Lot by Ben Godby

One day, a peasant, a warrior, a merchant and a priest appeared before the Angel of Death. “Tell me about yourselves,” said the Angel.

The Comeback by Nick Tramdack

I will say it again, Jaquel. Burn this letter now before you read another word.

Moonman by Kristine Ong Muslim

Following the direction of Billy’s frightened gaze, I saw it: a white face with what looked like holes lurking sparsely on its surface.

Biodyssey by S. Decoteaux Bates

A wave rises beneath you, lifting the boat. You embark on the eve of the spring equinox.

Lalla Rooke by John Gerald Fagan

The Americans, the Chinese and the Russians had plans of their own, but the Tasmanians were the first to act and sent Tex up in a tiny space shuttle three months ahead of schedule.

Border Patrol by Rachel Ayers

Adam and María had twelve hours together after dropping the skiff into orbit.

One day, a peasant, a warrior, a merchant and a priest appeared before the Angel of Death.

“Tell me about yourselves,” said the Angel.

“I was born in a village called Thim,” said the peasant. “In spring, the pastures ripen green, in summer the harvest is yellow, and in winter the earth is hidden with a veil of snow.”

“And in the autumn?”

She cast her eyes downward. “Aye, in the autumn. I have no good memories of that season.

“In the autumn of my seventeenth year I met my husband,” she continued, “and it was then that I lost my lover. His name was Ilto, and he and I had been betrothed from our infancy. We played in those pastures, fields and snowdrifts. We grew up to know each other by name.

“Then came my husband. He was a moment not of rage or passion, but uncertainty. He was not the red slashes of the leaves, though he was among them. We were, together, their falling; though I began to think that way only after. And he was the father of my first child.

“We had three more. Our first, my son, followed in the footsteps of his father, and grew into his old man’s profession. Our second, my daughter, had a child of her own and moved to live with her partner, though I am glad to say I saw her every holiday. Our third,” she lowered her voice to a whisper, “passed away,” it crescendoed to normal, “and the fourth was a bad seed.”

“A bad seed?” the Angel asked.

“Rotten to the core,” she nearly whispered, shaking her head. “It made us feel awful – his father, especially.

“It was then that my husband took a lover. When I discovered, I said nothing but thought deeply. I never discovered whether his actions were on account of the child, or on account of me, or for the unfiltered sake of the other one that he found; but the more I thought on it, neither did I know for what reason I had taken my husband, so many years ago, when with Ilto. And then I took a lover of my own – a new one, as it was not Ilto, who had moved away and, for all purposes, disappeared. Though he was still strong in my mind, and I always tried to imagine it was him there with me; and perhaps that is why my second lover, like my husband, drifted away.”

There was a silence.

“And then?”

The peasant started. “Well, then I died.”

“I was born to the streets,” said the warrior. His gaze flicked to the peasant, ascertaining the completion of her testimony after the fact. Then his eyes settled on the Angel of Death with unimpressed familiarity. “To a mother, in truth, though not to a father. But still… still, the streets were my parents, good as any.

“I learned what was given, and what taken; what was done, and what could be redeemed. But I never learned the art of figuring, and thus my expectations were unequivocally proved wrong.

“When I turned eleven, they caught me. Either the streets had turned against me, or I had outgrown them, or else I had never been as intimate with them as I expected. They said I could join the army or have my hands chopped off, and I had some friends who’d been back from the wars already and had said it was a black business but gold coin. And imagine, until then, bread had been black business.

“There is little respect for our profession; and I admit I did some bad things – some things I’m not proud of. I have a wife and two daughters, for example, and I have not been home as often as a man should.”

He stared at the Angel, his eyes flinty, as though daring the being. Then he continued.

“But I’ve always supported them,” he said, “always loved them, and always fought for the same thing, which is peace.”

“The merchant has sent a letter,” said the Angel of Death.

The warrior blinked, not sure if he had had his fill of himself, or if he ought to say more; but it was too late for more words.

‘My name is X,’ read the letter, ‘and life is no longer worth living.

‘When I was still just a child my father died and his affairs fell to me. My mother had died long before that; so long that I sometimes doubted I was born. But I had advisers, who were certain I had been; and who were certain, too, that they could further grow me into a second father. I wondered if they could grow me into a second mother, too.

‘But when I was thirteen, I got rid of them. It was their own fault. They had shown me the lines and figures necessary to understand the businesses left to me, and there was a discrepancy in my own household. Their disappearance, I thought, could balance ledgers – profits for loss. And it was a necessary conclusion of the conditions predisposed.

‘But I was wrong. I was very wrong, or at least, I made the incorrect decision. And all of my father’s hard work fell apart.

‘How I ruined everything he’d created through one touch… I don’t know. There were checks; there should have been adjustments. The numbers, the formulas, they said so. Had said so. Or had, at least, suggested it.

‘I do not know what my former counsellors thought – if it amused them, or if they had planned it, or if my failures were a narrative unread by the collegial class of my city and province, utterly unremarkable. Instead, I grew older – not quite a father, and certainly not a mother – on a dwindling inheritance that, finally, obeyed a law: that of subtraction.

‘Then I met X. How could my life not immediately change? I think that when everyone meets their soul mate, they must sense that they are the one, and know that – though the unexpected might arrive – the foundation of all deviations from that point forward is solid.

‘We lay that foundation together. We were the keystone of familiarity against which rested the humble bricks of routine, the doorposts of beloved company, even the windows that let in the bother – the beloved bother! – of the world. Those Archimedean points, arbitrary in and of themselves, from which we could move the entire world and us within it.

‘It was many years we spent building that house. But now it has been two more, and these… these without. The gravel of the park path is unheard when scuffed by a single pair of feet, and the night breeze, without a body of warmth that lies against it, is tyrannical. Our house still stands, for it was built strong, but now it is a temple, and – if I am honest – I am fearful of entering it and prefer to tarry always elsewhere.

‘I have known it for so long, but I say now: I cannot live this way, alone. There are those who tell me there is so much yet to live for, and there are others who rush to fill the void. But what I now know best is that emptiness is not a negative quality; once it arrives, it cannot be filled up.

‘And so, goodbye.’

The Angel rolled the merchant’s letter and sealed it in a scrollcase.

“And you?” he said, at last.

The priest sighed – a great, long, windy thing. “I was born an orphan,” he began, “or, rather, that’s how I came into this life.

“Orphans suffer the greatest trials in life,” he continued – and for a moment looked as though he might sermonize on the story of the merchant. But he narrowed his eyes and, understanding time was short, stuck to his own. “But for me it was most fortunate. God, you see, took me in. Faith, you understand, brought me under its wing. That our lives are crass, profane, perverse, unfair, is the reason we have bases; and it is these bases that the fluid of wisdom rests upon as it fills up the vessel of the pious mind.

“But when the tapping upon these bases that is religion increases, and it rushes faster and froths to fill the clay, then these bases can be swept away – so that God’s mind runs like water through your own. When I learned this – and then learned how – I gave all of myself to God that I could. And, having forgotten all conceits, I was rewarded.

“Before me I saw the greatest vision ever beheld. It was golden thrones, and iron sceptres, and crowns of lights that shot into every aspect of reality. The thrones were great, the sceptres great, and the crowns presided over them as kings that were not kings, but only orders of metals, gems, and brilliance.”

The priest paused, his face glad, and his gaze passed over the shoulder of the Angel of Death and to a place beyond.

“I have held on to that vision all my life, Angel,” the priest said finally, “and now here I am at last.”

“Thank you,” said the the Angel of Death. Looking round, it considered the ghosts before it. “Now, tell me why I should admit you to the eternal hereafter, and not condemn you to the endless never.”

The ghosts, too, took their time to consider. Then, answering politely and without interrupting one another, they began. No one expected the first to answer would be the first to speak.

Said that one: “I have not asked life for anything, and I have not taken anything from life, either. When my heart has turned against something, my mind has fought for its salvation; and I have always done the best I could will towards anything and everything. Truly, I have walked through this world as easily as possible, both for myself, and for the rest of it. Spirits and hidden futures have no need to fear of me, for I will walk among them as a wisp of wind only mildly pleasant on the cheek.”

Then said another: “I do not expect God to take pity on me. God’s judgement will be final and swift. Life is a brief instant; I believe, now, that so too will be death.”

And said the third: “Well… I am alone. And I am not alone in my aloneness, but rather all beings and all creation share this heavy truth. But not being alone in aloneness is not enough; we wish to be together. We all long for a community, if not of the heart, at least of the spirit – a place where we are not alien to one another. Am I saying I have a right to this? Or that I expect my schematic to be in truth what stands beyond the rifts of time? No, of course not. But the world has been so much evil. Is it too much to ask that, once past it, we are given just some respite?”

One did not answer, and it was not the letter.

“Alright,” said the Angel at last. “I’m letting you all in. Provisionally.”

There is a red boat, and you slip over the gunwale and conceal your small body amidst the ropes, for though adult eyes seldom note a child so young, the docks are vast and teeming with myriads of citizens.  As you lay among the coils, smelling raw fiber, you stare up at a sky where no sun shines; the heavens arch above you in a uniform and nacreous dome that lights all of space with a comforting impartiality.

A wave rises beneath you, lifting the boat.

You embark on the eve of the spring equinox.

The seas stretch onwards to forever, shallow and flat, and a few days out you ask your reflection which bearing will guide you home.  The shimmering figure claims not to know, but tells you your name is Paidon Pais, and that you shall steer a good course.  There is a lie here, you decide, for reflections can never speak more than half a truth.  At night you watch the face of Luna and feel the tides pulled tight against the sacrum of planet.  The air is clean and good, but what is your true name? 

When you make landfall on the seventh island you see, the sun hangs in mid-spring, and strange flowers like tongues deck the shore, their calyxes drooping in the humid air.  Alone on a shard of rock thrusting out of moss-shrouded lagoon, a slender girl with eyes the color of roses asks you to take her upon your boat.  Her name is Ear the Lesser, she says as she strokes your supple limbs, and she has lost her way long ago.

You try your very best, but the seas spin whirlpools and waterspouts, and by the summer solstice she has lost her way once more; starving and parched, you sail into the harbor of a vast white metropolis alone on the little bark.

Along the waterfront run streets lit by ruby lamps as delicate as your skin, and you ache to wander those alleys, but as you disembark armored men take you from the harbor and drag you up ramps of alabaster to where a palace shaped like a chrysanthemum crowns the city. In an ivory hall the men throw you down before a throne. 

