A man in a suit was brought by a man in a lab coat to a boy standing in front of an array of spinning cylinders and spheres, and the boys hands were held out in front of him. His fingers were the unusual thing, because they branched out like a tree branches, and he could not move, for his fingers had grown delicately into the array of edged spinning obstacles, and indeed his fingers were branched deep into the structure, and yes if he would so much as tremor from a sneeze his hands would be torn to shreds.

A person joins a war, and gets stuck on the other side, the side of the enemy. But the enemy is an encroaching mass of mercury like boundary, and it is slowly creeping along. The sides fight. Each side builds up an army along the mass. When they attack the weapons strike through the thin layer, setting off counter and counter-counter attacks between the troops on either side of the boundary. Meanwhile in the country, they aren’t paying much attention to what is going on at the front. Joe say’s there’s more on that line than two folks fight’n. They say it is the strangest thing they ever saw, with things common as anything, which are so impossible that no one could possibly believe it. And you can’t bring any of it away from the membrane, and anyone who lives away from it doesn’t know anything about it, and the people who live around it think it’s a hoax, they get all kinds of hapless people that tell them stories of pure fiction. Some of them get curious, but that doesn’t change the fact that no one else has much of an attention for the topic. Some just know it as ‘the war.’ But everyone has a different idea what the war is about. But no one talks about it, so no one finds out even that. For some people the war has drifted out between sheets of paper, drifting in the wind in a world self contained and aside. All the while there is this third side in the war. Each real side can’t figure out which side the third side is on. Its actions don’t seem to make sense, and nobody can agree on what these actions are. Parts of each side insist that this third side is, or is not, moving in their favor in the war; and some parts say both simultaneously. For all the world a war, over a doorway that leads out through connection.

There were a few kids out by an airfield. They were getting inside the plane, a small old propeller plane. One of the boys, Roy, his father helped build the airfield, and had told them where it was, and why it had only been used once. It was a test flight, and it never got off the ground, but as soon as that plane plowed into those trees that runway filled with birds, a lot of Canadian geese, and it has been ever since. The kids sat in the plane in the runway with thousands of birds sleeping and walking around all about them.

One of them hit the ignition and the propellers started turning. In a breathtaking moment all the birds rose into the air and flew into the air behind the plane. "So that was all we had to do," said Sainra. Roy had just started moving the little plane down the runway, when Jib tapped him on the shoulder and told him that all the birds were now flying directly at the plane, that he should probably hurry up.

In the community of giraffes, it had been fashionable for years to use what were called, ‘Turtle Cubes’; which were simply ice cubes with turtles frozen in mid suspension. At cocktail parties one is sure to find a assortment of them. In recent years refrigerators began to go into production which had special drawers, bin door-slots, or otherwise compartments or accommodations especially for this item. A fair amount of billboard space is occupied by advertisements. Rare Brazilian turtles, four-turtle cubes, photo-luminescent turtles, organic turtles, Cajon spiced turtles, turtles with edible holographic stickers on their shells depicting racing cars or garden variety parasitic insects, turtles dressed like roman gladiators, turtles with racing stripes, tie-dyed turtles, turtles with a company logo for promotional events.

Teny, a young giraffe, was sitting as his lunch table. He wandered why it was all so important. He pulled a paper bag out of his back pack and pulled the top open. He pulled out his insulated tray cubes his mother had backed for him, and he sighed. He looked around the cafeteria. All the commotion in other places. What if he didn’t like Turtle Cubes. Was he allowed to do that?

Just then the principle came up and patted him on the back. "Why are you sitting alone little Teny?" Principle Clurie boomed out in his low tenor voice. Teny held up his Cube tray for the principle to see, and the man staggered away laughing so hard he could barely stand up straight.

An old man in a dusty straw hat walked out onto a beach. He walked along in his bare feet. A few families picking up their towels to take off as the sun goes down. As it walks to the edge of the water, two great groups of fisherman meet face to face in the ocean before him, not paying much mind to him.

At home there was sauce to be made, tea to be brewed, and Klail was busy at it. The bread was coming out, the soup quite a bit better seasoned than last year’s. And what was Fred going to think about Jason’s idea that he had yet to tell him, and when Philip told them about his accident, how he spilled a universe or something. And about Jimmy who smashed his father’s car in his hurrying about, and had to tell him tonight. Then there was the wedding, and the funeral. And that thing which Helber’s uncle’s niece was working on, a new bottle of information, with higher potency, less interruption of your body’s normal metabolism of calcium. And in this new more refined state, information had a wider spectrum of malleability and dimension. In fact, some say people are coming to grips over it. Meeting in strange places, under historically anachronistic conditions. And usually when they do, as they eat eachother’s food and use eachother’s technologies, and listen to eachother’s music, and hear eachother’s ideas, they have much to share through intermarriage.

So they find the road and things seem to be clearing up. They had barely realized they’d even driven off. On the road again they looked around, and saw only a handful of the cars which were usually speeding along these wide lanes. And they saw cars veering in and out of the woods. Everyone seemed to be present, a bit dusty and some explained dents in things, but no worse for the wear. Someone said that in aisle five, some old woman had frogs just start jumping out of her pockets. Other people didn’t need to wear glasses they’d worn for years. One guy reported finding all around the tour-bus all the books he’d read growing up, as well as all the ones he’d wished he had read. And Mitch spun the wheel, swerving back into the road. ‘It is much harder than it looks,’ he thought to himself. And then they came upon a toll gate set up hastily in a temporary cease-fire zone.

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