Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Six Impossible Things
    Six Impossible Things
    Six Impossible Things
    Ebook65 pages57 minutes

    Six Impossible Things

    By Renee Carter Hall

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A new father is visited by his childhood imaginary friend. A woman falls in love with a cartoon character. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse show up at a big-box retail chain. Sometimes humorous, often poignant, and always memorable, the six short stories in this collection may just make you believe impossible things.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRenee Carter Hall
    Release dateMay 27, 2012
    ISBN9781476175324
    Six Impossible Things
    Author

    Renee Carter Hall

    Renee Carter Hall writes fantasy and soft science fiction, with excursions into dark fantasy, poetry, and stories for children and teens. Talking animals slip into her stories whenever they get a chance, and her work has been influenced by storytellers from a range of media, including Steven Spielberg, Ray Bradbury, and Jim Henson. Her short stories have appeared in numerous print, electronic, and audio publications, and her most recent book, the anthropomorphic fantasy Huntress, received the 2014 Cóyotl Award for Best Novella.Renee lives in West Virginia with her husband, their cat, and more books than she will ever have time to read. She can be found online at www.reneecarterhall.com and on Twitter as @RCarterHall.

    Read more from Renee Carter Hall

    Related to Six Impossible Things

    Related ebooks

    Short Stories For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      WIL WHEATON on Stand By Me

      Nov 18, 2022

      WIL WHEATON on Stand By Me
      5 min read

    • Article

      Remembering Steve Ditko: Forget Kirby Dots, Let's Talk Ditko Sparkles

      Jul 8, 2018

      The idiosyncratic co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and many lesser-known comics characters died last week. His distinctive storytelling style shaped generations of comics readers.

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Kaleshion

      Sep 1, 2020

      The Kaleshion
      8 min read

    • Article

      Sisters And Other Life Forms

      Jan 1, 2021

      Sisters And Other Life Forms
      7 min read

    • Article

      A GARDEN In My HOUSE

      Mar 31, 2022

      A GARDEN In My HOUSE
      1 min read

    • Article

      Bill And The Tooth Fairy

      Mar 10, 2021

      Bill believed in the Tooth Fairy. Big deal, you’re thinking. Lots of kids believe in the Tooth Fairy. Well, Bill wasn’t a kid. He was twenty-eight years old. You don’t believe it. My girlfriend Mary Beth didn’t believe it, either. We were having dinn

      15 min read

    • Article

      The Library of Gromma

      Jul 10, 2023

      Zac was sweating and panting as he reached the top of the hill. The crooked beams of the library loomed over him. He dropped the buckets of water, swore at the few drops that spilled, and escaped the piercing morning sun in the shade of the library.

      22 min read

    • Article

      Open Throat By Henry Hoke Review – Inside The Mind Of A Lion King

      Jul 16, 2023

      Over the past few years, non-human narrators have cropped up repeatedly in experimental fiction. There was the slowly decaying protagonist of Emma Glass’s Peach and, most recently, in Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, the villainous v

      2 min read

    • Article

      She Dreamed of Dresses

      Feb 1, 2020

      She Dreamed of Dresses
      6 min read

    • Article

      Left To Lose

      Jul 10, 2022

      Around the time she gives up her name, it starts to feel like this entire revolution isn’t worth it anymore. The world is probably lucky that Kelian—she still remembers Kelian, in spite of everything—is there to pick up the pieces, the way he always

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Wimblestone

      Oct 1, 2023

      The Wimblestone
      7 min read

    • Article

      Garden Magic

      Sep 15, 2019

      I took a step further to meet Horace for health, for love, for a leg up. And at Horace’s everything was gray there with some white accents—and the walls were gray, not paint. They were hung with fabric and he had a gray carpet on the floor. Once, bef

      2 min read

    • Article

      Rise Of The Robot

      May 1, 2023

      Rise Of The Robot
      1 min read

    • Article

      What to Read Now

      Oct 12, 2022

      WHEN I was thirteen I acquired a magic notebook: a thick, blank sketchbook with richly textured, flecked paper of all different colors. Paging through it was like peering into a lush garden of unwritten delights, and my brain exploded with possibilit

      7 min read

    • Article

      Making Tracks

      Apr 30, 2021

      Making Tracks
      8 min read

    • Article

      Martian wants Drabbles

      Jul 7, 2022

      Martian is a zine for SF drabbles and the team publish new ones twice a week. Drabbles are very short stories of exactly 100 words (excluding title) and they are tricky to write. Read what’s published here to see how other writers do it. The editoria