Her name is Ear the Greater and her pages call her empress, for beneath an anadem of twining roses and briars she brings law to a thousand prefectures.  She names you Meirakion Meirax, the violator and murderer, and when they bring you to the calcified chambers below the palace, the armored men chain your hands, and, though you moan and plead, emasculate you there.

The air tastes hot and foul, and through a crack in the walls you watch swift Hermes skirt the horizon.  You feel sure the queen has lied, for you are not the man she named.

Released the day after mid-summer, you don the robes of a monastic and beg for your belly in distant villages where xanthic dust floors the streets.  You take the name Neaniskos Neanis, and your only companion as you travel the Rimlands is an ascetic called Theros, a blind leper and deaf-mute who scourges himself during the hot nights and parleys with angels at dawn.  Over your heads, blue-white Aphrodite arcs towards zenith but never gains dominion, and you ruminate on the idylls of ambition.

Theros builds fires against the dark, and croons to the flames when he believes you asleep.  This pleases you, for the flames burn clean and good.

As the serfs load wagons with summer’s harvest, you lose the man and search the wide fields, at last finding his body wrapped in the green sheaves that hold back the arid earthen banks of a canal.  Wind stirs the rows of crops like a whisper, a rustling name, and you stretch your lanky form within a furrow and lose yourself in sleep.

You awaken at the autumnal equinox and your army hails you as Aner Gune, Gatherer of War.  With your four wives elevated besides you–their litters gleam silver, yours gold–the hoplites bear you across conquered riverlands, subjugated forests, and fortified highlands until the procession halts before the mountain known as Opora.  Men and goats are sacrificed to bright Sol, and then you alone descend into the dusty heart of the mountain, losing your path in a labyrinth where stones hang from the ceiling like clusters of ripening fruit.   Long do you wander, and your armor rusts and falls away from the slabs of muscle that pad your body. 

Flames dwell under the mountain, streams of fire that gnaw at the root of the world, and gnaw at the mountain, and your heart is also gnawed. 

At last you find a vein and, touching it, feel the roots of the mountain, and a silver root in your spine, and rooted together you speak to the streams of fires.  The flames burn foul and dry, but they heed your words as you confess: you are not Aner Gune.

Blind and blinking beneath a mid-autumn sky, you crawl down from a vent in the mountain to find your hosts dissolved, your wives fled and the lands you claimed with blood despoiled and forsaken.  The season of grit has come, and you can smell the waning year on the stale breezes as they blow. 

In the seventh of the plundered villages you enter, the survivors–mostly children–touch your hands and mark your grizzled beard, calling you Presbutis, which they have forgotten means Maturity of Reason.  Though bloody Ares rides the sky, you think not of war but of peace, and teach the children to till the dry earth.

Pthinoporon, he names himself, and though you taught him how to hunt the beasts of the forest when he was a child, he challenges your rule, calling you out before an assemblage of villagers.  You kneel in the dust before the young man and proffer your spear, but he strikes you to the ground with seven furious blows.  You can taste dirt in your mouth, and it is clean and good.

When you rise, your persecutor stumbles back into the crowd, for a thrumming fills your throat and your eyes are terrible to behold.  But you forgive these children (and they are the only progeny you will ever father), telling them you were never Presbutis, and bless their hearths before striking northwards.

By the winter solstice, all the holy pilgrims and eremites of the northern peaks known your name–Geron Graia, abbot of Sporetos, he who tamed the passions by stacking the sheer walls of his abbey with his own two hands, and then seeded the mountains with a crop of cloud-wrapped shrines to no deity.  Your followers venerate you on the high terraces of the abbey’s orchards, and within the jeweled cloisters bathe you in oils reminiscent of the shallow seas, but at night you stroke your magnificent ivory beard and gaze through a clarity of mountain air towards the stars, thinking their network of sparks mirrors the mind of man.

Though you enjoy your life as the abbot, you know the time has come to depart when jaundiced Zeus surmounts the eastern edge of the earth, and so bid Sporetos a reluctant farewell.  The illuminists vow to immortalize the name of Geron Graia in their scrolls, and you forebear to tell the eager men that, no, that name is not yours. 

Lies bitter the tongue, and as you climb the paths that wind away from your abbey, you feel you can taste the earth, and the earth is cold and foul.

Mid-winter.  You have reached the pole.  In the dark hours, storms lash the world and waves of chartreuse radiance come rushing from the horizon; the daylight remains the abode of wind and cold and an indifferent white light that drowns the earth.  Crouched in a shack built from the timbers of your great sleigh and the bones of the musk oxen that dragged its runners above the ice, you scratch your bald crown and converse with the spirits of the winter, the only company you keep here in this realm at the top of the world.

Androgyne creatures of frost and blue fire, they are whisperers and speakers of tongues whose sense eludes you; among the spirits, Keimon proves the most loquacious, and from his whispers you divine the name they have bound to you: Eskhatogeros, the highest, the best, the last. 

Wisdom is yours, and honor, and freedom from obligation, but the days burn cold and distant lie the lands of men. 

Once, beneath a heaven ruled by the cruel gaze of old Chronos, Keimon seeks to comfort you, and you watch her spectral fingers pass through your emaciated flesh.  Then it is you who seeks to comfort her–you admit you are not Eskhatogeros, and, in truth, you have forgotten your name long ago when the world was young.  You weep together, spirit and flesh, and the water is clean and good.

Stars awaken you with their singing.

Her name is Phutalia, and once again she tells you the time has come for planting.  With a potter’s caress, she shapes you anew, and the ancient wounds melt to nothingness.  Here swing the stars, she says, and here you will go. 

Pylons of light support the arc of space, and all the teeming myriads between swim in its ether.  You apprehend the diversity of paths and scintillate brighter, anticipating your fall, while the massed glory of Creation beckons like a stream of tainted water to the thirsty.

On that cusp, in that timeless moment of light before you descend, she leans close and whispers your name.

 There is a red boat, and you slip over the gunwale and conceal your small body amidst the ropes….

It wasn’t our fault. You should understand that by now. But I don’t expect you to understand the reason we did what we thought we had to do that summer of 1999, because people don’t understand order as much as we do.

At first, there were only three of us: Mel Arlington, Judith Legold, and me. By the end of the semester before that summer vacation, Billy Gambale, a fourth-grader who once helped Mel push my bicycle out of the ditch, joined our little group. I could never forget that day. It was humid, and the whole world was the mighty Godzilla out to get us. The burly Bartman and his ferocious pack were chasing me and Mel riding double with me on my bike. I lost control of the handlebars when we reached the embankment so we landed in the ditch near Mr. Ashley’s farm. The Bartman and his gang were laughing their heads off as they walked away from us. Mel and I cursed silently as we eased our way out of the filthy mud bath.

We both understood that we had no choice but to endure the treatment, because that was how the world worked. There was so much room for pain because the course of natural hierarchy–the taut demarcation line that separated predator from prey–had to be sustained that way. We knew that. We respected that.

“Want some help?” the freckled Billy Gambale called out from the embankment.

According to Judith, Billy spent almost half of his life playing inside the video arcade at Kingshoppe because he didn’t have any friends. He flushed when we looked up at him, probably thinking that it would be a lot easier for him if we ignored him.

“Come on down if you want to,” Mel said, laughing and splashing mud on me. “You’re Billy, right?”

“Yeah.”

He brightened instantly. I could swear I’d never seen happiness as profuse as that which shone from Billy Gambale’s eyes.

That afternoon at Judith’s house, Billy joined us to watch Flame of Recca, a Japanese animated series. We ate chocolate cookies and drank all of the milk in the fridge.

There were now four of us in the Legolds’ spacious living room and the thought of us being friends for a lifetime suddenly dawned upon me. I felt proud.

It was on the twenty-fifth of June when we first ventured into the vacant lot beside the Lares House to play baseball. It was Billy’s turn to pitch.

Judith swung for the fences.

Crack.

I followed the ball’s course across the sky although the sun hurt my eyes. Strange, but I felt like a real man whenever I did that. It landed somewhere in the middle of the thick vegetation fifteen feet away from us.

Mel turned around and went for the ball. He told us earlier that he only managed to snatch the ball from his older brother’s bedroom because his brother had his head clamped with headphones. “The volume was turned up so high you’d hear the sound from the next room,” Mel informed us. “I think he’ll need a hearing aid the size of a cookie jar when he gets older.”

We all laughed at that. His brother was obese and ate sloppily. The cookie jar would have been a nice touch.

Mel was approaching the bushes when Judith screamed. I never heard her scream before; she was as hardassed as any man I’d ever seen in my life.

Mel froze. Following the direction of Billy’s frightened gaze, I saw it: a white face with what looked like holes lurking sparsely on its surface. It looked like a child, but its face resembled something out of a white board cut-out, with eyes made up of buttons, a paper clip nose, and a piece of string shaped to form the lips. Most of all, there were those terrible, hateful spots on his skin which resembled miniature lunar craters.

Mel stepped backward as the creature took one step forward. Its grotesque limbs were holding the ball, stretching them awkwardly on Mel’s direction to indicate that it wanted to return the ball.

My three friends huddled closer to me, their eyes fixed on the creature as it set the ball on the third base and scuttled back towards the bushes. Judith was the one who picked it up for Mel.

“I think he’s just a freak,” Mel said, looking down at his dirty sneakers as we walked away from the Lares House.

“He must’ve gotten some radiation when he was a kid,” Billy added.

I was annoyed by the way that they blatantly referred to the creature as a he. It wasn’t human to me. And I hated it, had to hate it more for what it represented. It was completely dislodged from my concept of primal order. The creature was a pure abomination, like a punk clad in a motorcycle jacket and engineer boots mouthing nothing but the f-word. And when you were a kid, it was not easy to allow it to fit into your general scheme of things or accept even the remotest possibility of its existence. It was simply too much for me.

“What’s radiation?” Judith asked.

“It causes things to mutate,” Billy said. “Like if I give it to you, you’ll change into a rat or something.”

“Shit,” Mel said, horrified. “How’d you get it?”

“I don’t know,” Billy answered. “It’s everywhere. The government puts it on our food so we don’t get past fifty. And there’s this one time–”

“I think it’s an alien invader,” I told them. I was not smiling. I knew they realized I meant business. “I think it wants to take over the world. We have to stop it.”

“Us?” Mel gasped. His face was ashen with fear.

