His mother wore oven mitts as she wrapped him in aluminum foil for his first day of school. She placed welding goggles over his eyes and smiled down at him. “Be yourself and try to make friends, okay, Billy?” Billy… Continue Reading
“Good evening, sir,” said the pale man in black coat at my front door. “Hello. You are…?” “Call me Mackey, sir.” “Ah, Mr. Mackey, you’re a day early,” I said, clutching my robe against the chill. “But come in, come… Continue Reading
We are hungry, so hungry we could eat the whole world. Everything smells like ketchup. We could eat the trees, we could eat the sun. The glass lights on the deck twinkle like little candy stars, and we could eat… Continue Reading
The story of the world is the story of the water and the stone. They were here before the plants and the creatures and it was their world. But they were not friends. The water was quick and curious, rushing… Continue Reading
Take a Credit and place your PocketBank™ back into its magnetic placeholder on the left side of your belt, then take off your tie. Let it float to the ground slowly before shattering into a miasma of colors on the… Continue Reading
He had been cut this bad once before. In the Central Highlands, a punji stick had jabbed him below the knee. It had gone in less than an inch, but the feces that the VC had smeared on it had… Continue Reading
Garry switched off the engine and looked towards the house. He’d hoped that Bea would be out for her run so that he could jump straight into the shower, but the lights were on. He sniffed his shirt for any… Continue Reading
My first thought was to lie, and spent a few moments dreaming up common household emergencies like an overflowing washing machine or a broken refrigerator. But Marla was one of those sympathetic-but-also-kind-of-nosy bosses and usually would look the other way… Continue Reading
Fuck the ugly dog. That’s what he said as they were taking him away. Somebody shouted to him as the police were leading him away, “Hey, Joe, what do we do with the Boy?” and he just leaned back over… Continue Reading
Ten years ago, everyone thought A.I. Richtree was just an eccentric tech trillionaire with a hidden identity. These days, everybody is aware that A.I. Richtree is a rogue supercomputer that is somehow responsible for “creating” around 2 billion people. The… Continue Reading