Game Control
The kempt and ingenuous young man held before her a carving of an enormous African family. The carving was awful enough to start with, but had be mucked over with tar. Eleanor was reluctant to touch it. 'I don't-' she fumbled. 'I'm travelling, I can't-' 'Please,...
Four Thousand Weeks
Now that my daily duties involved a baby, I'd simply expanded my instrumental approach to accommodate the new reality: I wanted to know that I was doing whatever was required to obtain optimal future results in the domain of child-rearing as well. Except that this now...
Timbuktu
Mr. Bones knew that Willy wasn’t long for this world. The cough had been inside him for over six months, and by now there wasn’t a chance in hell that he would ever get rid of it. Slowly and inexorably, without once taking a turn for the better, the thing had assumed...
Damned If I Do
Warm and Nicely Buried "Mrs. Marotta, Jose is gone." The woman took Fragua's hand and patted it as if consoling him. "Yes, my son is dead." She assured him that her feet were planted firmly on real ground. "Mrs. Marotta, I don't know how to tell you this. I'm really...
Time Shelter
At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created. In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ. It was a...