Ruinous Price I mixed my first martini at five. The morphine was taking its toll. The ceiling receded and the window looked out over the sea. The nurses appeared to be made of wire, sculpted as a Bertoia chair—pleasingly curving. What did the wire people see? My bones, working their way to the surface.   Read More …
The Theory of Five Thousand Footsteps John Eldritch woke up in the middle of the night to find himself pinned down in his bed, a knee on his chest and his arms grasped firmly below the elbows.   “Just tell us where it is and you won’t get hurt.”   There were two men in Read More …
Codex Plasmodium “There is no future. This is not pessimism but the borderland of science, where time is only the present tense. Even that word is not sufficient. It confuses me.”   That is the voice of Quentin Foster traversing the airwaves at the dead of night, subversive and soothing, edgy and plain-speaking, beloved of Read More …
The December Ninth Study In 1967 I lived in a small city nestled in a verdant valley between a high piney plateau and a vast empty desert. I would get high with my friend David Lake and other high-school hippies around a campfire in an aspen grove or at the foot of a red-rock cliff. Read More …
Sefira Lisa looked in the rearview mirror and saw that her eyes had turned black.   The process had started a week ago, her second day on the road. She’d been washing her hands in the ladies room of a rest stop on I-80, somewhere in the sprawling middle of Pennsylvania, and when she glanced Read More …
The Cloisonné Pill Box He has always hated that jewelry store, but something catches Marshall’s eye as he passes by on his walk home from the Gray Panthers meeting. Gold rings, watches, emerald earrings, pearls, and this thing that squats amid the glitter, colorful but practical.   *   What do other men give their Read More …
Schräge Musik A boy bends over his work, shoulders hunched, absorbed in his task. It is mid-afternoon on a bright, sunny day, yet the boy has switched on a pair of angle-poise lamps and in their pooled circles of light a few pieces of grey plastic and perspex can be seen on the desktop behind Read More …
Son of Neptune Simon Bearde, a steward on the SS Pandora, made a discovery just as his vessel had passed over the equator into the Southern Hemisphere. The crossing of the line celebrations had lasted two days. Though they were not as violent as they had once been on naval ships, they still had dangerous Read More …
World Leader Retired I knew him when we were young. We were friends for a few months. Then we lost touch. He had a remarkable sense of direction – innate and much more powerful than most people’s. It was as if he carried in his mind a very detailed map of everywhere, and he was Read More …
Meno’s Stories One: Winter Flies   The frost patterns on the single-pane windows resembled, without color, the end pages of some old, very old leather-bound book in his father’s library. The cold had worked patiently and delicately to create a design that combined paisley and fleur de lis. Meno was impressed, as he hand-ground his Read More …
