Anthony Clifton

OMG!  We’re under attack! I don’t know what the hell it is but it’s pulsating and anything that is pulsating is automatically, by definition, scary!  Get me out of here!

Help!  I have no money for the train to Yokohama!  The Japan Rail police, who (in this universe) seem to be a special force comprised of various Yokai and demons, say that if I don’t buy a ticket soon, they’ll fine me for loitering.  Apparently, the ‘fine’ is that I’ll have to clean toilets in all the JR stations in Japan for one hundred years.  They said something about ‘that certain’ restroom and then chuckled menacingly.

I’m really scared!

Please send me some money right away so I can get out of here!  Or, if you have ideas how I can raise some money, send them to my Twitter feed @ChangedEarth.

OMG I have to run!  The vampire gothic lolitas have found me again and… they’re smiling!

I DON’T WANT TO DIE!

OMG

Well, it looks like I’ve finally managed to get to Tokyo. It’s not really the way I expected it to happen, unfortunately. There I was just messing around with a particle accelerator I found in a research lab dumpster, connecting it up to an artificial intelligence I made from some Java neural network software and a cluster of Pentium 2s while relaxing with a Ganzfeld apparatus when *bam* there was a flash of light and now here I am in Tokyo!

Fortunately, I was touching my laptop when the wormhole opened and hurled me here. Unfortunately, I don’t know how long the battery will last, I don’t have my wallet or passport and I seem to have attracted the attention of some rather unsavory gothic lolitas with a taste for human flesh.

Aside from those problems, this Tokyo doesn’t seem exactly… right.  I’m beginning to think that it’s not actually ‘our’ Tokyo if that makes any sense.  First, the pleated skirts the school girls are wearing seem improbably short.  Second, they all seem to be on a mission of one kind or another.

For example, one girl suddenly ran into me, knocking me down.  Then she blamed me for running into her!  My Japanese is pretty weak at best but I could tell she was trying to pass the buck on the whole collision thing.  Then, just as suddenly, she grabbed my arm and dragged me behind a sign, insisting that some pastry vendor was after her over a misunderstanding.  She started saying something about dreams from which you can’t awaken and then *poof* she vanished!

Anyway, third, I’m pretty sure that the police in ‘our’ Tokyo don’t stride about, shaking buildings, in forty foot tall robots.  And, fourth, I could be mistaken but I’m almost positive I just witnessed a haggard looking man defend the Earth from invasion by a fleet of alien spacecraft using only the boundless passion he channeled into the playing of a single, inconceivably lovely chord on his Gibson Les Paul guitar.

I have to run for now.  Apparently, there is some crazy old scientist somewhere in Yokohama who knows the secret to open a worm hole back to ‘our’ reality.  The guy who told me about him said something about having to prove my worth, whatever that means.

I’ll do my best to keep in touch… and stay alive.

Dog calls out to the fading Summer evening, chasing it with frantic cries as it rolls down over the blushing horizon. Then he is quiet. Moon shivers in the still surface of a child’s forgotten wading pool. The silence, Autumn’s herald, rings and hisses in my ears as I sit before a candle flame that dances into the deepening night.

The world is such a magical place. Spider webs, curving like Einsteinian space time diagrams, shimmer in the breeze and sun. Crickets call to one another endlessly, hopping frantically through the fresh mowed grass. Somewhere a child cries out and then giggles, leaping one last time through a summer sprinkler. I watch and listen and smell, both observer and participant. I stretch out to the world with my imagination and pull it back into myself with my senses, a fisherman casting a net woven from feelings.