“Don’t you think we have to call 911?” Judith said.

“I guess you’re right, Jude,” Billy agreed.

“They won’t believe us. Not grown-ups. They won’t believe a thing like that. They’d laugh their heads off and then stick us in the loony bin like Carl’s dad.”

“Not if we take a picture of him,” Judith suggested.

I noticed that Mel was looking around nervously.

“How?” I said. “Say ‘hey, Mr. Moonman, we’d like you to pose and say cheese because we need to take a nice picture of you and send it to X-Files.’”

“Why don’t we just forget about him, okay?” Mel said. He was sweating. He was such a crybaby.

We were silent after that.

“Come back here tomorrow,” I said when we reached my house. All I wanted was to become a leader, a real man. I would take the responsibility if I had to. “We’d talk about what we’re supposed to do.”

I turned around and walked across the yard. I did not wait for them to respond because I knew they would stick with me no matter what happened.

In the end, every one agreed to join me in hunting the thing and killing it. Mel, anxious about the idea, finally gave in when he saw Judith’s enthusiastic response.

We tracked down the Moonman for three days without success. On the fourth day, we had the luck to spot it near the stream forming a mound of sand with its bulbous fingers. That scene disturbed me; no other kind of blasphemy could come closer to it. The creature was building what appeared to be a sandcastle.

It did not have a right to do that as much as it was devoid of its right to exist. The Moonman had corrupted my innocence, and I thought I had nothing else to lose after that. I pegged my first rock with such murderous force my right arm ached in its socket that night. The rock hit the creature squarely on the forehead, and it collapsed against the stream bank. Yes, close your eyes now, Moonman, my mind shouted triumphantly. Close your eyes and seal those lunar craters on your skin forever. Let the earth feed on you and leave us in peace.

Then I saw red stuff ooze out of its hairless head. I could not believe what I saw but I knew it was blood.

Mel wailed, and all three of his rocks fell out of his shirt. Thud, thud, thud. Colder than the earth, the rocks whispered a rhythmic chant as they hit the ground.

“It was only a freak,” Judith said. “We’re murderers.”

Billy and Mel quickly found their way out of the dense undergrowth we used as a hiding place. They ran. Away. They never talked to me after that. Judith cried on our way home, and I never heard a word from her again. But I knew they had kept the secret. It was a pact none of us needed to talk about.

A month after the incident, I overheard my father talking to my mother about a decayed body near the stream two miles from the Lares House. According to my father, the police swore they never thought the remains could be that of a human’s until it was autopsied.

But I knew better.

Tex opened his eyes, looked out the window and saw it was dark – it was always dark. The Earth, smaller than his hand, ignored him in the distance. The whiteness of the shuttle’s interior stung his sticky eyes. He undid the belt and got out of bed. It reminded him of a coffin. His face was clammy and his back was wet from sweat. It was hard to breathe in there. Tex floated over to the control station, secured himself to the hard foam chair, and activated the video diary.

“G’day, it’s me again,” he said through a yawn. “This little computer is telling me it’s now day fourteen. I haven’t had any contact with any of you pricks for a while now. You fuckers had better not have left me out here. Geez, I’m starting to feel crook. Fuuuck. Well, in terms of me mission, one of me guitar strings broke, so I’ve not come up with anything since me last diary entry; I’ll need time to fix it, but geez I’ll have that song ready just as soon as I do, and that’s a bloody promise. I’ve had some good ideas, and I’ve been thinking I could write one about an old sheila of mine who broke me heart. Let me know if that’s what you’re after. Well, I’m needing a piss now, so I’ll speak to ya later.” He posted his latest entry and released himself.

He attached his feet to the floor, just like they taught him in training, and pulled a chord that undid a layer of clothing. Tex hated that silver suit; designed for comfort, if comfortable meant constantly having sweat running down your back all day and a feeling of sandpaper rubbing against your prick.

He picked up a water bag from a dispenser and let his thick yellow piss spray into it. He shoved the bag into the waste disposal unit, and it was sucked out into space.

He’d been confined to a space shuttle no bigger than a caravan. Contact with the Hobart Space Centre had been lost ten days previously. The shuttle was full of gadgets and machinery Tex had no idea about. Things would hiss and click at random times. He thought the launch would be the hardest part of the mission, but he was wrong.

Tex reached into the small, refrigerated box, pulled out the last can of Boag’s XXX Ale and skulled the contents. He let the empty can float away inside the room. Tex looked at his guitar, untouched the whole time he’d been in the shuttle, and then moved his eyes to the photograph of his best friend.

“You write the bloody song then Stinky ya prick. Fuuuck. I know mate, but me mind’s went blank. I’ll have something written bloody soon and get us back home. Don’t say that. Geez you’ve been a pain in the arse since we’ve been here. I should have never have rescued you from the pound.” He sat in silence, staring at the dog. “I’m only kidding me little puppy dog. Geez, we’re best mates me and you.”

He picked up the guitar and strapped himself back into the chair beside the control station. Tex stroked the smooth wood with his palm as distant memories ran past in his mind. He strummed the wire strings; they were out of tune. Tex twisted the keys until it sounded the way he remembered it should.

“G’day, g’day, how’s it going…” he sang then let the guitar go. It floated up to the corner of the roof and stayed there.

“What the bloody hell are you doing out here Tex? You’re sixty-six years old mate and playing at being a bloody spaceman. Fuuuck,” he whispered into his hands. His eyes rolled around the ship. That midget sized bed, the blue coloured walls, that control desk that looked like a squished spider and those fucking cupboards painted with the Tasmanian flag had now all been engrained in his memory. He had been there for too long; it was only meant to be for seven days.

“It seemed like a good idea didn’t it Stinky?” he shouted at the photograph. “I know mate, I know.” He let himself loose from the chair and drifted over to the cupboard. Everything was silent. He could hear his organs pulsating inside him. That was all. He opened a door and took out a nutrition bar. He bit into it and coughed. Fucking shitty space food. It tasted like paint. He floated up to the roof.

“What the fuck is that smell? Is that you Stinky?” He sniffed his armpit and his face recoiled. “Struth, it’s me mate. Well, what do you expect? I haven’t had a bath in days mate. Do you expect me to smell as fresh as a sheila only using those fancy wipes? Fuuuck. A man needs a bath once a week mate. I feel salty.” He looked out the thick window then banged his head against it. A thin layer of grease from his forehead stuck to the glass. He smudged it with his fingers.

“Those pricks better get me back soon.” He pulled himself over to the video diary area.

“Righto bastards. I’ve had enough of this shit. Get me bloody back home. You hear me? I’m running out of that cardboard you call food, me water supply is getting low and I’m fed up shitting into a bag.” He punched the metal and his fist throbbed. He let himself float around the ship.

Tex was attempting to be the first person to compose a song entirely in space and send it back to earth. He was the last musician in Tasmania to still play old-style country music, and when the new Tasmanian government asked their people who they wanted to represent them in the space race an internet campaign urged people to vote for the man who appeared on the freedom flag. After refusing twice, Tex was finally convinced to undertake their first space endeavour.

The Americans, the Chinese and the Russians had plans of their own, but the Tasmanians were the first to act and sent Tex up in a tiny space shuttle three months ahead of schedule. He was waved off a hero, armed only with his trusted guitar and a photograph of his dead dog Stinky.

“Tex, Tex, do ya read me?” a coarse voice said. Tex pressed a button and spoke.

“I hear ya mate. What the bloody hell happened down there?”

“We’re not sure, but everything’s under control now mate. It’s a new system we’re working with. You right? You don’t sound too good mate.”

“Struth, I’m fine mate, a bit dehydrated I reckon. I’m getting low on food and water. Geez, I’m ready to come home now.”

“We haven’t received the song yet Tex. What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry, but I couldn’t think of one. I gave it a go mate, but I’ve had enough. An old man like me ain’t meant for space.”

“For fuck’s sake,” the voice shouted. “Just write any old shit and send it to us. No one cares about you or any of your fucking music. You ain’t up there because you’re the best musician – your only there because of a bloody picture! I don’t want to lose me temper with you mate. We just need a song, any old bloody thing will do.”

“I bloody care. I don’t want to be remembered by a shitty song I wrote cooped up in a tucker box in space ya prick.”

“Look mate, I’ll make this as clear as I can. Those fucking yanks and commies are back in the race. I don’t mean to panic you, but we don’t have much bloody time left.”

“I thought you said those pricks gave up after we launched, and I had as much time as I needed?”

“They did but since you’ve not fucking done it, they’re sending their boys up this week. They said we’re all poofters in Tasmania. We can’t be having that Tex, so just fucking write something or we’ll leave ya out there.” The line went dead.

“Fucking prick.” Tex strapped himself onto the command chair and whacked different buttons. “Take me home ya piece of shit. A week those bastards said, a week at the very most, even if I come up with something or not.” The lights went out in the shuttle and he fell silent. A set of luminous orange lights lit up after a few minutes.

“What did you say Stinky? Well, it’s all your fault ya prick. You convinced me this was a bloody good idea. I should be in the little pub back home drinking schooners. Fuuuck, it’s hot in here.” He buried his face in his hands and pushed his eyes until he saw yellow rings. Tex leaned over and pulled the photograph off the wall.

“Remember that day when I played in Launceston and you pissed in me guitar. Geez I was mad. I had piss running down me arms before I realised what had happened. Well, I just want to say I’m sorry for kicking ya in the nuts mate. I didn’t mean to go wild on ya. Can you forgive me mate?” Tears ran down his cheeks. “You were the best mate I ever had and I should have treated ya better. You were always there for me, and I didn’t even get ya buried properly. I had some prick chuck ya into the sea like you were nothing. I’m so sorry Stinky. I’m so sorry.” His eyes were red and his bottom lip was trembling.

Tex stuck the photograph back to the wall and flicked a switch that had an upload of his greatest hits. He turned it off as soon as he heard the beginning of the first track. I was shit, he thought, I never made a bloody good song in all me life. Fuuuck. He left the chair and opened the food cupboard. Five nutrition bars were left. He opened one and bit a little bit.

