The Paragraph Stories

by: michael ziff published: 04/06/2025 Slow Motion Ever since he was a kid, he loved slow motion. On Friday nights after dinner, he would watch The Six Million Dollar Man, with scenes of running and jumping in slow motion to save the world enhanced by that special effect sound he hears clearly to this day. Any attempt at saving the day should be in slow motion to better preserve the act. But as he grew older, with each passing year, he no longer saw the world as a place worth saving. Humanity had, in his lifetime, rendered itself undeserving. After engineering school, he gravitated to making bombs and worked hard at imagining and designing ever more efficient ways to blow things up. And every bomb test was filmed in slow motion to better observe the intimacy of destruction. He now felt the same way he did watching that show every Friday night as he did watching his ever larger explosions. There was no one running to stop him. Cuckoo

Forever now, or at least as long as he can remember, time has always felt like something akin to a disease, a syndrome, and at the very least, an inconvenience. Time had been responsible for more pain, injury, and heartache than anything else in his life. And forever, or at least as long as he can remember, he’s been trying to live without time, or outside of time. One day while shopping for old axe heads at a flea market, he came across three old-timey cuckoo clocks on one of the vendor tables. Their faces staring at him. He bought all three, took them home and went straight to the garage to get a hammer. He placed them on the grass in the backyard and smashed them in the face then placed them on his mantle. He liked to reach into the parts of them that remained and move the bent hands to his will. Languages

On some weekdays, instead of taking the bus, Peter got a ride home from high school with Ms. Steinberg, his English teacher who lived five doors down. This gave him an extra 45 minutes before his mother walked through the front door and asked him to mix her a gin and water with a squeeze of lemon. On those days, he would go upstairs to his parents’ bedroom and pull out the blue duffel bag from the crawl space at the back of his mother’s walk-in closet. Before choosing one of the more than 40 hardcore vintage Swedish and Dutch porn magazines, he would take precise note of where to place the duffel back in place to avoid discovery. Every page had accompanying text describing the action in four languages. He could understand only one of them but always read aloud all four and imagined he pronounced them perfectly. Reading the three he didn’t understand is what he liked best about those moments.