Computer Leon wrote a protest letter and when the officials took him for questioning, he knew what he would say, and he said it: “I’m not sorry I wrote it. I knew you’d come for me.” “And did you think we didn’t know you’d say that?” an Official said in the interrogation room. “You’re one […]
“The food’s running low,” Eddie said. “I keep thinking of things I thought I hated,” Ben said. “Onions, friend chicken, the smell of broccoli boiling, paper cuts.” “It’s running low,” Eddie said. “Maybe a few more days. We have more oxygen than food.” They watched the earth above the gray horizon, quiet and blue. Deep […]
Tinkerton hits a pocket of suspended space. On the street the cars have stopped moving. A plane overhead is a quieted image, pastel drawn, a stop-motion bullet, long in the sky. or Tinkerton hits a pocket of suspended time. On the street the cars have stopped. He remembers watching out the window of a plane […]
Summer begins for the reader, summer reserved for later nights and just another glass. Morning sun drifts in squares across the floor. A man rushes into a house and finds a werewolf hunched over a woman. The werewolf eats them both and gathers itself under moonlight and howls about the gratifications of flesh. The remainder […]
My scientist friend invented a time machine and we went back in time and did a number on some Neanderthals. I don’t know anything about the time machine except that it works with anti-time, my friend said. We went back to the time of the Neanderthals and they were real as you and me. Except […]
Imagine this as a sitcom. It’ll be a killer. We have Nancy and Bob Henderson, the parents of five children who live on an average street in an average town. The funny thing about them is that the five kids have no heads, which will make for a great laugh track when the Hendersons head […]
Did I tell you how I lost my tongue? It all started at the ice cream shop when a friend, Elan, suggested a drive to his sister’s wedding the next day. “She’s marrying some guy named Johnny, who she met just a few weeks ago in Toronto. I’m going for the drama, as all of […]
One day the earth cracked in two. There was a great rending noise at the separation point followed by tremors. A reporter reporting on a crime looked down and said, “What the hell? Get the camera on that.” But as people can only see a few miles in any direction, most considered the crack a […]
One day the whales departed. The whalewatchers waited and waited but the sea kept its stories hidden. Its surfaces were just blue-gray waves, wave upon wave unending. The captains scratched their heads when sonar pulsed back blank fathoms and whalers returned to the harbor to sulk and drink. And then it was the bees who […]
A man sits up after sleep and places the soles of his feet on the carpet, these feet that will no longer work. They’d carried him through South American jungles, through the streets of Lisbon, where nothing happened. They’d assisted him and Ben up mushy stairs with a piano, and with them he’d carried two […]
It’s morning and a crowd of people is in the street. I have a conflict: I work for the state and the state has claimed these crowds, these people, illegal, and I work for the state and must enforce its declarations. But I’m also a human being and these people in the streets are human […]
At the diner, a man spoke to his pancakes. He said, “I shall consume thee, my warm fluffy cakes, so buttery and sweet.” In the office, he told the copy machine: “I shall press thee, green button, and thus procure 15 copies of these, my required documents.” “And so, my friends, we shall set forth […]