“Fuuuck,” he shouted holding his jaw. He dabbed a finger in his mouth; it came back with blood on it. “Geez Stinky me teeth are hurting. It might be all those juicy steaks we used to eat mate. I remember when I went to the dentist a few years back when I had a sore tooth. The dentist said to me, Tex I’ll be able to save your tooth, but it will cost ya six hundred dollars. Six bloody hundred dollars – fuuuck! Do you know what I said to him Stinky? I said, just pull the bastard out. He referred me to some other prick, but I never went mate. We had to go play a gig in Melbourne. You remember that day? Fuuuck, it was full of pricks. I got booed off the stage I did. Those fuckers never liked us from the little island did they? Tasmanian pricks they called us. Bastards the lot of them. I’m telling you mate, Independence is the best thing that ever happened to Tasmania. It’s a bloody shame you never got to see it.”

After a while Tex picked up the guitar again. He strummed a few chords and sang,

“When will I go home? Where the grass is green. Where the sky is blue. I hope you’ll be there too.” It was the first new lyrics he had written in over ten years. In less than twenty minutes he had the new song ready. Tex forced the rest of the nutrition bar down his neck, drank some water from his depleting supply and strapped himself onto the small bed. He looked over at Stinky’s smiling face.

“I remember one night when you were just a pup. I felt someone licking me face when I was in me bed. I thought, aha me luck’s in here. Turns out it was only you ya prick. Fuuuck. Ha-ha. We had some laughs back in those days didn’t we mate? Best mates Stinky. Geez you loved your tucker; only juicy steak for Stinky mind. You’d hate the food in here; I wouldn’t blame ya either mate.” He closed his eyes and fell into a dreamless sleep.

“Tex, do ya read me Tex?” the voice said.

“I’m here, I’m here.”

“Righto mate, have ya loaded up a song into the video diary?”

“Not yet, but I wrote one yesterday. Geez it’s a beauty. It might even be me best yet.”

“Great, that’s bloody marvellous that is mate. Get it uploaded as quickly as you can and post it off to us. Those yanks fucked up their launch this morning so they’re out, but the commies shot up this afternoon. It’ll take them a day at least to get set up I reckon, so get it done ASAP and we’ll get ya home.”

“Righto.” The line went dead. “Ya cunt.” He headed back over to the bed. “I’ll go for a bloody sleep if I want to Stinky ya prick. And what if I don’t? You and no-body else can tell me what to do. You’re the real fucking reason I never met a sheila. You would scare any off I brought back with me wouldn’t ya? You ruined me life Stinky, you fucking ruined it.” He reached for the photograph, slammed it into the waste disposal unit and fired it out into the darkness. He fell silent in realisation of what he had done. He cried and tasted dregs of hot sick. He spat them out and they floated around the shuttle. He stared out of the small window and into the abyss. Darkness, it was all darkness. The earth looked further away than it ever did. He wanted to go home.

“G’day Tasmania, it’s your old mate Tex here. This is me latest and hopefully one of many new songs I’m planning to write.” He strummed his three favourite chords, repeating them twice, and then he sang: “When will I go home? Where the grass is green. Where the sky is blue. I hope you’ll be there too. When will I go home? Where the coral sleeps. Where the sugar cane grows and the wind she blows. When will I go home? When will I go home?” Tex stopped playing his guitar, stared into the diary screen and pressed stop. He looked at his guitar; a friend he had for forty-one years; and played thousands of times. He jammed his old mate between the seat and the shell of the shuttle and put his foot through it; shards of wood from the guitar floated up. He let the rest of the broken instrument drift and went back over to his bed to lie down.

They had outlined plans for every Tasmanian to be relocated in the new townships in the Simpson Desert. The Tasmanians went wild over the news. This initial reaction was followed by protests all over the island and a demand for independence. An election took place on Tuesday the 16^th June 2024. The Tasmanians voted by an overwhelming majority for immediate independence from Australia, and thus the world’s newest nation was born.

“G’day,” Tex said.

“Don’t ya bloody G’day me ya cunt. Where’s the fucking song?”

“I’ve recorded a bit of it on the diary.”

“A bit? What do ya bloody mean a bit?”

“I’m sorry mate. I can’t do it anymore. I’ve had enough of it all. I don’t want a comeback; I want to be left alone.”

“Fuck. Righto. Well just send us what you’ve got mate. There’s still time. We’ve heard reports that the commie cosmonaut rappers are still recording, but they could send their song any bloody second, so send it to us now and we’ll be right.”

“Mate, I don’t think I should.”

“Millions and millions of fucking dollars were spent on this ya prick. It’s our first space mission, and we don’t need some old turd like you fucking everything up. We need to win this for the country mate. Do you want those Aussie pricks laughing at us? Just send the fucking song, and it’ll all be over. We’ll get ya back home.”

Tex stared at the virtual diary.

“How long will it take before I’m home?”

“Fuck me. Send the fucking thing will ya and I’ll tell ya.”

“Promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“Just promise me if we win it will be dedicated to me dog Stinky.”

“Sure mate, just post the thing will ya.”

“And you promise right?”

“Yes, for fuck sake yes, I promise, I fucking promise!”

“Righto. It’ll just take me a second.”

“Hurry the fuck up ya old shit.”

Tex activated the video diary.

“He’s posting it just now.” Tex heard the voice say in the background. He held his arm over the send button and looked out at the ball he called home. He let his hand hit the button.

“He’s posted it. Have we won? Have we won? Yessss!” the voice screamed. Tex could hear people cheering, and the song he’d written, faintly in the background. He never took his eyes off the tiny globe.

“Can ya bring me home now mate?” Tex said to the command centre but the line was dead.

“What’s going on Stinky me little puppy dog? When did you get here?” His face was tight and grey. Stinky had appeared and was drinking water from a bowl. “Save some of that for me mate.” Tex pulled himself over beside Stinky and the water but it had disappeared. “Where’d it go mate? Did ya drink it all ya prick?” Stinky shook his head and floated over to the bed. “It’s alright mate. I believe ya. I’m glad you’re here now. Geez I’ve missed ya.” He strapped himself onto the bed, held Stinky in his tired arms and closed his eyes.

Adam and María had twelve hours together after dropping the skiff into orbit. There wasn’t much to do but watch the monitors. Adam was horny and María wasn’t having it, which made for a tense ride.

Eight hours into their shift, they thought they had incoming refugees. Time raced as they followed all procedures and made the proper calls, only to find a bit of debris sending outdated transmissions.

Adam propped his feet up on the control board. “Makes you long for the days when all we had to worry about was Mexicans, eh?”

María gave him a black eye.

Everything started the night it should have ended, that night in November when Ranstal lost to Gorki. An embarrassing duel. On the seventeeth move Gorki captured Ranstal’s sword and knocked it sailing out of the ring. No one wanted to believe Ranstal had lost to a foreigner, but it all had happened fairly. I always maintained that much — in public, at least I know you may not believe me, Jaquel. But look up my article in Blankrent’s and you’ll see how I came down on Gorki’s side. If that isn’t enough, just reconstruct the fight from the transcript I made. If you can read fight notation, that is. Can you read fight notation, Jaquel? Did Ranstal ever teach you how? He taught me how five years ago, when he was my lover.

Do you gasp, Jaquel? Do you blush at such shameless statements? Then read no further. Throw this letter in the stove. Have a glass of rum. Have two. Dandle your child and look out at the street through your meager window and try to forget everything you ever saw in Glavebrook.

I will say it again, Jaquel. Burn this letter now before you read another word.

Ah, I have a premonition you have burned the letter by now.

Good girl.

I may be mistaken. Possibly you have not burned it. Possibly I have burned it myself, or forgotten to put a stamp on it, or thrown it in the river, or just left it in the hidden drawer in my desk where I keep my secrets, my expanding-bullet pistol and raw laudanum and herbs a married woman need not purchase. In short, Jaquel, these words, which a certain reason forces me to address to you, must never actually reach you.

Because otherwise, I could not bear to write them.

After Ranstal’s duel with Gorki was over I sat in the observation box, recovering. You can get in a queer zone when you transcribe a fight: did anyone ever tell you that, Jaquel-who-will-not-read-this? At times your response-time gets shorter and shorter, until cause and effect seem to switch sides, and you’re not recording the moves on the keyboard, but rather conducting the fight like a duet, to the point where you almost feel responsible for the outcome. For me the day’s results had come hard.

When finally Ieft the box, I found Ranstal lurking in the corridor downstairs, pretending to study a dusty case of pennants. His facepaint and spiked hair looked odd in the dim gaslight; they clashed with the baby fat on his face. The costume gimmick that week was to dress like some foreign savage, but Ranstal just looked like what he was, namely, a dismal failure. His lips were red and when we shook hands I could smell the whisky on his breath.

“Wish I’d put on a better show for you.”

His smile was tight, like someone who doesn’t know a language. Someone began shooting off fireworks; there was a skylight in the hallway and as Ranstal glanced up at them his sweaty face was struck by colors, and it was like every color revealed something worse to me. I asked Ranstal what had happened back in the ring.

“I couldn’t move. Step fifteen. Gorki did something with his eyes…”

“You’re saying he did an illegal move?”

“I am. Magic. Or hypnosis. Something.”

I stared straight at Ranstal. To judge a fight you have to see ten facts emerging a second, avoid all bias, never let yourself be charmed. Turning all that off was a hard thing for me, as hard as falling in love, or maybe falling back in love… Ranstal took out an accelerator and twirled it in his fingers like a schoolboy and nipped it and lit up.

“I think about it sometimes,” he said. “What you and I had. Why not admit it. Wasn’t it rather nice?”

“It was,” I allowed. “But we had our own ways to go. I don’t want to insult your wife, Ranstal.”

“So what? So we shouldn’t even be talking? That’s cold, Vivian.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “You came over to me. Don’t tell me it was just to say hello.”

“In the first place, Ranstal, you came over to me. In the second place, you lost the fight on step six, not step fifteen. You lost a tempo and you never got it back.”

“That’s not—”

“And in the third place, what you are trying to do right now is completely unworthy of you.” That silenced him. “Take some time off. Go north, visit your parents.”

“They can’t even feed the servants,” was Ranstal’s reply, and then he shook his head and put his hands on both my shoulders so his awful cigarette was in my face. “I could not move, Vivian, Gorki did something, I’ve never seen it before, but I swear, if you think for a moment I…”

I told Ranstal his sweeps were six inches too wide, his feints were mistimed, and his footwork all wrong for wielding that nine-ring sword. I said he had no business fighting in this bracket.

“Vivian, I thought we were friends.”

“Have you noticed you’re twenty pounds overweight?” I asked. “Do your blame your mirror for it? Get your hands off me and let me pass or I will call for aid and you will get ten lashes for harassing a Blankrent’s agent. I will not reconsider my ruling.”

