Beginning Year Number Nine in Chronic 1A (1987)
I used to want to ask Johnson how to control things, how to control even my arms and legs, but he would have only laughed. Johnson is convinced I’ve gone the same place as Hewlitt, that we have both surpassed the need for our bodies, that if he is dedicated enough he might someday be like us. Besides, he would have said, had I been able to ask, how was he to know I wasn’t a spy, sitting immobile in my wheelchair for eight years in order to trick him into revealing his methods?
Read MoreBertie Makes it Worse (2011)
If I said this story wasn’t influenced by Mark Twain’s Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning, I would be lying.
Read MoreGeorge and the Dragon (1994)
Most of my attempts to write stories for children have turned out disasters. I like this tale, however, and hope you will, too.
Read MoreThe Nice Lady (1990)
Ilana told herself that when she grew up, she would be just like the nice lady.
Read MoreFour Unfinished Short Stories (2013)
Here are four uncompleted works of short fiction. I like each in some way or another, and so decided to publish them here.
Read MorePopular Authors and Characters, Moonlighting (1981)
For the better part of two years I was a child protective services worker for the state of Tennessee. That, and my twisted sense of humor, explains this post.
Read MoreTwo (Really) Early Stories (1966)
I have no excuse for these stories, except to say I was in my teens when I wrote them. Proceed with caution.
Read MoreInterlude (1976)
I speculate about the first point of view; it’s my best guess about what might have been happening in the mind of the other party. The second viewpoint is mine, exactly as I remember it. I was perhaps 19 years old when the encounter took place.
Read MoreAvendon (1984)
If there were additional changes, they were too subtle to measure. Were the contours of his body different? Did his face seem more feminine than it had the month before? The year before? Was his voice a little less deep? Was his personality changing? Sometimes it seemed so.
Read MoreThe Turnaround Game (1990)
As soon as they were in bed together, he knew there had been another man. He pulled her toward him, and there was a resistance there had never been before. Gently disengaging himself, he rolled away. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling of rafters and pipes.
Read MoreDear Raggfllad (1972)
I wrote this not-very-good story when I was about 22 years old. I’ve present it here so it can be compared to my later writing to prove I do have the capacity to learn.
Read MoreFree Bleeder (1968)
To the best of my knowledge I wrote this story while still in high school. I might have written it my junior year, but I have dated it to my senior year. Certainly by the time I was in college I would have known better than to create a fictitious type of alcohol in a future that would have undoubtedly preferred single-malt scotch.
Read MoreRules (1973)
I wrote this story when I was 22 or 23 years old. Needless to say, the Cold War was on my mind.
Read MoreA Tale from Whitey’s Tavern (1967)
I wrote this story, as best I can remember, my senior year in high school. I had heard of but not read Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales From the White Hart, and the concept of fanciful stories told by regulars at a neighborhood bar intrigued me.
Read MoreDeep Freeze (1966)
I wrote this story when I was a junior in high school. At the time I was under the influence of Victorian-era writers like Poe and Verne and H.G. Wells.
Read MoreNo Good Guys in This Story (1972)
Several times during the night the driver attempted to start a conversation with his passenger but succeeded only in eliciting stony silence or monosyllabic replies. He gave up, and they drove silently across the Texas panhandle. The driver had a hard time staying awake, and several times ran the passenger-side wheels onto the shoulder as he dozed. The hitchhiker showed no sign of being bothered by this, nor did he offer to drive.
Read MoreA Trade is in Order (1990)
I expected them yesterday, but they didn’t come. I imagine they were looking for Honda in Tokyo, or Weinstein in London. But they came today. I was sitting in the oval office, reading documents which had once been vital to the security of the United States, when I heard them land. I put the documents back on the President’s desk and went out onto the White House lawn.
Read MoreImposter (1990)
Zara was a clouded leopard, anatomically, physically, chemically, behaviorally. Her whiskers were clouded leopard whiskers, her fleas clouded leopard fleas. But Zara had not been a clouded leopard forty-eight hours earlier.
Read MoreThe Unhappy Life of Constance Thornberg (1989)
Miss Thornberg is a desperate woman, and desperate women are different from desperate men. Men, in their desperation, often turn anger upon the outside world; desperate women turn their anger inwards, steaming in the bitter juices of frustration and helplessness until eventually the juices are all used up and only a dry husk remains. But Miss Thornberg is different from other desperate women. Her anger is directed both outward and inwa
Read MoreThe Bad Kid (1990)
Miss Grant was in somewhat of a dither, because she had just run through the list of reasons why a parent might want to temporarily give up his or her child. But Mr. Johnson wasn’t asking the Department of Family Services to care for the child on a temporary basis. He wasn’t asking the Department to take care of Benjamin until he could get his act together, or until a specific problem was taken care of. He didn’t want to see the child again, ever, or so he said.
Read MoreO’Darby and the Ducks (1988)
The bluffs fell away on both sides, and on a spit of land, I could see the aliens. They were lizard-men—Vegans, from the look of them. Our allies. Soldiers, like us, on furlough, looking like crocodiles on two legs. One of them was holding an old Earth-style double-barreled shotgun. He wore an orange hunting vest filled with .12 gauge shells. The other bent down and picked up something small and white and fuzzy. After a second, he tossed it into the air.
