Lode Harkwick hadn't more than half believed that there really was a Hanging Witch. Folks who returned from seeking the Witch didn't talk about it, and no-returners never spoke again. Then how did anyone know that the Witch was even there? Such notions came natural to Lode; born on Old Christmas before the Evening Star rose, she saw what others didn't.

It was a drunken lark. A gag. Eric and Tony got hammered out of their skulls on a box of cheap wine and then went tearing through the Red Mantis Buddhist Prayer Gardens at two in the morning.

They giggled like schoolboys when Tony filled his pockets with bars of soap from a steam room and exchanged his running shoes for a pair of wooden sandals placed neatly beside the doorway. They laughed heartily as Eric rampaged through carefully tended rock and cacti gardens, flipping stones and gravel through the air, cleaving cactus in two with an iron bar he'd found near the fence right before they'd hopped over it.

Sound approximating speech.

I wake, dream receding into the back of my mind. Like some monster with glowing eyes disappearing behind a bush. Perforated edge of imagined reality tearing away as my senses start to record the real world.

Sun coming in through a window. Bed with soft sheets. Smell of fresh coffee in the kitchen. All very nice.

I start to swing myself out of bed. Stop, surprised by the lightness of my body. Lifting the sheets up, slowly. Scared. Knowing what’s coming. Seeing how my legs come to a stub halfway to where my knees would’ve been.

We've all heard this story before. A rogue asteroid is headed toward Earth, and the destruction of all life is imminent. . .unless a band of self-sacrificing loners does something to save us. It's pretty familiar ground that Eric Shapiro's new novel, "It's Only Temporary", published by Permuted Press, treads, except for one thing: there is no intrepid band of saviors. Six weeks ago, the governments of the world announced that no one has any aces up their sleeves. Less than half of one percent of life on the planet is expected to survive impact.