I never called for aid, Ranstal never received ten lashes, and after a muddy walk back through Halved-Eye Gate, I arrived back at the Blankrent’s office and… reconsidered my ruling. For about thirty seconds. At my desk I looked at the punchtape, those little pinpricks in two columns, R and G, like a poem almost. I reconstructed the fight in my head…

Could I have been mistaken?

Then I remembered how Ranstal had looked at me, how pathetic and lost, and the shameful things he’d said.

I went down to the basement and fed my punchtape transcripts into the Blankrent’s solvers. The clockwork clicked, evaluating Ranstal and Gorki’s performances and crunching out a spool of butcher-paper with the magic number, the career-breaking number, the number which sells so many copies of our magazine, a number even you must have heard of, Jaquel… rating.

Why had Ranstal insisted that he’d lost the fight due to an illegal paralysis on the fifteenth move? Here’s why, Jaquel: because if Gorki had somehow paralyzed Ranstal, Ranstal’s rating would’ve been penalized 7^1, or 7 points. Four for losing a tempo, three for losing an opening. He would’ve left the ring defeated, but with a rating of 125. That would still have been enough to keep going.

Instead I had encoded that fifteenth move as a blunder. Cowardice? Indecision? Mere human frailty, out of place in a martial world that had been accelerating toward technical perfection for a hundred years? Whatever it was, the penalty was not 7^1 points, but 7^2, or 49.

And so Ranstal’s rating fell to 83. Once again the Blankrent’s algorithms had spelled the end of a pro career. There was nothing for me to do but write the article, and that I did dispassionately, safe in the knowledge that Ranstal was on his way down, into an amateur hour where despite all the shabbiness and the cheap beer and the stinking limelight and the low-cap betting, the death of heroes was at least an uncommon occurrence.

I only wanted the best for Ranstal. Believe me, Jaquel, I never stopped wanting that.

You might know more about the next phase than I do, but maybe not. I don’t know how much Ranstal shared with you. You were already pregnant then; maybe he didn’t want to worry you.

So I will have to be content with imagining it, the predictable path. The pickup circuit at fieldhouses beyond the city limits – community venues squeezing bouts in between handball games and prep school track meets. The train commute, the snow on the rooflines, coalsmoke, sunset. Ranstal brooding in a locker room sauna, trying to read one of his little books of poems, while boys half his age snap towels and screech.

Then out to the ring to fight petty gangsters, members of the fire brigade, the odd ex-pro even more washed up than our man himself.

Finally the exhibition fighter job, thirty Guilders a week, out at the fair in the old train station at Hortence Court.

Meanwhile I kept busy. Blankrent’s was sending me to venues all over town. Rooftops, vacant lots, Spry Hill mansion courtyards where snow covered the statues. Late in the year I transcribed a marathon bout, eighteen fights in the maze off the Crow Street Undercity. Ranstal never fought magic-users, that wasn’t his style, but I lost myself down there in the tunnels where magic flew thick and fast… totems to dampen flame and clot blood and tweak friction coefficients… the air stank with cordite, the prestige of alchemical change, repetitive dialogue:

“C’mere and learn something about swords!”

“A touch! By the teeth of the Black Lion, a touch!”

“Good martial arts!”

I realize now that I was almost dead to it. Brain matter and intestines and magically fried guts bothered me no more than a pail spilled in an alley. I saw and accepted everything; something bounded all my horror. With Ranstal out of the pro bracket, was once again a consummate professional.

I think it was in February when I got that invitation to your housewarming party. I remember the words on the card quite well. Only Ranstal could have described your place as a “cozy garden apartment”. When I showed up he was very drunk, too drunk to spring a trap, I remember thinking. He still had the ghost of his old dreamboat look but much of his muscle had already gone to fat.

I remember the guests only vaguely. That gambling scout, the consulting alchemist, and Ranstal’s young second cousin. You were there too, Jaquel, the proud new mother: I remember you nursing the boy, your nipple cherry red, like Ranstal’s lips. You were so beautiful, Jaquel, so precisely Ranstal’s type. Do you remember me at all?

Tell me, was that ratty sofa really the bed where you and Ranstal slept?

Did it bother you to live in a room with a concrete floor, and drains in the center of it, and a mildew smell?

Did you know your husband had been in debt for five years before you married him?

I remember how you tried to ask me if Blankrent’s ever retracted a ruling. You were so gentle and indirect about how you said it. And I was gentle and indirect about my answer; even after a shot of that parsley vodka I remembered my manners. I doubt you saw how badly I wanted to tear apart your hope.

Then you kept asking if I wanted to see your little boy and I felt it would be rude to refuse, so I held him. That was when you discovered that your chicken in the oven was burned black. Remember how Ranstal grabbed the potholders without a word and took the roaster outside and dumped it in a snowbank?

And poor Jaquel, you were practically in tears. Especially so when Ranstal just said they’d send a boy to the restaurant down the street for food. You whispered to Ranstal: maybe we could save some of the chicken. And Ranstal told you you should have thought of that before you burned it.

But don’t hate the other guests, Jaquel. Remember that while you were peeking forlornly into your cupboards, and found only onions and salt and barley, Ranstal asked them what they wanted from the restaurant. Did you see how all three men formed a united front? Like everyone in that house, they loved Ranstal despite everything, and they pretended to hanker for the cheapest foods they could think of. A heartwarming scene.

And since you couldn’t scold Ranstal, you took it out on me. I was going on about how Ranstal had originally made the introduction to that Blankrent’s headhunter, then about the benefits of being a reporter for that paper. How I could call on heroes to protect me anytime, I got to jump the line when the city rationed coal, I got to vote even though I’m a woman, and how when I got married my husband would be legally forbidden from striking me. And you looked me over and said, “So, do a lot of you get married?”

After that I told Ranstal I had business in Halved-Eye Gate.

“But you haven’t eaten anything!” Ranstal looked at me with a steady eye, he’d rolled that blue thermal shirt up to his biceps, I could smell his sweat in that hot apartment. I remembered that smell and I was lost. It took a single word from your husband to make me wait for him outside in the snow.

“Look, Vivian,” he said, once he’d closed the door. “Do you remember who got you that job?”

I told Ranstal not to say something he would regret. He sighed and slapped his belly and put his thumb in his beltloops and noticed the black chicken, still steaming in the snow.

“She’s a wonderful woman,” he said, meaning you. “But good grief.”

And I told Ranstal I thought you loved him very much. I may have hated you, Jaquel, but that was not a thing I could deny.

“She does,” he said vaguely, and lit an accelerator and shook his head. “I can’t keep doing this. I need a real fight. I’m a duelist, not some punching bag. I need to get back in the world. And if I don’t I am probably going to do something drastic. Do you understand that, Vivian? I don’t want to hurt anyone but I need it. There’s nothing else for it. I’m going crazy. I didn’t come this far to end up a juggling bear, to live in a slum.”

“I hear what you’re saying.”

“I don’t know, Vivian,” said Ranstal. “I just don’t know about you.”

“I wish I could do something.”

“But you can,” Ranstal said, and turned me to face him. I was in my boots but still he towered over me.

“What?”

“You know what. I just need you to tell me the truth. Why did you give that fight to Gorki, Vivian?”

I said nothing. I was an elite Blankrent’s reporter, one of the sharpest women in the business – hell, one of the sharpest reporters in the business. Just by standing still and listening to this, I was breaking every rule that had allowed me to get to that point. But I kept silent, and I couldn’t understand why that didn’t mortify me.

“You’ve changed, Vivian,” Ranstal said, and looked away.

“Both of us have.” I looked away also. “But we can’t go back to five years ago. We can’t be like we were.”

Ranstal threw his accelerator in the snow, where it sizzled. He took me and kissed me. And I will admit I kissed him back.

“What if I told you we could?” he whispered, stubble scratching my cheek. “Do you want to kiss me again?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Let’s find out.”

And right there in the cold street, we kissed, and my heart raced, and I felt convinced everything had changed, until we heard the door opening, and then we leapt apart. Then you came out, Jaquel, and told me I had forgotten my scarf inside. You said it was a very pretty scarf, that Meernesse wool, so proof against the cold.

And I said the scarf was a present for you.

I walked east. Sun was setting. The snow on the streets was an aching, chemical blue and it gripped my boots like mud. An omnibus passed. The horses’ nostrils blew shapes that could have been cut from silver construction paper… I reached the riverside quay and looked across the Glave, yellow lights in the windows on the opposite bank, and snow began to fall, and I watched it spilling into that black half-frozen river, vanishing without the slightest trace.

By the next day I had decided to pay an unusual visit.

Like I said before, Gorki was a foreigner, but he didn’t live in the Argitravian ghetto. He rented a single room in a house near the Yeastmarket.

I knocked on the door (it was open) and found Gorki was seated in the lotus position, throwing some ordinary twelve-sided dice and looking up things in a giant folio book. He was a young man with a pointed nose and a single eyebrow, though his skin wasn’t as dark as I remembered. Oddly, I saw no sign of a sword in the flat.

When I tried to introduce myself, Gorki invited me to come shopping with him. He seemed spooked by a woman in his home: the first bad sign.

We went up the street into the Yeastmarket. It wasn’t very cold indoors, but it smelled; most of the bakers and brewers in the place had brought their pigs along. I remember Gorki being very interested in the beasts: their red yarn caps, the leashes, how choosily they nosed the samples of activated yeast in their little china dishes.

“Well look at you,” he’d tell some pig, his yellow raincoat and Argitravian accent unique in the crowd. “You’re a handsome one.”

“In November you fought a duel with Ranstal Gieur,” I said. “I judged that fight. Do you remember it?”

“Yes,” he said with his back turned to me.

“Do you know Mr. Gieur?”

“I didn’t then. Now I do.”

“Oh?”

“He paid me a visit,” Gorki said, and shook his head a little. “He asked me the same question as you. He could not forget that fifteenth move.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“All situations contain seeds of change. Like worms in apples, like beauty marks. Like grains of gist.”

“Pardon?”

“Gist,” said Gorki. “What they’re selling here. Like ‘get the gist’.”

“Yeast?”

“These are different words for you?”

“Forget it. I see your meaning: seeds of change in situations. I presume martial arts are no exception, and your dice allow you to ‘excavate’ those seeds?”

“Close enough. Your friend Ranstal thought he was improvising all through that battle. But in fact, he had lost from the very first move.”

