Bam!

by Luc Reid

“If I ever tell you I want to get married again,” my friend Rick told me when his divorce finally came through, “I want you to punch me in the face. Hard.”

I laughed.

“I’m not kidding!” he insisted. “Promise me.”

“I’m not going to punch you,” I said.

I figured he’d drop it, but half an hour later, I found myself saying “OK, fine. If you ever try to get engaged again, I’ll punch you.”

*

Nine months later, Rick blew into my kitchen with two oversized bottles of Belgian beer.

“Guess what?” he crowed. “I’m engaged!”

“To who?” I said. “Not Marie, right?”

He popped open the beers on the counter. “Oh, I know she comes off a little cold-blooded right off, but you’ll warm up to her, seriously.”

Obviously I didn’t punch him, but I mentioned a few important facts: Marie was always making Rick do things her way. She’d screwed her uncle over on that loan. She left hot water running. And my dog, who was a great judge of character, hated her.

“And Rick,” I said, “you told me to punch you if you ever said you were getting married again.”

“I meant to somebody like Erika!” He said. “This is completely different.”

*

I hardly saw Rick over the next two months, but one day he called me from the police station.

“Assault?” I said when I picked him up. “They took you in for assaulting her?”

“Yeah,” Rick said. “Good thing my cell phone does video. You want to see her scratching herself? It’s actually kind of hot.”

*

Did I mention I time travel? It’s no big thing: it just happens sometimes when I’m asleep. I think it’s usually when my brain gets stuck on something. I go to sleep and wake up maybe a few months or a year earlier.

That’s what happened about a week after the assault incident: I looked over at my calendar clock one morning and noticed it was four months earlier than when I’d gone to bed. So I got up and called my broker. (Well, how do you think I got this huge house and the pool and the cars and everything, an unemployed slacker like me? First the lottery, then investments.)

After that, I went out with some of the same girls I had the last time and got an early start cutting back on my cholesterol. I was just taking my fish oil capsules one afternoon when Rick walked with two oversized bottles of Belgian beer.

I punched him.

Lion City Daikaiju

by Jason Erik Lundberg

That night, Singapore’s landmarks declared war: the Merlion lurched off its concrete pedestal and flooded the riverfront with its eternally gushing masticatory fountain, catching untold numbers of tourists unawares, forced to leave behind their $20 mixed drinks and plates of tapas; the Raffles Hotel, in all its colonial splendor, leapfrogged across the downtown area, knocking over bank buildings and squashing flat petrol tankers and cars plastered with adverts; the twin metallic durians of the Esplanade curled into spiny balls of hedgehog lethality, and rolled over and through every upscale mall they could find, taking especial care to utterly demolish the shopping district on Orchard Road; the National Library took flight and glided to the MediaCorp building, dropping barrages of encyclopedias and folios onto transmissions towers and backup generators, destroying the link between the viewing public and the badly acted and written serial dramas that filled the broadcast airwaves; the twin statues of the country’s patron saint, Sir Stamford Raffles, one dark bronze and one white polymarble, lay seige to every construction crane in evidence, leaping nimbly from structure to structure, leaving bright yellow wreckage in their wake.

Who was to blame, the people cried, why has this happened, could it be Jemaah Islamiyah and that terrorist who escaped, or was it resurgent aggression from Japan, or could it be an intelligent group-mind of dengue-carrying mosquitos, or revenge-seeking Americans with outrage and the image of a public caning in their minds, why oh why is this happening to us, and the people fled in terror, at this revolt by the reminders of the nation’s greatness, as those selfsame landmarks reduced to rubble every symbol of progress, sign of homogenized inclusion with the globalized world, and showing of shallow flash and glam over depth and culture and tradition, and when the sun rose over the tropical island the next morning it was all over, the assault had stopped, the landmarks as still and inert as their previous states, the country no longer globally competitive, but the people did not despair, because as they buried and cremated their dead and began the rebuilding process, they remembered that they had endured the British occupiers, and the tyranny of the Japanese military, and they had arisen to become a global corporate power, and that they would now reinvent themselves into something new and bright and shining, a jewel of the future world, a unique visage of identity.