"Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst." - Joe Hill

I wanted an image. The stereotypical writer (in my mind) was a wild-eyed man with wild hair and a bushy, unkempt beard sitting in front of a typewriter and furiously tapping out his next masterpiece. This image did not appeal to me, so I constructed my own. I wanted to use a quill, as these instruments had always captured my fantasy. When I thought of a quill, I thought of a noble old man sitting at his desk in the dead of the night, writing forbidden secrets in elegant, curvaceous letters by lantern-light. Manuscripts written with quills seemed like the type that endured through centuries and ended up in museums.

Jackson-or what was left of him-lay on the ground beside Linda. She wasn't sure at first, as he was just a skeleton lying in a shadow thrown across the ground by a tree. But she recognized his clothes, and the Nikon hanging from his neck.

"Hurry. We're running out of time." The silhouette's voice was clearer now; she could hear it over the constant whistling of the cool breeze and no longer sounded like it was floating to her ears from the end of a long tunnel.

"Jackson...what happened to Jackson?"

"Stay down!" Kevin put his hand on Darren's shoulder. Darren ducked just in time to avoid being seen by the Glugdug.

"What's he doing?" Darren asked, his voice a whisper so soft that Kevin almost didn't hear him.

"Harvesting."

Tucker was resting on top of the bookcase when the aliens came back.

They'd been here before-tall, gray-skinned beings with bulbous heads and big black eyes. They didn't seem harmful-they hadn't seemed to hurt Chelsea-so Tucker let them do their thing.

One minute, he was licking the underside of his paw and getting ready to join Chelsea in her slumber; the next, a bright blue light flooded into the room through the slatted blinds.

He turned his gaze to the girl lying before him. In the moonlight, her panties-at least, the part he could see under her nightshirt-glowed a pale pink, too. According to the college ID card he'd found in her purse, her name was Lillian.

Just like he'd picked the lily in his hand, he'd picked this girl. He'd awakened that morning with an aching urge to do a photo shoot. So he went down to the local community college, found an appealing subject, and followed her home.

Now he stood in her bedroom. The digital clock on Lillian's bedside table read 12:09. He paused--was there somebody else in the house?

It all happened suddenly enough.

There, on the morning news, barely audible above the chomping in my ears of the cereal in my mouth, it is said:

All the dandelions are gone.

I listen more closely, shifting my attention over to the TV. Dandelions, did they say? Surely I had misheard them above the munching of my shredded wheat. I stop chewing.

They recap the details... All of them, around the world, gone with the sunrise. The minute the sun came up, no matter where, no matter what the time zone it came up in, that was all she wrote: gone. No more dandelions.

No one in the little town she lived in could draw as well as she could. People talked from miles around about the little girl who could draw the beautiful flowers. As she grew more and more famous, her flower pictures, which soon became known as Lily Flowers, became widely coveted. People would come from everywhere to get a Lily Flower and soon she was the most popular artist in the land.

But despite her talent for drawing beautiful things, her lovely namesake, and her ever-increasing fame, Lily had a dark, ugly soul. She didn't like people at all and spent a lot of her time alone in her room, isolated from even her family.

"Jaaassson?"

I sat up in bed, looking around my room; I could have sworn I heard somebody call my name. I had just started to pull my covers back up when...

"Jaaassson?" The same slow sing-songy voice said my name again.

I threw off my covers, "Huh-huh-hello?" There was no reply. I took a deep breath and crawled out of bed. I tried to swallow and licked my lips; finally I managed to croak out, "Is somebody there?"

"Come here Jaaassson."

I ran for my light and flicked it on, light flooded the room, everything seemed to be the way I left it, my legos were scattered over in the corner, my superman toy up on my dresser, and my spider-man alarm clock on the stand by my bed, the only difference I could notice was my closet door was open just a crack. I walked over and shut it, telling myself, "I'm ten years old now, I can't be afraid of the boogeyman."