Read MoreA Gift of the Catacombs (1986)
But the catacombs! My catacombs! The catacombs meander beneath modern-day Paris like the tunnels of a crazy mole. They cut here through the time of the writers of the Lost Generation, there through the reign of Louis XIV, running here through layers which were deposited during the lifetime of Christ, and there through strata more ancient than Moses. The catacombs touch all that Paris is and all that Paris has been, and they are influenced and colored in so doing. They are steeped in the lore and lives of all the inhabitants of Paris throughout all time. They are the true essence of Paris itself! The essence!
Read MoreDamned Worm, Part II: Exobiology Lesson (1995)
It is clear symbiosis in the customary use of the term is not occurring here. What is not clear is whether the host species could have managed as well without the peculiar interdependency with the symbionts. Certainly, the civilization on Trill is well advanced, but it is repressive in many ways, much like Earth was until recent centuries. I have asked myself why, if the advantage of the symbiosis is for the host species, the political, social, and economic climate on Trill is so, to use a word that is perhaps not scientific, bad. I am unable to determine the reason.
Read MoreDamned Worm, Part I (1994)
At that point, Josanna, overcome by survivor guilt and remorse (she had been somewhat in love with the Allex-Krat Thing), agreed to be the host. And so the Worm Krat had been surgically implanted in her chest. But when she awoke, there was not the blissful pairing she had imagined.
Read MoreNext Exit (1990)
Ignoring the speed limit, he accelerated to a pleasant, if illegal, seventy-five miles per hour. He turned to Judy, sitting white-faced beside him, and said, “Sorry about all that.” She didn’t reply, just pulled her seat belt more snugly around her. “Be that way, then,” he growled.
Read MoreMantid (1990)
It wasn’t that Earth was such a backwater. Earth had, after all, some of the best recreational drugs in the known universe, and the highly stylized antics of what passed for intelligent inhabitants were a source of perpetual amusement for the idle rich of the Hundred Hypercivilized Planets. It was just that she was stuck here, and she was hungry.
Read MoreThree Lives Lost (1986)
He said nothing until I attempted to take him on an illustrated voyage through Shakespeare. “Tragedy,” I said, in the midst of a harangue his tragedies. “There is no true tragedy in life. Pain, yes; suffering, certainly; unhappiness, in great profusion. But tragedy, as Shakespeare saw it—it just doesn’t exist. No one’s lives could be so tragic as, say, those of Romeo and Juliet.”
Read MoreGWillie (1984)
GWillie is always telling me what to do. I usually do what he says, because he’s awfully smart. He tells me he “makes suggestions.” “I merely point out socially acceptable alternatives to decisions which may not be in your best interest, Willie. I’m like a big brother.” GWillie is like a brother in a way—a nice brother who is always there when I need him
Read MoreWhat I Found in the Basement (1984)
Mr. Evans said please don’t tell anyone, and tried to give me a one hundred dollar bill, but I wouldn’t take it. And then I was running through the grass of the front lawn, and letting myself in the door of our house. I turned around in the doorway, and took one last look at Mr. Evans’ pleading face. And then I went inside and took a long, hot shower.
Read MoreA Raid on Donahue’s Bread (1990)
MacManus could have targeted any of the others: Saunders, Kinnon, Ayers, Britton, or Halvington. But Saunders was fleet of foot, with a vindictive nature; Kinnon was bread-wise and kept a close guard on his slices; Ayers was on a diet and got no bread at all, and so was on the prowl himself; and Britton and Halvington operated on the buddy system and were mutual body and bread guards. That left only Donahue. It had to be Donahue.
Read MoreI Think of Cindi (1987)
A millipede, seeking relief from the green spray paint insanity, comes inside, where the real insanity is. It bustles over the window ledge, its multitudinous legs working in tandem. All those legs! I wonder if it could spare a pair, What kind of god would give a bug thirty pairs and deny me the use of just one?
Read MoreJust Another Year in Chronic 1A (1988)
We’re on the big goddamned yellow and black school bus, on our way to a “picnic,” which means we’ll stop at a roadside park with three trees and two concrete picnic tables and eat extra krispy recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken, bones and all, and maybe even the plastic sporks, the hungrier of us. Then we will be put back on the bus and driven back to the hospital, where we will disembark and be rolled back to the musty, dusty, and always gloomy buildings, back to the chronic wards.
Read MoreThe Liberation of Uncle Eddy (1981)
“Nobody rightly knows, Miss Hope, where Uncle Eddy came from. When I bought the salvage barn back in ‘43 I found him in a corner with a lot of other junk. Nobody seemed to know anything about him, so I just moved him out to the center of the floor, dressed him in this tuxedo and wig, and started telling everybody it was my Uncle Eddy.”
Read MoreDebtor’s Prison (1982)
They almost got him that time. The black Mercedes had swerved onto the sidewalk thirty yards in front of Hadley, mowing a swath through pedestrians and parking meters with its cowcatcher.
Read MoreI Was Trapped in a Man’s Body! (1969)
I have never read what is popularly called transvestite fiction. I’ve seen it of course, but it has just never interested me. To some readers, this piece might at some level seem to fit that genre, but it’s my attempt to fictionalize how a young woman might feel and behave when she learns she is biologically male. The protagonist identities consistently and entirely as female.
Read MoreNight Ride (1993)
Bicycles have changed, and yet they are the same. They are still silent running and breezes in your hair and sweaty palms from holding onto handlebars too long. They are leaning into curves and riding without hands, pumping hard when you go uphill, and coasting when you can find a downhill. Modern bikes only remotely resemble those I rode when I was a kid the first time, but the old-time feeling is still there, fresh as ever it was and ever will be.
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