A boy with yellow skin holds his leg in his hands, trying to keep it a part of his body as blood pools on the ground beneath him, and he understands what pain is for the first time in his life.

A faceless creature raises its head, looking out of its den at an empty stretch of wasteland from which it thinks it has heard another living being.

A young man drives his car to work five miles over the speed limit, his thoughts dwelling on the woman at home who seems to slip further out of his grasp the tighter he tries to hold onto her.

A falcon returns to the nest she has made on top of a skyscraper, calling for her chicks to come and eat the fish she has killed for them.

An old woman sits on a porch riddled with holes, staring into the darkness of the deep swamp which her grandparents braved for five months in order to keep their freedom over a hundred years ago.

Two planets that have shared a solar system for eons fall in love; as they kiss, the screams of their inhabitants sound for a cosmic millisecond, and are then reduced to silence and nothing.

A cricket chirps from a stand of grass, seeking a female and filling a young poet passing on a bicycle with wonder for the world he lives in.

A conqueror who has not yet taken a name stands on a mountaintop, rips the shackles from his arms and roars his defiance into the open sky.

A bright-eyed baby is held for the first time in her mother’s arms, opening her mouth to fill her fledgling lungs with air with which to cry.

A star that has burned for millennia closes its eyes, breathes its last flame, and goes out.