The Bullshit Machine
Here’s a tiny confession. I’m bored. Yes; I know. I’m a sinner. Go ahead. Burn me at the stake of your puritanical Calvinism; the righteously, thoroughly, well, boring idea that boredom itself is a moral defect; that a restless mind is the Devil’s sweatshop. There’s...
Mockingbird
I stretched myself in the chair and yawned. Then I said, “What happened to conversations? Why don’t people talk anymore, Bob?” He looked at me. “Yes,” he said, as though he had been thinking about the same thing himself. “When I was newly made, back in Cleveland,...
Dear Life
She looked for the more important man to help her, but he wasn’t there. Now she remembered what he’d written. A play about Doukhobors that had caused a big row because the Doukhobors were going to have to be naked. Of course they weren’t real Doukhobors, they were...
Linger Awhile
Suspension of disbelief is the first step in doing anything hitherto thought impossible. Yes. I keep telling myself that. I'm Istvan Fallok and I believe that I'm going to reconstitute Justine Trimble from the magnetised particles of a videotape. I believe it because...
The Circle
“For example, when you heard your dad had a seizure, you drove, what, a hundred miles or so, and never once during that drive did you try to glean any information from the InnerCirclers, or from the larger OuterCircle. Do you see that as an opportunity wasted?” “Now I...