The dilapidated tower at the edge of the swamp looms over an unending sea of algae and deadwood. But the girl in the tower peers through her spyglass every day, waiting for the raft that took her father to the world of wheels and smog. She's an old withered hag now, still waiting by her spyglass, but still the same girl who wept the world away.

A bent-bodied fisherman takes his sailboat into the clouds at first dawn. He nets the waves of sunbeams that dive from the stars into the air, flopping and wriggling on the boatfloor once captured. The current carries him along as he feels the wind in his burnt hair, and he sells the streaks of daylight at the market in unending night. Someday, he will buy a new body, and take his sailboat over the horizon to the place promised to the unbroken, from where none have ever returned.

The circus tent in the meadow called to me every day I walked to school. It had been abandoned for years, yet still stood more or less intact with faded colors and frayed ropes. I never went in, for fear of being late. The other day I returned there after many years and found it still standing if a bit dustier, so I stepped within. There was a crowd gathered, impatiently waiting for the performance to start. Their faces, eyeless in shadow, looked to me with irritated scowls as I took my seat. The show was mid.

A lonely cat peered from a wall at passerbys for years on end, never accepting the offers of fish or small rodents offered its way. Weather would not budge it, and would often be found under mounds of snow in the winter, still watching everyone who passed by. One day however, it stood up, took a long stretch, tail held high, and then trounced off the wall. The wall crumbled soon after, allowing a world of possibilities in, with all the hopes and horrors that could be had.

Cruel pirates make blankets from the skins of cruel children, wrapping cruel men in them, shackled to beds made of bone. The pirates shush them softly and cradle their heads, and they are made whole again, with kindness only for those with blood on their hands and hunger in their black hearts.

There's an octopus that grants wishes in the ruined fountain in the ruined city built into the side of the ruined mountain. No, you may not have a wish. Wishes are precious things, forged from want, cooled in disappointment, and polished to a sheen from pure tragic loss. You cannot simply come here wishing as if beggars should ride, and should return to the cold terrible world until your tears shine like diamonds.

Crowds of fish in the sea sometimes stick their heads up above the still waters of the bay late into the night, and sing songs that only the dead can hear. The dead lament and cry out for warmth, but the fish can only sing and the dead can only dance.

The goblins in the forest tried to rob a bank once. The manager gave them lollipops and sent them on their way. They still count it among their greatest heists.

Somewhere in the dark between the stars are several chess boards spinning slowly into oblivion. Once in a while, a tiny meteorite strikes a piece sending it forward, always in conjunction with the rules of the game. Once, when white's loss became inevitable, an asteroid was hurled into the stars with all the rage of the cosmos. It hit something 65 million years ago.

A man was murdered and his body left within a tree. Over the years, the branches twisted into grasping hands and the bark contorted into a miserable face. One day, the tree began to move, slowly as trees do. Many centuries later, the tree stopped in a graveyard and planted itself over a particular plot. Ten winters later, the headstone crumbled in one night.

If love could save us all, then it probably would have by now. But if hate could do the same, then it probably would have, also. Perhaps we simply cannot be saved. Or maybe love and hate need something more than the sum of their parts.

I found myself awoken the other night, by children playing in the snow. I watched them making a snowman until I realized they were covering one of them with snow. I tried to scream but I could not, so I simply stood there and watched, as the snowman came to life, and they escorted him away into the woods.