The black hole of her heart kept pulling my eyes away from her face. She was a mere three feet from me physically yet miles away emotionally. I heard the little trembles and shifts in my failing voice as I asked, “Who are you and what have you done with my wife?”

And so it was through an utterly bizarre set of circumstances that the unlikely team of a troop of Sherlock Holmes LARPers and one lone mystery shopper were the first, best hope of solving the gruesome murder of Santa Claus at the grand opening of a megastore on Black Friday.

The game is afoot, and afoot, and afoot, and…

When asked how she was always able to take things in stride, Camilla told the story of her house burning down when she was ten years old. The fire was no one’s fault, it was just a matter of faulty electric wiring in an old house constructed of mostly wood. From the attic to the cellar, the entire thing was reduced to ash, taking everything they owned with it.

Camilla buried her face in her mother’s shoulder and sobbed uncontrollably until her well of tears ran dry. Her breath hitched as she exclaimed, “This is the worst thing that could ever happen to us!”

Her mother cupped Camilla’s face in her hands and said, “Aren’t we lucky?”

In answer to her daughter’s confused expression, she added, “If this is the worst possible thing that could ever happen to us and we made it to the other side alive and in one piece, then everything else that comes our way will be a piece of cake.”

“But we lost everything, Mama!”

“We lost things, not everything, and things can always be replaced. Besides, with everything all burned up, now we can start again fresh and make it all better.”

Ever since that day, Camilla learned to view difficult life situations as “fires,” some could be put out quickly and others had to burn completely in order for her to rise from the ashes like a phoenix and begin anew.

There were many descriptors used by the various and sundry modern day art critics. Some called it vividly beautiful, while to others it was sophisticated and detailed. It was hailed as a painstaking labor of deep devotion and love, a priceless piece of art whose colors shone bright enough to cut the eye and textures that soared and dipped like no other painting ever created.

But I was apparently one of the unwashed masses because all I could focus on was the tiny, dark patch on the canvas that no one ever mentioned in their discussions on the masterpiece. Surely it was a mistake or an imperfection or the result of mishandling during transport but why would everyone choose to ignore such a thing?

“It was intentional,” a woman’s voice whispered behind me.

“Excuse me?’ I said, turning around to be face to face with the artist of the piece, whom I recognized from the art exhibit brochure.

The corners of her mouth lifted in a slight smile and she pointed past me at the painting. “The spot you were concentrating on, it’s not an accident.”

Was I speaking out loud before? I didn’t think I was but it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. Sometimes thoughts became words and managed to escape unintentionally.

“I realized as I was painting this that it would have been impossible to create something so universally beautiful that everyone would appreciate it,” the artist continued. “So, for those who choose not to appreciate and look for the beauty in it, I created a flaw to focus and dwell on. My thinking was if you were expecting the worst, you won’t be disappointed.”

And it was at that moment that I finally began to notice the beauty that surrounded imperfection.

I have borrowed words from you without your permission and for that I do apologize but they were hanging in the air between us drying and dying like fruit on the vine when they deserved better. I have restructured their order and intend to roar them out to the world.

Nameless and unknowable, it was left in plain sight but only visible from the corner of the eye, this object of sounds, tastes and scents that defied description which was birthed when the universe was still in short pants and whose retrieval was now critical if the human race had any chance of survival against the extraterrestrial attackers.

They were young and willing to take ridiculous risks because life had not as yet knocked them on their collective asses enough for them to become disillusioned. They were filled with a strong desire to produce online content and talented enough to come up with original material. The only thing that eluded them was the coveted title of influencer.

One day, while marathoning their way through Alien, Jaws, Jurassic Park and Pitch Black, the team decided they were going to stage their own “monster in the house” movie by breaking into an abandoned government facility and pretending it was Area 51.

It was a brilliant idea and everything went to plan when they live streamed their shoot and shortly thereafter quadrupled their viewership. The only fly in the ointment was that none of them lived to see it. It turned out that although it was not Area 51, the government facility was actually another secret site that conducted torture and experiments on extraterrestrial lifeforms and the ghosts of these aliens were seeking revenge against all mankind and their latest victims came gift-wrapped.

It was all coming to an end. The asteroid struck Earth like a match and set the world ablaze. While all their neighbors made futile attempts at outrunning the apocalypse, the Glomb family decided to watch their daughter, Gigi’s, favorite movie on Blu-ray in the living room that was bathed in the warm red light of the flames that licked their apartment building.

The one thing Chaddeus knew from experience was the only thing lonelier than being a writer was being a writer with writer’s block, when the characters inside your mind stop speaking to you.

Fictional characters interacting with each other while the mind was idle formed these creative bubbles where ordinary situations weaved and evolved into something new and wonderful; plot germs to be sown as far and wide as possible as soon as they emerged. But his characters grew silent which meant his stories lost their ability to fly into the productive chaos of the ever-expanding frontier of creativity.

Set adrift in his lonely mental avoid, Chaddeus contemplated giving it all up and resigning himself to an existence as one of the content-consuming mundanes…when he was hit with a streak of story brilliance like a bolt out of the blue.

A tremendous amount of Earth’s resources went into constructing the Interstellar Drive which was designed to propel humans to the very edge of the ever-expanding universe.

The hope was to find a compatible planet in its infancy so that humankind could begin again and avoid the mistakes that placed their homeworld in its deathbed.

But as Astronaut Anton Pascoe explored the planet at the end of the universe, he stumbled upon a sign that suggested someone had beaten him to the punch.