In a short story that stretches back through pre-colonial America through modern day and beyond, a construction worker, a soldier, and a young boy all discover the same strange object. Each one sees the artifact through the lens of his own life and time, but can any of them discover its hidden power?Raul is a prince and the leader of his father's army. When he attacks an evil wizard he is transformed into a bear. Searching for a way to return to his human form he meets Juanita and falls in love. See what happens next in this short story.

It was Christmas Eve 1968. And the astronauts of Apollo 8 - Commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders - were participants in a mission that took them faster (24,000 mph) and farther from the earth (240,000 miles) than any human had ever traveled. Apollo 8 was the mission that broke humanity's absolute bond to the earth: it was the first manned vehicle to leave the earth's orbit. Confined within a tiny spaceship, the astronauts were aided in their journey by a computer less powerful than one of today's handheld calculators. Their mission was not only a triumph of engineering, but also an enduring moment in history. The words these three men spoke from lunar orbit reverberated through American society, changing our culture in ways no one predicted.

"Chiefly among his tenets is the proclamation that the universe, and to a smaller extent, the Earth itself, is the same as a living animal. And at the end of their lives, in the midst of their death throes, such animals will writhe and convulse, wildly, savagely, with the hopes of staving off death for just a bit longer. And, like an injured animal, this convulsing will lead to unpredictable behaviors. Time will begin to overlap with itself. Individuals and objects might exist as simultaneous duplicates of themselves at different ages. They might disappear altogether for a time before reappearing someplace else, if at all, and might appear as incomplete, fragmented partials of what they should be."This is not a story of the end of the world, but rather a story of six individuals in a dying shanty townfor whom the world may as well already be over. When Elizabeth Hesse's husband and children go missing, a chain of events is set in motion that will lead the inhabitants of this...