Yesteryear Fiction

The Zero Second
By Paul Edward Costa


With my eyes I viewed horrors that others never noticed. With my perception I experienced nightmares that they happily accepted. These visions drove me to my violent actions. These actions led me to exile from my home city. I walked along northern highways, into the forests, and along dirt roads past the trees.

Now I stand at the end of the longest hallway I’ve ever known. I’m waiting for the second when the door in front of me will open. The door shimmers platinum. A small 0 sits in the dead center of the door. The 0 has a diagonal slash through it like in an architect’s blueprints. Legend has it that when the door opens you are briefly no longer confined to viewing life through the subjective optical physics of human eyes. I can’t remember if I’d ever asked anyone to externally verify the way I saw the world. Or had I? The past and the world before the entrance to this hallway seem so far away, beyond the reach of my memory. I don’t feel sure of anything before this moment. What did the entrance look like? How did I find it? I can only just remember passing certain scenes on the way here. I saw a line of business men and other professionals outside a large bus shelter, without umbrellas, waiting for transport in an onslaught of pouring rain. Later I passed a massive crowd of students in gray uniforms filtering into one doorway of a school with thirteen entrances.

I stare at the door in front of me. My eyes look it over. I feel my hands sweating at my sides. Each click ringing out from the door represents another passing atomic second. When I first got here those clicks represented small snapshots of time going by steadily. By now the clicks all morph into a wall of noise washing down the hall. I wonder if my senses have dulled or if time moves more slowly. The roar of seconds rushes through my ears.

Legend states that at the zero second one sees the world through the objective unbiased eyes of the earth’s creator. That vision must be very old.

Finally the zero second comes with no fan-fare, no change in the atmosphere, and no indication that it is in any way different from a trillion other seconds. The door vanishes for one scientifically calculable moment.

Very briefly, I see a dryad in four dimensions, a person made of wood with vines for hair and an emerald aura. It sits atop a glass unicycle bolted to the ground. It pedals furiously. The unicycle wheel moves a belt attached to a machine holding a light-bulb. The faster it pedals the brighter the light-bulb burns, sending endless energy to the dryad through the process of photosynthesis.

The shimmering platinum door appears again. In its dead center sits the technical zero. It looks like the official lettering on the door of a professional’s office.


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Paul Edward Costa has previously published in "MacMedia," "The Flying Walrus," "Timber," "Yesteryear Fiction," and "Entropy," as well as in Diaspora Dialogue's Webzine "Shorthand." He has work forthcoming in "Thrice Fiction." He teaches High School in Ontario, Canada.

Garden Laundry Candle
By Paul Edward Costa


Somewhere a cluster of linens lie on the grass, layered into the shape of a pyramid. A single scented candle rests on the peak of this soft structure. Its wick burns like magnesium, sending out a glow to places whose illumination is counterbalanced only by areas with an extreme absence of light…

The sad stone children smeared with dirt ask that you remain silent. They each hold one finger to their granite lips.

Enjoy this moment of peace and reflection. Don’t look at it as the present. Don’t look at is as now. If you do, you may forget and devalue everything within arm’s reach. Imagine this close cluster of time as the past with yourself standing in the white light of the future looking back in sorrow.

And why not sorrow? This garden hold’s dusk’s mystical light like a crystal. The dark grass murmurs with an internal mystery. And the classical white youthful statues! They insist upon your silence. Some gaze around in wonder. In their stillness they withhold information. They suggest the nearby presence of terrible, beautiful wonders. You feel not scared or bored. Curiosity remains, prevailing in the blessed absence of heavy stones like satisfaction or fear. Such pure feelings in this dreamlike place.

…of course you look back at this scene with sorrow while in the future’s white light. Now cease your dark regretful imaginings. Open your eyes. You are not looking back at this serenity from a blind empty future. You are standing in the now, and now is this midnight garden of awe, and this realization is a gift.

A holy ache courses through your muscles. You sit on the garden’s wrought iron bench. You feel spent and content. No paths presently lead out of the garden, but you now feel able to forge one someday with confidence. What is this feeling? A sense of accomplishment overcomes your mind. What did you achieve? What did you construct?

A white tower rises far away in the night fog behind you. It lies in another isolated place within these black lands of midnight. Blood stains streak down its stucco walls. Sounds of life and laughter echo from its top rooms. Green neon letters spell W E L C O M E over the tower’s arched front door. The first three letters are burned out. Spotlights shine through midnight’s fog from the tower’s roof. These lights do not reach the garden where you sit. You never turn around to try meeting them with your eyes.

What does reach you are innumerable groans from the tower’s base and from deep beneath its foundations. They still come out of the dark past to claw at your ears. What’s that in your hands, hanging limply between your knees? You still hold the antique crossbow made of brass and wood from a yew tree because the groans never come alone. They bring their living hosts: ravenous skeletons, half crushed and caked with dirt, pulling themselves through the dark with bony fingers, leaving drag marks rippling through the blackness. One with a bolt through its skull remains mangled in the garden’s closed gate behind you, the same gate you used when entering this place. Its one frail arm lies stretched out on the grass with a single index finger pointing towards you, followed by its skeletal face, whose bone brow and open jaw twist into an expression of rage, silently screaming a grave accusation in your direction.

It feels like the only thing left to do is sit quietly on the garden’s bench while surveying what lies ahead with introspective contemplation. Don’t move your body. Become like the sad stone children, except for your eyes. Let them drift to the right and to the left in their sockets. Feel them move in your skull, soft spherical organs unchanged since yours birth. Feel them move while surveying the tight, tall expansive hedge marking the farthest edge of the garden. Vines and branches twist in on themselves towards a singularity. Green leaves cover them in clusters so close only a few streams of wind pass in from the night beyond. The hedge’s structural complexities bend, guide and morph the wind into whispers snaking through the garden. Sitting still, almost frozen, you listen hard to the whispers balanced maddeningly between music and language.

The sad stone children smeared with dirt ask that you remain silent. They each hold one finger to their granite lips.

W E L C O M E


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Paul Edward Costa has previously published short fiction in MacMedia, The Flying Walrus, Shorthand and Timber. He currently teaches high school in Ontario, Canada with the Peel District School Board.