      1 min read

    • Article

      Blue Ticket

      Jun 26, 2020

      Blue Ticket
      4 min read

    • Article

      Scare Home

      Sep 16, 2021

      Scare Home
      1 min read

    • Article

      Daring to Show My Dark Side

      Feb 12, 2024

      Daring to Show My Dark Side
      4 min read

    • Article

      Take A Chance With SF Noir

      Jul 1, 2021

      Tyche Books is a Canadian small-press specialising in science-fiction and fantasy anthologies, novels, and non-fiction, all available as ebooks and trade paperbacks. The editorial team ‘crave innovative stories that push the boundaries of imagination

      1 min read

    • Article

      The PRIDE

      May 1, 2023

      The PRIDE
      5 min read

    • Article

      Sarah Everard’s Disappearance Strikes A Chord With Every Woman Who’s Ever Been Afraid To Walk Home Alone

      Apr 1, 2021

      We don’t yet know what happened to Sarah Everard. The 33-year-old marketing executive disappeared a week ago, in Clapham, on her way home from a friend’s house at about 9pm. A serving Met Police officer has since been arrested on suspicion of murder,

      5 min read

    • Article

      Follow Her Forward, The Innocent Hare

      Jun 16, 2022

      It was the edge of a scrubby wood in Suffolk, sometime when I was at university – 1972 or 1973. I was having a picnic with friends, and we were playing frisbee, a red one, and I was running across the lumpy grassy terrain to where it had dropped. As

      12 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Six Impossible Things

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Six Impossible Things - Renee Carter Hall

      Six Impossible Things

      short stories

      by Renee Carter Hall

      Copyright 2012 Renee Carter Hall

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ***

      Alice laughed. There's no use trying, she said: one can't believe impossible things.

      I daresay you haven't had much practice, said the Queen. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

      --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

      ***

      Table of Contents

      Childish Things

      Moon, June, Raccoon

      Norma the Wal-Mart Greeter Meets the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

      Swear Not By the Moon

      Drawn From Memory

      The Garden

      About the Author

      ***

      Childish Things

      When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

      --1 Corinthians 13:11 (KJV)

      When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

      --C. S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children

      David sat in the hospital cafeteria, sipping coffee that had gone cold half an hour before. It didn't matter; he wasn't thirsty, wasn't hungry. He felt rather like the corridors around him: white and blank and cold.

      He twisted his wedding band around and around on his finger. It was a little loose; he supposed that meant he'd lost weight, and any other time he would have been glad. Instead, all he could think about was how this same gold ring had encircled his newborn daughter's entire arm. How her tiny red body, delicate and fragile as a butterfly's wing, bristled with needles and tubes hooked to monitors and machines he couldn't even name, let alone understand.

      Some things, he thought idly, are good when they come early. Repairmen, for instance. Spring after a hard winter. A raise, a promotion. But not a child, not a baby who still needed two and a half months before she would have been ready for the world that now pressed so heavily upon her.

      He wanted to be upstairs with Amy, in the NICU--neonatal intensive care unit, a name far bigger than its occupants--but she had made it clear that he needed to eat something, especially since they were going to be here all night. So he'd come down here with the idea of obeying, because she was right, of course, in the way she always was, the way that saw to the heart of things, to the heart of him--but he'd looked at plastic-wrapped turkey sandwiches and wilting Caesar salads and cups of layered Jell-O, and nothing had looked good. Nothing had even looked real. He wanted...

      He wanted to be home, all three of them home where they belonged. He wanted to watch Amy nurse Caitlyn, wanted to rock his daughter in the chair he'd refinished just a few weeks before, wanted to put her to bed first in the frilly bassinet, then later, when she was bigger, in the white crib with the plush mobile of moons and stars hanging over it. He wanted to watch her sleep, without the discordant electronic lullaby of the monitors and pumps and respirator all keeping mechanical time.

      He rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch. The doctor was coming by in an hour and a half, and then the longest night of their lives--all their lives--would start. They had agreed that turning off the respirator was the best thing to do, the only thing to do.

      She would breathe on her own, through the night, through every night afterward.

      Or...

      Or, she wouldn't. It was that simple.

      Hell would not be red with fire, David decided on his way back to the NICU. It would be white, and sterile, and cold. It wasn't about being tortured yourself; it was having to watch the pain of someone you loved more than your own soul. And being utterly helpless to do anything about it.

      ***

      And then the elevator stopped.

      He was, of course, alone. He swore and jammed the red emergency button. Silence.

      He leaned back against the wall and closed

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1