“You knew the moves in advance? How?”

“Magic, what else?”

“Is it very hard?”

“It suppose that depends on how you feel about celibacy, a vegetarian diet, and meditating for six hours a day.”

“That’s interesting,” I said evenly. “Though I don’t think it’s quite my style.”

Gorki pulled a strange, sly face, and said he didn’t think so either. I ignored that and asked him if he would consider fighting Ranstal again.

“It was my impression he had fallen out of the rankings.”

“He has.”

“Then what’s in it for me?”

“There is some question about whether your moves were entirely legal in that fight. You don’t deny you used magic. Strictly speaking, that’s not allowed in a duel of that type.”

“I used magic beforehand, not in the ring.”

“And can you prove that?”

Gorki looked irritated. “But there was no such question before. I was declared the winner without any doubt. Five thousand people saw me knock Ranstal’s sword out of the ring.”

“I have the option of rescinding my ruling within ninety days if I see good reason. The win will still be yours, but Blankrent’s will back-adjust your rating.”

“I don’t understand what you want from me, Madam. I wonder if you know yourself…” Gorki sighed. “I really should not have come out here. The dice told me this would happen…”

“Told you what would happen?”

“That you’re just like Ranstal, madam. You think you’re improvising, but you’ve already lost. What do you want me to say? I hexed Ranstal? I stole his future and the auction is next week?” He smirked. “Are you in the market for it? I thought he had a wife.”

Of course I felt my face go hot. I told the impertinent wretch I did believe he’d cheated in the November fight.

“And now you take his side,” said Gorki smugly. “That is, of course, just what the dice said you would do. And now I will save you the trouble of asking me to choose between admitting that I cheated, and fighting a rematch. I will take the rematch, madam, granted that you will not observe it from the booth. We will agree on an impartial judge, though of course that won’t matter, as the victory will be mine without a doubt…”

“Did your little dice tell you that too?”

“Perhaps you might make a decent magician after all, madam. You are clearly observant.”

I said to spare me the sarcasm and that Ranstal would see him in the ring.

“In my opinion,” Gorki lisped, “the martial world has no need for washed-up swordsmen or partial judges. I hope I will not overly enjoy teaching you both a lesson.” Those were his exact words: ew-verly enjoy.

I stomped out of the Yeastmarket and went to the telegraph station by the eastern end of the Span and sent a few telegrams that settled everything.

What I had done was unprofessional in the extreme, but by the rules, it wasn’t precisely illegal. Heroes at Gorki’s rating – it was 144 that day I met him – aren’t forbidden from dueling those with lower ratings, it’s just that they consider them pipsqueaks who are better ignored. The Blankrent’s handicapping algorithms are a good reason why.

Despite my threats, I had no serious intention of back-adjusting the scores on the November fight. If Ranstal won, the victory against Gorki would put him on the map again. There would be no need to embarrass myself by rescinding my old call…

In short, I thought I’d done a decent job of baiting the young mystic into a rematch. It would be simple.

All Ranstal had to do was win that duel.

Of course, Ranstal loved it. “You’re a wonder worker!” he crowed. He insisted on taking me out to the cafe Quine, where he got far too drunk to make it home, and I had to wrestle him back to my apartment, where, I will own it, I had hoped something would happen. But Ranstal just collapsed on my bed and vomited in his sleep. I rolled him onto the floor, changed the sheets, curled up alone. In the morning he rubbed my rosewater perfume on his cheeks and half-stumbled-half-fell out the front door to get to the train for the fair.

The problem was, Ranstal never learned how to drink. Or more precisely: he wanted to be a hard drinker, but he didn’t realize it was possible to do it briefly, like a poem, rather than the long-form essays he had started making of his weekends.  To take a single sip of gin and welcome it so strongly the chatty smog of the cafe is wiped away like grease from a plate, welcome it to the point where every fibre of you vibrates in sympathy with the action of that potent liquor, until you have almost fallen asleep in your own peace… that is what I mean by hard drinking, Jaquel, and it can be done on the first sip. I should know, because I did my share of hard drinking as I pretended not to count down the days to the rematch.

You would think the rest is simple, Jaquel, but it isn’t.

There was the day you visited that private gym down from the Winemarket, and I was there standing in a corner with my arms crossed while Ranstal loudly insisted to his trainer that he already knew all 36 Synergy Doctrine Defense Patterns perfectly fine, no need to run through ‘em again, and you asked me so lightly whether Ranstal was worrying me. I said I was only feeling ill. But how could you have known what I couldn’t say, Jaquel? Was there any way I could have told you your husband was simply too fat and slow to use the same style he’d used at twenty-two?

I even scouted Gorki the night before the rematch. I put on gloves and climbed onto a roof where I could hunker above the grimy skylight of the hall where he trained. Looking down through the tea-colored windows I watched him stand in the ring a few yards away from a little pneumatic cannon that fired hard-boiled eggs. Gorki danced all around, slicing the eggs apart in flight. I remember the sour arclight that lit the space, the boy’s long ponytail tracing out his previous step, white spheres flying against his nine-ring sword and exploding. The sight was unbearable, wrong, like a cheap illusionist’s copy of a household object…

I left the rooftop and tottered down the hill into Beaker Park. I didn’t know the hour. I pushed through some hedges and came to the frozen lagoon and walked a hundred feet around it and fell to my hands and knees and threw up quietly onto the ice.

I walked all night, staying in public places. When the shops opened I was drinking tea from a paper cup on New First Street Bridge and watching the dark river flow out toward the dockcity.

I remembered five years ago. I remembered the jangle of Ranstal’s keys and belt as he climbed naked into his dark tight trousers, triangles of sunlight on the comforter, the hoarse sound of the kettle. He’d tug on a hemp shirt, flip up the bottom fringe and pin it under his chin like a little boy and aim at the chamberpot with both hands. He’d stomp around the cold flat we had near the university and frown at the holes in his socks as if to say what’s the use. And he would hop back into bed, where I’d nestle close and feel consoled, raised above a sadness I couldn’t explain.

But there on the bridge above the river, I could.

I think I knew all along, Jaquel, what would Ranstal would suffer because of me.

And now just a little remains that you don’t know.

You were in the arena that day, but you weren’t allowed in the warmup room before Ranstal went on. With my Blankrent’s pass, I was. Ranstal was surrounded: an alchemist to buff his circulatory system, a scared-looking boy to comb and oil his hair, a makeup artist dabbing on warpaint. He kicked them all out of the room.

“I have to know, Vivian,” he said in a quiet voice, a voice that wasn’t weak at all, but completely flat and absent, obligated, as if he thought he were doing me a favor.

“Have to know what?”

“The November fight. Gorki was cheating. He was cheating all the time, wasn’t he? You were wrong when you told me how I lost. Tell me you were wrong.”

I swallowed and looked at Ranstal. In ten minutes the fight would begin.

I thought he needed the confidence, Jaquel.

“You were right and I was wrong,” were my words.

All I can say to excuse myself was that I honestly believed them; I made myself believe them. The same way that I had spent five years telling myself that Ranstal would come back to me. The same way I had told myself Ranstal would beat Gorki and get in the ratings again. The same way I have made myself believe that you will burn this letter, that I will fail to post it, that I will keep it locked in my drawer of secrets…

It is enough to come to the truth at the end.

I watched the duel, Jaquel, just like you. I watched every step, from Ranstal’s first mistimed thrust to Gorki’s final cut. I said before that merely transcribing their first duel had made me feel almost responsible for the outcome. Now I knew the real thing, guilt; I felt it burning in my gut like a brand, and I knew that no comparison was possible.

When they brought Ranstal inside again he was only conscious for a minute. The alchemist wanted to rebuild the spinal damage and he had Ranstal’s stretcher dragged into a sunbeam to operate. I got close to Ranstal. A few words were all he had.

“Tell Jaquel the truth,” he said. His lungs were filling with blood. “Promise me.”

And I promised I would.

I lied to Ranstal just once. Now that I have come to the end of this letter at least I can say that. Once, not twice. Because I have kept my promise now, Jaquel, and told you all that happened. I’ve held nothing back, that part has been the hardest of all, and I don’t care if you forgive me, I don’t even care if I forgive myself. Because what would that prove, when I don’t understand just what went wrong and why and how?

I wish you well, Jaquel. If you need money you can talk to me. Look me up if you like, but not at Blankrent’s; I have done with the martial world.

I will lead a quiet life. I will grow strong. I will tell myself the truth about everything.

Ten Tumors by Gregg Winkler

The children’s cries bounced around the house, then, before long they were running through the front room again, screaming and wailing. Sandia laughed with them, holding up her hands at them, “Please, children, you’re going to wake the — ”

But it was too late.

A Family Tale by Ryan Rubai

When we were eight, we overheard our mother and father talking about us, in the kitchen. Gregory, we need to get rid of them, mother said.

Dearest Son by Graeme Penman

First and foremost, always wear your hat.

Dad by Jonathan Bird

His disapproving sneer simply lit up the room and made every occasion just what it should be.

The Burden of Gender by Abha Iyengar

But the scourge had changed her, too. She did not bear only one child as her mother had done. The next birth had been of twins, then of quadruplets, then eight kids. Each successive time, the number of babies conceived doubled. Each successive time, the babies were male, no girls were born.

And one more story, Winter Baby by Anna Caro

It was on one of these nights, when Jasleen was asleep with my arm loosely round her shoulders, that I saw the ghosts in summer for the first time.

1.

The woman was there to have a grapefruit size tumor removed from her abdomen. They were hoping to go in, remove the tissue, and begin post-operative treatment as soon as possible to prevent more tumors from developing.

But once the doctor had made the incision into her abdominal cavity and pulled back the skin, the light above the operating table fell upon the gray mass of cells, and it flinched. As the surgeon leaned in to begin severing the arteries that were feeding it, the tumor opened its gray eyes, looked up at the doctor, and began to mewl like a cat.

A nurse fainted. The doctor backed away from the patient, the scalpel trembling in his hand.

The nurse brought the woman back from her anesthetized slumber, her body still splayed open. She carefully explained what they had found growing inside her. As the nurse spoke, the thing attached to her intestine spewed something that looked like pus and slobber from its mouth.

Even without the drugs that they were pumping into her at the time, the woman later thought that she would have still made the same choice. After laying eyes on the life that was growing inside her, the woman didn’t feel it was right to kill it.

