Category: Fiction (Intensification)

“The Second” was written for a speculative fiction writing workshop and very last-minute in its original form. I did the plotting and world-building on the fly, and basically the original idea was “what if the protagonist were trying to save their friend from a duel?”

The game gives us a satisfaction that life denies us.—Emanuel Lasker ∞ “Tea or coffee, Sir?” “Coffee. Black. No sugar.” I’m on the phone with a market researcher. I try to picture a pretty girl at the other end of the line, but it isn’t working. All I …

I looked at him through the camera. “You have a secret.” His eyes widened. I continued. “It’s not something…bad…but you think it is…. Something about a confrontation with your father. And it has to do with…a female.”

As a fledgeling writer and editor, as well as an (almost-retired) scientist, I am feeling my way into the business of editing, critiquing, choosing. I have eclectic tastes. I read just about anything, and voraciously. I review everything I read—you can …

Whether I chose to feel my emotions fully, or experience the depth of them — that wasn’t up to me. That was up to God, or Satan, or whatever it was that controlled me.

That room is gone. Or rather, the room is still there, but what’s in it now is so different from what was in it before that the room itself seems transformed. It holds a vast model of the world we live in, built to scale and rendered in exquisite detail…

You must listen intently to the sound in your ears. It’s a carrier signal. The message is layered into it.

Yes. It was the Werewolf, he said. I ask him what happened.

How much further are we going? She isn’t really asking me. Just thinking aloud.

There was a boy once upon a time who lived in a small village with his mother, this father, and his sister.

So this man lived once in a fairly clean house, up along a good road. A good neighbourhood. This was the man I told you about.

Where did those men go? What men? He says he didn’t notice; had his eyes closed listening to some music the barman had put on.

Fade out. The music fades out. I say you’re a strange girl. She doesn’t reply immediately so I stay: switch channels.

Three black bags lay on the table and the telephone was ringing in the back. That’s where it was.

So in this photograph are a boy and a girl. The boys sits on the ground to the left and the girl lies on the ground to the right.

The point about the Werewolf is this: a popular conversation about categories of things.

This guy works in a store. He has a bulging gut but his heart was in the right place.

And off we set with the black bag in the trunk of the car. The drive to the restaurant is some two hundred miles of desert, mountain passes.

I was wrong. It did change. How can you hear the cries of others and not listen?

I get flashbacks of war. But I wasn’t there

Now see what you think about this: a man up along a road stood next to a tan colored car.

Letters. The writing on the brown envelope said: photocopies as requested.

As I mentioned, this isn’t my natural line of work. I just fell into it.

Every now and then the old man would rock back on his heels. Every now and then.

You must listen intently to the sound in your ears. It’s a carrier signal.

March the seventeenth. Thinking about the body guard: got shot.

I spent two weeks in the hospital. I can remember getting there.

There’s a spider crawling on the counter.

I awake with a start, and then slip back to this time.