Six Word Stories
Baby’s first words: “Reporting for duty!”
Author Archive
Wetherfell’s Reef Runics: New Story Alert
F&SF has officially announced acquisition of my latest short story, “Wetherfell’s Reef Runics,” which is tentatively slated for early 2017.
To mark the occasion, I present the first paragraph:
The visitor drowned at Hollows Reef while Ambrose Sabala, mid-snorkel, was making a gleeful mental inventory of the morning’s haul—not of fish, but of books. Ambrose drifted over the dull, trampled coral beds with ears full of seawater, snorkel mouthpiece firmly clenched in his teeth, three-pronged pole spear dangling, and did not hear the sirens wailing louder and softer and louder again as emergency vehicles raced along the folds of the ocean highway. He had raided the Friends of the Library bin outside the Schefferville Library that morning, and with one ten dollar bill taken away a stack of first editions in good and even mint condition. A Bret Easton Ellis, stowed in someone’s luggage, then unpacked and left behind—no doubt to make room for a resin tiki or a seashell mug. A biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, also unread. An untouched copy of The Marriage Plot, or anyway one that had been touched only in order that it might flatten a dozen photographs of a bat mitzvah and family surfing lessons. Ambrose pulled his spear back taut on its rubber sling and released it half-heartedly in the direction of a trigger fish, which failed to react except to swerve away slowly from the empty triple threat of his barbed prongs.
This is the first of what I hope will be a new series of stories centered on Castaway Books, a secondhand bookshop located on the slightly skewed Hawaiian island of Tauai.
A Writer’s Mind at Work
Two men in brown clothes walking in lockstep across a pasture, seen through a screen of trees, look a lot like a horse. Oh wait, that is a horse.
The Flawed Logic of the Stocking Thief
“Heh heh heh! They will never notice if I steal just one…”
Entertainment
The Ghost Penny Post
Now available, wherever fine rare periodicals are sold, “The Ghost Penny Post” is the cover story for the March/April 2016 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. This beautiful and stunningly weird cover is by Jason Van Hollander. The issue has been reviewed by a few online websites, including Amazing Stories, Tangent Online, and SFRevue.
An idea I’d been carrying around for over 15 years, it was finally written in response to a request for stories about videogames; but ultimately, while it does involve games, the video element is nonexistent. It might be considered steampunk thanks to the Victorian period setting, but the only steam in it comes from a kettle. The keen observer might notice that it takes place partly in the bewildering village of Binderwood, referenced elsewhere on this site. There are no coherent observations to be drawn from this, however. I had simply run out of names for made-up places, I assure you. Please don’t see patterns where none exist!
Dreams of a Dead Singer
Chtherub
Text Trailer: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
–“How many of your memories of the world beyond the border are verifiable?”
–We were the 12th expedition.
—“How calm do you think you might be in an emergency?”
–There were four of us.
—“When I snap my fingers, you will have no memory of this conversation, but will follow my directives.”
–Our mission was simple.
…In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe…
—The brightness washed over me in unending waves and connected me to the earth, the water, the trees, the air, as I opened up and kept on opening.
–Emerging from that space was a foot and the end of a leg, amid a flurry of disrupted sand.
–The sea was ablaze with light, but nothing beautiful here fooled me anymore.
–Vaguely, from some far-off place, I realized that the words on the wall were being infused with sound as well, but that I had not had the capacity to hear it before.
–The smell of lime and mint unexpectedly arose, cutting through the must, the loam.
–We stopped calling back when the intensity of its moans heightened in a way that suggested anger, as if it knew we were mocking it.
–By the time we were ready to cross the border, we knew everything… And we knew nothing.
–I could no more have turned back than have gone back in time.
–I’d had experience enough with lighthouse keepers to know one when I saw one.
–Of all my answers, “Breakfast” annoyed her the most.
–I could not deny that these habitats were transitional in a deeply unnatural way.
–No one ever explained what form “extraction” might take.
–They did not have the will or inclination to clean the kidney-shaped pool.
–I suppose I should have reared back from the microscope in shock.
–“It is a body?” the surveyor said.
–Perhaps it is “merely” a machine.
–The map was the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?
—Consolidation of authority.
–We had all been given self-destruct buttons, but the only one who could push them was dead.
–I’m well beyond you now, and traveling very fast.
(Textler by Marc Laidlaw, based on Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, February 2014)
Bless Me, Ray Bradbury
Sometime in early 1976, Ray Bradbury came and talked in the Laguna Beach High School auditorium. Afterwards I went down with my friend Robert Gillespie to meet him. We peppered him with questions, and Bradbury commented that he had corresponded with Clark Ashton Smith, at which my enthusiasm must have overcome me, as he reached out and sort of gave me a noogie. Robert never let me hear the end of it: “Oooooh, Ray Bradbury tousled your hair!” Gillespie tortured me with this embarrassing information for quite some time. In the end, I prepared this card and sent it to Bradbury, who kindly signed it. I carried it in my wallet for quite a while.
