Aging sucks. He found that out the hard way. The beer and liquor no longer flowed. The pills didn't do the trick anymore. A lifetime of crafting tales that thrilled a generation - gone. The well ran dry. It's the fear of every writer. What happens when the ideas stop coming? No mere 'writer's block' - the reality outside his door was more terrifying than any fictional fear or foe he could cobble together from his own neuroses and phobias. The government had come clean. It didn't give a damn about the people, the laws, or anything else it was supposed to. It came down to two things: money and power. Enough of either one assured the other. The people could live or die, it didn't matter. There would always be someone to take their place. Someone who had no choice, no say. The Constitution had all but been abolished. Decades of embedding partisan plants in the judiciary had guaranteed it. The media, before it was forced into piracy, claimed that it all happ...
He had a deep-rooted fear of the sky. Wind scared him. Trees terrified him. A thunderstorm could practically paralyze him. He wasn't always like this. Age often brings with it odd phobias. As the years pass, one witnesses many things, and makes a quiet mental note of all of them. In time, those horrors from the past take root and blossom into full-fledged anxiety and panic. Wind, storms, and even the trees - these made sense. One good storm could bring a tree down on his house. Or his neighbor's. He no longer had the strength to remove the trees, and didn't have the funds to pay a professional to do the job. But the sky? Even on a clear, sunny day - looking up at the sky caused dread. He noticed the deepening blue knowing that just beyond was the void of space. Nothing was coming from there - was it? He wasn't concerned with aliens or meteors. He doubted a species advanced enough to reach us would want anything to do with us. A meteor large enough to ...