“Leave it,” the woman said.

tumor:  an abnormal mass of tissue that is not inflammatory and arises from preexistent tissue.
-Webster’s Dictionary

2.

In another hospital, a different woman was scheduled to have a tumor removed from the back of her neck, where it had begun to affect her pituitary gland and lymph system.

The girl was twenty-two years-old and only a year away from completing a bachelor’s degree in theater. She was hoping to move to Chicago and join the Second City troupe before moving to New York to try out for Saturday Night Live. Then the blackouts began, and the tumor was detected. It was basically agreed that she should have it removed, despite the risk involved. The girl figured her chances of making it on SNL were slim in perfect health, and nil with a tumor. She agreed to the surgery.

Amidst the pre-surgery paperwork, the girl signed a form specifying that she did not want to be revived in the event that the tumor was sentient. In later years, she felt tinges of remorse, but for the rest of her life, she believed that she had made the right decision.

living organism:  a thing that possesses the quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body or inanimate matter — characterized by the capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.
-Webster’s Dictionary

3.

Donald Hemple dreamt that he was in charge of a large catering service, and that he and his crew were about to serve scores of hungry dignitaries. The staff was separated from the guests by three twelve-foot doors. They stood at the ready. When the doors were thrown open, the entire team would spill out and begin dropping appetizers in front of the masses. In the back of the line were several stout men and women, each with a pitcher of tea in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other.   

“Okay,” Donald said peeking out of the door. “On three!  One!  Two!  Three!” 

The doors flew open and the wait staff marched out and began pouring drinks. Donald watched from the doorway, smiling as each patron was served a glass of water, a glass of tea, and presented with a beautiful garden salad. He watched as another waiter carrying one serving bowl of ranch dressing and one of Italian asked each person which they preferred. It was going perfectly.

And then the crying began. He wasn’t sure where it was coming from. Who in the hell brings an infant to an event like this?  Frowning, his eyebrows coming together above his nose, he looked up the rows of tables for the screaming kid.

Then the dream began to break up. The sounds of silverware clinking on plates and the chatter of happy, hungry guests faded away, and the walls began to melt into the blackness, and only the crying remained.

Donald opened his eyes in his bed, the crying still very much with him. He sat up and looked around his empty bedroom. “Hello?” he said. The crying intensified.

Donald climbed out of bed and wandered through his empty house. He stumbled into the bathroom, and looked at himself in the mirror. He glanced at the knot beside his ear. The crying was all in his head.

citizen:  an inhabitant of a city; a person who owes allegiance to a government and is entitled to its protection.
-Webster’s Dictionary

4.

“Mom?”  Alisia stared at the back of her mother’s head as she stood at the kitchen sink, washing dishes. “Mom, we need to talk.”

Alisia watched her mother. She didn’t stop washing the plate in her hand or turn around or say anything, but her shoulders tightened. It was times like this that Alisia missed her mother. She wasn’t sure how they had grown so far apart in the last few years. It wasn’t that Alisia hated her mother, though she may have said that she did. And it wasn’t that her mother had done anything to deserve Alisia’s disdain. Alisia was just growing up, that was all, and that meant she was becoming independent. Sometimes nobody liked that.

For her mother’s part though, she thought they were bringing her up right. They sent her to the “good” school, joined a church, and tried to provide her with everything she’d need to fit in. And yet, despite all of that, somehow Alisia still managed to spite her mother whenever she could. She even had her navel pierced.

“Mom?” Alisia said again.

“What is it?”   

“I need to talk to you,” her voice quivered. She was nervous. It had been years since she had needed to talk to her parents about anything that was important. Other than to ask for money, it felt like years since she’d actually had anything to say.

Alisia’s mom dropped the plate she was washing into the sink and turned around. She had no idea what to expect from her daughter. It was like she didn’t know her anymore. She could remember a time when she could describe every freckle on her body, and now she wasn’t even sure if her daughter had plans to go to college. “What do you need to talk about?”

“Mom, I — ” Alisia stopped. She thought she could just say it, but the words stuck in her throat like a chicken bone. She looked into her mother’s eyes. The consternation was there. It was always there. They had built so many walls between them.

“Yes?”

“Mom, I have a lump. A tumor.”  There. The words were out. Alisia felt the burden of the words come off her chest. The weight floated in the air and landed on her mom’s shoulders.

Alisia’s mom’s mouth twitched, and she could feel heat behind her eyes.

“Mom, I’m sorry,” Alisia said. She didn’t know why she said it, but it came out anyway.

Alisia’s mom nodded, and without saying anything, she turned back to the dishes. Nice house, good schools, expensive clothes, bought the girl a car for her sixteenth birthday. A savings account in the bank for college. All of these things flashed through her mind, and underneath that, the words, my daughter has a tumor repeated.

“Mom?  Aren’t you going to say anything?” Alisia asked staring at her mother’s back. They stood that way for a very long time.

The P.E.T.T. (People for the Ethical Treatment of Tumors) was founded a year ago today. The organization’s mission is to advocate on behalf of the safety, welfare, and protection of tumors. P.E.T.T. rejects the idea that tumors are a “medical condition”…

5.

The seventeen year old boy sat in the bathroom, his back against the door, his chest rising and falling erratically. His hands were covered in blood, and now it was pooling out around him on the linoleum.

The boy’s name was Kyle Vanderboss. He was the quarterback for the football team, vice-president of the junior class, and had a damn good shot at being nominated prom king in May when he and his girlfriend, Faith Hammons arrived. Kyle had scored a 30 on his A.C.T. and was already receiving invitations to several colleges in the tri-state area.

Two years ago, however, he began getting migraines. He thought they had started from a concussion received during a football game. After a CAT-scan, the doctor informed him that he actually had an inoperable tumor on his brain. It was swelling against his skull which was causing an immense amount of pressure, which was what was causing his headaches.

So he took a pair of scissors and cut off his left ear. He sat with his ear in a bowl of ice next to his leg. Blood ran down his face in warm waves. He jammed his fingers into the hole, but he couldn’t find the tumor. He trembled and sighed. He was just going to have to go deeper.

In the case of Alexander v. Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the removal of tumors is permissible for any reason that a person chooses up to the point that a tumor can be considered “viable.”  Only if the individuals health is in danger by the tumor after viability is the removal acceptable…

6.

Sandia Brosset’s son, Andy, jumped up from underneath the kitchen table and scared his two younger siblings, Jennifer and Ben. They screamed and ran through the house with Andy chasing them making monster noises. Jennifer giggled. Ben ran behind her, a look of disinterest and snot on his face.

Sandia watched her children play as she reclined on the couch. She loved her children more than anything else in the world. She loved to hear their laughter. She loved the way the lights twinkled in their eyes. She loved the smell of their hair and the touch of their kisses. There was absolutely nothing in the world as precious as her babies.

The children’s cries bounced around the house, then, before long they were running through the front room again, screaming and wailing. Sandia laughed with them, holding up her hands at them, “Please, children, you’re going to wake the — ”

But it was too late. The tumor in her lap, the one that had started on her fallopian tube, was awake and fussy. “Mamma!” the tumor said in between its cries. It couldn’t say a lot of words, but it could say “Mamma,” and it infuriated Sandia to no end.

“Oh, go back to sleep!” Sandia hissed at the gray thing in her lap. It looked up at her with its potato eyes and cried, “Mamma, mamma!” 

“I said go back to sleep!”

The children continued to run through the house, the shrill joy in their laughter combined with the annoying sting of the tumor’s cries ratcheted Sandia’s anger to another level.

“Hungry!” the tumor said.  

“You just ate!” Sandia said.

“Hungry!” the tumor said. “Hungry, Mamma, hungry!”

“I’m not feeding you again!” 

She leaned over and grabbed a gray roll of duct tape from the floor. She ripped off a strip about eight inches long and put it over the tumor’s mouth. It whined, and its eyes never left its mother’s face, but at least Sandia couldn’t hear its awful voice.

Sandia laid back against her pillows and watched her children play, while between her legs, her tumor cried silently.

From NPR News:

“The United States Supreme Court ruled today that William Ross, the man who murdered three federal agents including Samantha Weiss, who had unknowingly carried a sentient tumor on her right breast, will be charged for the deaths of four individuals…

7.

Dr. Andrew Winn’s hand trembled as he closed his cell phone. He was getting old — perhaps too old — to continue in what was a younger man’s profession; but he loved his job, and he loved helping people. He wiped his soft hands across his face, which had begun to take on more and more wrinkles. His eyes had bags under them.

The call had come from Dorothy Rainwater. Dorothy had been a patient of his for more than forty years. Before that, Andrew had been in love with her (though her name then used to be Dorothy Sternburg). Dorothy’s granddaughter had a tumor growing inside her. Dorothy’s granddaughter was only fourteen years old.

Dr. Winn took an oath many years before to do no harm. Never before had the distinction of “do no harm” been more muddled than now. For Dr. Winn, doing no harm would be to take this horrible toll of responsibility, this unwanted burden placed upon a child, this easily corrected accident, away from a little girl who could then go to high school without the long, late nights; she could get a driving liscense, she could meet a boy and get married. Someday she may want to have children. If this girl could just wait another ten years to have the responsibility of caring for another, everyone involved would benefit.

Besides, Dr. Winn could remember a time when tumors were just masses of cells that had gotten out of hand. They were the results of bad habits, accidents, a glitch in the genetic code, and just plain bad luck. And now that these lumps of cells could generate a nervous system, everything was different. Laws were rewritten. It was ridiculous.

Dr. Winn slipped his coat on, grabbed his car keys, and slipped into the night. He drove in silence to his office. He tried not to think about politics and religion, and tried to think only of Dorothy Rainwater and her granddaughter. When he pulled into the parking lot, they were huddled together underneath the awning over the front door.

“Where did you park?” Dr. Winn asked, looking down the quiet streets and then jabbing his key into the lock.

“We parked a block down, just like you said.”

“Good. Let’s get you inside, sweetheart,” Dr. Winn said to Dorothy’s granddaughter. She looked a lot like her grandmother had when she was a teenager. “We must hurry.”

The two women and Dr. Winn slipped into the office. He left the waiting room and reception lights off, and walked through the darkened hall to the last room. He turned the light on, pulled the shades, and then grabbed a gown from one of the cabinets. “Here, put this on,” he said to the girl. “Then climb up on this table and I will be right back.”

The girl nodded. Her face was frightened, her eyes red, her lips swollen. She was being strong though, and Dr. Winn was quite impressed by that. What she didn’t know was that he was just as frightened as she.

