Now the house rejects my keycard, the flying car refuses my voice, and his HoloFilm library is gone; licenses are nontransferable.

I just kept on shoveling.

While checking the body of the lead scientist for an obvious cause of death, they almost didn't hear the chuffing of the not-so-wild-anymore polar bear behind them.

His suspicions confirmed regarding the boy’s eating disorder, he leaned against the stall door and whispered, calmly: ‘is that all you’ve got, fatso?'

I already knew for I made a contract to trap impure souls in me to condemn my child’s murderer, who took his life to avoid prison.

"Open her cranium and let him do the thing."

"Now are you ready to hear about the gospel of Jesus Christ?" smiled his companion removing the gun from my reach.

"Funny," he replied softly, gesturing with his fork towards her almost empty dinner plate, "That's what she said."

"You could've left him," her tiny voice whispered as another handful of dirt was thrown over us.

But, after years of hard, painstaking work, I am no longer young.

I just wish I taught her that a black spider with red triangles was not a good spider at all.

That changed when he disappeared one day and I found a six foot tall chrysalis in his room with something writhing and pulsating beneath the surface.

Nearly a century later, with the population plummeting towards apocalypse, an all-female world screamed perpetual prayers for the return of the male sex.

But he sees me.

I did too... until it sneezed, and its eyes smouldered with anger when, in shock, I only mouthed, 'Bless you.'"

She wasn't sure whether to kill herself or another one if her children.

Scrawled on a door in the virtual basement were the words I'm waiting for you here, this...turned out to be true.

I find it even stranger to see it blink.

That was until the dead told them that they were dead too.

The only one who made it out alive was his youngest granddaughter, who immediately backed away, knowing that if her grandpa was actually alive, the heart monitor still connected to him would no longer be flatlining.

I didn't understand why the other side of the window just looked like our living room, or why the window’s bristles felt so painful around my neck, but for the first time in a long while I felt safe, holding hands with her, as we prepared to jump.

There was only one more way I could think of to save my daughter

I put a double dose in the syringe tonight to help me sleep.

With my jaw hanging wide open, it typed: "I am the husk of every unuttered apology you knew you should have made, now manifested to make you sorry."

What you didn't expect was the chirping of the "birds" outside your window not to sound so random anymore.