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Please, Do Not Draw This Turtle
“Do you like to draw? Or paint? Or maybe just sketch and doodle?” I must have heard this line a hundred times as a kid, whiling away my summer Saturday afternoons watching old movies on TV. It was delivered by a pleasant-looking man with gray hair in a suit hawking a “free art test” over…
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The One Who Returned
When I was just thirteen years old I discovered the terrible injustice at the center of my community. On that day I could no longer enjoy the tranquil fields or pleasant weather of the place of my birth. I walked through the beautiful gates with nothing but the following: BackpackCloth clothing (no armor protection)Length of…
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Scramp
After they legalized all drugs in the United States, a handful of men became very, very rich. Nobody really inquired as to whether they’d been able to corner the market as a result of a head start they’d had running the illicit market, and the remnants of the federal government had essentially abdicated governing to…
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The Line
The Holy Vessel of the Security Forces of The Line, christened Inevitably Successful in All Circumstances, cut through space and time, arriving in the Real just outside orbit of agri-world 3B-L02. The world’s planetary overseers had complained for months of pirates intercepting shipments of foodstuffs as they were being prepared for shipment from the orbital…
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Raymond’s Women
Raymond was dead. There was no mistaking it — his frail form laid motionless atop his bed in the dark, a hardcover book spine up across his chest. As she waited motionless on the couch in the dim lamplight, Lisa wondered if she’d ever be able to get the image out of her head. She’d…
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The Dragon
I remember how excited I was for the launch of Reverie Moon Online. My friends and I had read about it in magazines for months, talked about it after school while trading Pokemon cards. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before — a 3D roleplaying game that let players cooperate with strangers around the…
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Larry
It takes a certain kind of temperament to be a bus driver. My uncle told me that. He drove city buses for forty years and during that time he saw some crazy shit. Women going into labor, couples getting into explosive arguments, people pulling knives on each other, the full spectrum of human experience crammed…
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Connection
When Facebook and the mass internet started to really take off one of the most interesting things was realizing how widespread and shared personal quirks and behaviors really were. A lot of these came from childhood. Remember that Facebook fan page for “turning the pillow over to the cool side?” Things like that. It was…
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Survival Instinct
The world was anathema to life. Well, Belan considered, that wasn’t entirely true. It hosted a thriving ecosystem of flora and fauna that were uniformly hostile in the extreme. Its atmosphere, thoroughly poisonous to him, had apparently created the perfect conditions for organisms deadlier than any he’d ever known to thrive. It was as if…
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Little Gods
Anyone who’s been online long enough knows the format of these things, right? You know how it all goes: someone remembers a TV show from their childhood, or they download a cursed ROM, or they find a video tape at a garage sale, and then something terrible happens. Do people even have garage sales anymore?…