“Dorothy, can you help me?” he asked, and Dorothy followed him to another room where he put on a pair of scrubs and began to wash up for the operation. As he washed his hands and neck and face, he breifly gave Dorothy a run down of all the instruments that he would be using during the operation. They were laid out on the cabinet beside the sink. “That first one is a scalpel,” he said. “I will use that to make the incisions. If I say, ‘scalpel,’ I will need you to hand me that one.”   

Cleaned and prepped, they came back to the makeshift operating room. Dorothy squeezed her granddaughter’s hand as she lay on the table in the thin paper gown. “Thank you for doing this,” she said to Dr. Winn. He nodded, smiled with his eyes, and then began preparing the anesthesia.

The operation took two and a half hours. Dr. Winn was able to open the girl’s neck, locate the tumor, and remove it, dropping it in the pan beside the bed without any ceremony or comment. It writhed there, twitching and squealing. It was no bigger than a jelly bean. Dr. Winn stitched the girl back up and was allowing her to slowly come off the anesthesia as he washed up from the operation. Afterwards, he came back into the room to check on her. Her heartrate was good and her blood pressure normal. The girl was going to be fine.

As he sat in his office, leaned back in his chair, dozing a little, waiting for the night to be over, a knock came from the front door of the office. He knew what was happening. Nobody came knocking on a doctor’s office door at 4:30 in the morning. He thought about slipping out the back, but he figured there’d be men waiting for him there as well. Instead, he walked into the girl’s room, checked her vital signs once more; she would be just fine. Then he gave Dorothy a kiss on the cheek. “You stay in here,” Dr. Winn said.

Dr. Winn walked back through his office, the pounding on the door intensifying. As he came forward, he flipped on the other lights. There was no point of keeping his whereabouts secret. When he opened the front door, a police officer had a warrant for his arrest.

Dr. Andrew Winn was handcuffed and tucked into the back of one of the police cruisers. He was formally charged with performing an illegal tumor removal. He would never again practice medicine.

From The New York Times:

…six people are dead in an explosion at a tumor removal facility in Worchester, Massachusettes. So far, no individual or group has taken responsibility for the blast. This has been the third such bombing this year…

8.

Jerry Chandler was a thirty-eight year-old man with a bitter ex-wife and three children that couldn’t care less about him. He used to be a man with a lot of promise and potential. He had a degree in physics for Christ’s sake!  But the booze and the bad attitudes and the lack of motivation all added up to the same thing. Now he lived alone in a little apartment outside of Cleveland, working on the night crew for Wal-Mart, and drinking in the mornings when folks were driving their children to school.

Well, he wasn’t completely alone. There was the tumor that had come up on the inside of his forearm. It had started as a mole, but it continued to grow until there was a knot there the size of a tennis ball. It hurt like hell to touch, and in the past week, it had begun to make noises and look around.

Jerry had called in to work. He wasn’t going to work with this thing on his arm. It whined all the time and looked up at Jerry with these black beady eyes, watching him, almost knowingly.

Instead, Jerry had a plan. He didn’t have health insurance, but he did have a physics degree, and he had a pretty good idea that he thought would work. So he spent about seven hours in the kitchen working and modifying and testing. Finally, around four-thirty in the afternoon, Jerry poured a large amount of alcohol down his throat, and put his arm in the modified microwave. He had cut a hole through the plastic door.

He set the timer for one minute and pushed start.

Jerry screamed in pain as the liquids in his arms heated and boiled. He screamed after only sixteen seconds, but the clump on his arm screamed before that.

After a minute, Jerry removed his arm. It was covered in blisters and burns. The tumor pulsed on his forearm, the eyes twitching back and forth, its mouth whimpering. It wasn’t quite dead.

Jerry put his arm back in the microwave and pushed the “Minute Plus” button.

From ABC Nightly News

Thirty-six protesters took to the streets of Washington D.C. today to protest against the raising of two tumors by homosexual actor, Clint Macmillian and his partner Jason Bainbridge. Spokesman of the group, Richard Standswell, declared that the tumors would be better off removed from the body and cast out of a moving vehicle than to live under the influence of homosexuality. This comes just two months after Rosie Degeneres was found to have two tumors in her lymph nodes.

9.

Doris Turk sat on her front porch everyday from sun up to sun down, smoking unfiltered Camel cigarettes. She waved at the kids riding their bicycles through the trailer park, and she passed a word with the men and women as they came home from work. Doris sat in the blazing afternoon sun without as much as a squirt of sun screen on her prematurely wrinkled, dark skin. Beside her chair was a coffee can full of butts.

At night, she slipped into her house and watched television while eating greasy foods and experimenting with an assortment of different drugs and medications. She was not married. At four-hundred fifty pounds, she didn’t see marriage in her future. When she was younger, she assumed that that meant she would never have a family, but she knew now that that was just wrong.

She sat in front of her television and lit another cigarette — her fiftieth or sixtieth of the day. She knew that she didn’t need a man to have a family. She glanced down at an encyclopedia she was looking at, turned to a page on “radioisotopes.”  Yes, she knew she didn’t need a man to have a family.

From The New England Journal of Medicine

…a new study has shown that scientists have isolated the gene that is responsible for the exponential growth experienced by tumors sharing the host body. This particular amino acid chain, found primarily in pre-viable tumors, may hold the answers to several cures for several degenerative diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s Disease and type II diabetes…

10.

Mrs. Rountree sat in the front row of the high school gymnasium. She was wearing her blue church dress and sat nervously, clutching a handkerchief to her lips as she listened to the commencement speaker finally finish his long speech. After he sat down, the superintendent stood up at a podium and asked the one-hundred thirty graduates to please rise. Then they began calling the names.

Mrs. Roundtree watched as one by the one, the students walked on stage to receive their diplomas. She heard the names that she had heard for the last twelve years and the applause from the families as they ran onstage. She couldn’t help but cry. It was the end of childhood. After tonight, they would no longer be their babies.

Mrs. Roundtree watched them climb on stage and thought to herself that she never really expected Travis to make it this far. It was a miracle in itself that he had survived as long as he had, but to be able to cross the stage with his other classmates was more than she had dreamed of eighteen years ago.

“Travis Rountree!” the superintendent said, and the gymnasium exploded in applause. Lights from dozens of cameras flashed as the gray mass in its large cap and gown came onto the stage, smiling out at the cheering crowds, its black beady eyes gleaming with pride. The superintendent leaned back over the microphone, “Congratulations, Travis.”

Travis waved his tentacle-like arm at the crowd, and then took his diploma. The entire gymnasium was on its feet, clapping and screaming Travis’s name. Mrs. Roundtree, hunched over to carry the seventy-pound mass on her back, bawled into her handkerchief. She was so proud. She was just so proud.

My dad lived long enough to be ashamed of me.

To make sure of this, he had himself frozen and arranged for his chamber to be placed in my living room.  There, I would be sure to see his disapproving scowl from all angles: when I come home from the job he disapproved of, played with the cats (who weren’t grandchildren), or had a fuck on the couch with my wife (who wasn’t the woman he would have chosen).

His disapproving sneer simply lit up the room and made every occasion just what it should be.  At Thanksgiving, his chamber would be at the head of the table, surrounded by mom in her jar beside me, my sister and her twelve kids (three sets of quadruplets), and my wife at the far end of the table.  Somehow, dad’s sneer was always my fault.

You push his buttons, my sister tells me as she puts mom back on the percolator in the kitchen.  The bubbles always help mom’s attitude.  You should try harder to make a connection with him: mom’s voice is garbled by the bubbling fluid in the jar.  It’s taken many years for me to be able to understand her, and even now I don’t catch it all.

Later, I push my wife’s breasts out of my face.  She continues to ride me on the couch while I look at dad’s sneer.  I can’t even fuck to his approval.  Can we go doggy style, I ask my wife.  I just can’t look at his face any more.

When I come home from work the next day, dad’s sneer is a lot worse.  I immediately think it’s the plastic coat.  He hates the coat, so I try to remember to take if off before I come in the house.  To everyone outside of the house, the coat is a sign of honor and respect: it is the coat of a professor.  To my father, it is the acme of all of my failings to become his son.

In the kitchen, I hear giggling.  Now I know what dad is pissed about: people have information that they haven’t shared with him.  That is always my fault.  The break down of communication in the house is something I’m supposed to work on.

In the kitchen I find my wife standing near my mother’s percolator.  Near them, the faded purple hologram of her mother flickers.  The projector near the refrigerator holds one of the brain cubes her mother is stored on.  They look up, see me, and start giggling again.

What, I ask.

They giggle again

Oh you didn’t wear that coat in the house, did you, mom bubbles at me.  You know how it upsets your father.

Oh mom, leave him alone.  My wife was trying to head off an argument.  The news she has must be something.

They giggle.  I hate the monotone, metallic giggle the projector emits and my mother’s giggles sound like a water cooler burping.

What, just tell me.

Well, alright, my wife giggles.  You remember that night you didn’t think you would come, but I made you come anyway, the night we did it doggy style?

The mothers giggle.  Her mother lets out a few metallic barks.  Those goddamn projectors are always developing personalities of their own, and they are never good ones.

Well, I guess the position worked, ‘cause I’m pregnant.

They all laugh at the news.

I reel.

Wow, I say after a few moments.  Do you know how many?

Three at least; the doctor thinks I might have another two hiding in there.

Wow, five.  Nice, normal number, nothing odd like Jason at work who had one.  Who ever heard of such a thing?

My mother’s jar bubbles.  Why don’t you go tell your father?  He’ll be happy with the good news.

I walk into the living room.  My father’s chamber has frosted over.  This always happens when he was extra-mad.

Dad, I’m sorry they didn’t tell you.  I know I’m supposed to facilitate better communication with you.

He sneers. I wipe away more frost from the chamber.

Well Dad, I’m going to be a dad.

His sneer darkens.

Yeah, my wife’s pregnant.  The doctor can see three and thinks there are two more in there.  I hope like hell there is.  I don’t want to think of how disappointed he’ll be if there are only three.

Yeah, so I’ll be a real good dad.  Teach them just like you taught me.  They’ll grow up right.

Apparently, this is the wrong thing to say for my father’s chamber frosts over completely.  No matter how much I chip at the ice, I can’t break through, but I know the sneer is there.

I wonder if I’ll live long enough to be ashamed of one of my children.