Another step and I’d have walked by without seeing it, but a quick stumble drew my eyes to the ground and, there, lodged in gravel, was a half-hidden penny. That day I needed luck to get a job before I lost the damn house, so I overcame my concern about the dirt that would spread onto my hands and potentially into my mouth when I ate, and picked it up. I dusted it on my trousers, wiping the worst of the germs away. I expected to see the Queen’s head – my dad called her the ‘Jelly Bean’ in some kind of convoluted not-Cockney slang – but she wasn’t there. Instead, it had a lizard’s head, briefly, before the Queen came back to replace it.
That’s how strung out and jittery the stress had made me: seeing dinosaurs instead of our Queen. But I kept the coin with me, mostly for luck. I took it out of my pocket and gave it a clean. Out of the corner of my eye, the lizard reappeared. I got better at spotting it with time: there was a knack to staring and not-staring at it, like a Magic Eye puzzle. With practice, the lizard grew easier to see. It was some kind of dinosaur, I reckoned, wearing a tiara that pulled its feathers into a frond.
Now, I’m no paleontologist, but I’m pretty sure T-Rex never evolved to wear tiaras.
It all began when I reached out to fix a flaw in the mirror.
Rag Muscovicz was getting ready for bed when a meme posted on the Brainz social network caused a New Tang (feel the fizz!) billboard satellite to overreact and fire a nuclear warhead on its nearest competitor, Hep Lite (heaven, carbonated).
I stood by the empty riverbed, watching and waiting, trying not to fall asleep standing up. Birds screeched overhead, swooping in circles, as if they knew something I didn’t.
The hood came off and I blinked in the anticipated spotlight. However, it was just a standard Anglepoise and I was cable-tied to a basic wooden chair, not a restraint-cum-waterboarding recliner. That shouted amateur, and amateur can be dodgy.
The sky was always pink in the Beautiful Place. Maybe because it was Ffion’s favourite colour. The clouds resembled candy floss, the grass was the softest green, and the trees swayed gracefully even when there was no breeze. Birds sang the sweetest songs and bees hummed along. There were no wasps.
The eye never has enough of seeing. 
Harry Holden stumbles through Ballykey Cemetery, blood gushing from his throat, chest heaving with sobs. Faster, faster! Gotta get away! He staggers into a clearing dominated by a hawthorn tree, its every detail rendered sinister by pale moonlight. Despite everything, he shivers at the sight of it, remembering his nana’s oft-repeated warning: Never trust the wee folk, Harry.
Deep below the house was a lab with walls of cold steel and soft luminescent light. There, a machine sat on a metal chair, cables inserted into the sockets placed within the spine, arms, and legs. A machine in the shape of a human female, with skin of metal and polymer. A gynoid, as was the technical term. It had been weeks since her creator had come to visit her. Thus all the greater was the gynoid’s surprise when her maker stood before her. She stood up, looking into the first eyes she had seen at birth. And now here they were: creation and creator, face to face once more.
“So it was, sweet friend, that––”