

I thought you… Never mind, what?

“I ask more question about thing we call love.”

Of course you do.

“Why give up love?”

Uh, some people have been burnt by others and-

“No, I refer to when someone let love go do other activity away from someone.”

Oh that. Well, you love them so much you want them to be happy, so you let them go be happy.

“But then someone is non-happy.”

Love means you sometimes are unhappy.

“Why do it then?”

Without it, humanity dies.

“Right.”

*Gronak is offline.*

Unheroic

One minute, Glory and Ayoneman were battling Spacee and Timee in front of their black hole generator, the next, all four were sucked into, well, a black hole, it appeared.

The rest of the Custodians of Earth quickly rushed to the machine. The three smartest minds on the planet worked quickly on the problem.

Within 10 minutes they’d worked out the wormhole induction that had occurred, and after 5 more minutes, they reversed it.

Glory and Ayoneman reappeared, their clothes tattered. The geniuses explained that time dilation often occurred, minutes here, years there.

Glory and Ayoneman didn’t mention the children.