Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Stay back!” said Chris, brandishing a gilded copy of Strunk & White. “Begone, grammarpire!”

“Bah,” said the creature, brushing the book aside. “I’m not a grammarpire, ya idjit. I’m a grampire, and I’m here to suck your grandmother’s elderly blood.’

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Kevsera would often return to the park and linger for a while amid the shadows of late afternoon leaves. She hadn’t been there as a child, but it reminded her of the idyllic green space a few blocks from her parents’ house. All her many hours running around when people were less concerned about that sort of thing came flooding back as she sat with one arm over the back of the rough wood, slouched deeply but not nonchalantly.

It certainly helped that the anonymous city park, not important enough even for its own name, was the last place on earth where Kevsera could visit.

When she had chosen to leave, there was a clear warning, a clear delineation: it was an opportunity to see places and things and times her dead-end life never could have revealed, but there was no going back. Crossing over the threshold was to leave the past, and the world that contained it, behind. The park was the only loophole, and Kevsera wasn’t even sure how it was possible.

Nevertheless, she returned often, typically not even bothering to change what she had been wearing…elsewhere. Few people came by, after all, and those that did tended to be cyclists who kept their heads down. Certainly not observant enough to notice a woman with an odd affect and on clothes slouched over a splintery bench.

Dog walkers were her favorite, rare as they were, because they were almost always willing to spare a few moments of conversation and to suffer their animals to be pet. Talking to another human, possibly the first human she’d seen in months from her perspective, and running her hands through the thick fur of a friendly animal… It was a remarkable bit of nostalgia, of normalcy, in a life that had become dominated by the fantastic.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

The bus took us through the worst of the unrest, rocking with the impact of stones and bullets, with the heavy armored sides and thick multiplex keeping the missiles at bay. An older car, ablaze, slid by as people emerged from the thick smoke wearing bandanas to press their assault.

“Do they know?” whispered one of my fellow passengers.

“How can they not?” I said. “Even if they can’t admit it to themselves.”

The port was heavily defended, but even then I could see that the lines were breaking. Tracers arced out from hastily erected fortifications, but I saw just as many soldiers desperately charging in the same direction we were, some peeling off their uniforms as the they away their weapons.

An explosion rocked the bus, knocking it back on two wheels. The driver, whose pay was a spot for him and his wife, heeled it back over like a veteran. But I could see a line of bruise and blood across his forehead where the impact had cracked his head against something or other. Our armed escort, sitting up front–and similarly paid with a berth–clutched her rifle like a life preserver, knuckles monochrome.

I caught a glimpse of the bay as we rattled toward it. The ships were already pulling out, everything that could be commandeered or put into service. They were beset by smaller launches on every side, either people desperate to board or people desperate to destroy. A bright crimson flower blossomed against the hull of one of them–an old cruise ship–and it heeled over.

“Suicide,” I said. “I’m not sure I blame them.”

A few moments more, cutting through the throngs of people who were able to make it through the armed cordon, we arrived at our dock, another old cruise ship pressed into service.

“Thank goodness,” said my chatty fellow passenger. “We made it. We’re safe.”

“Safe?” I said. “Far from it. We’re just buying ourselves the right to die last.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Now, it’s no tricky thing to run out on a bill, and Maya knew this. No, the real trick was to avoid paying a bill at your favorite restaurant while still managing to be able to return for later dining.

Casa de Almuerzo was Maya’s favorite spot, and she wasn’t going to let her lack of funds keep her from eating there.

First, she arrived just before their busiest crunch time–Friday night, when there was live music an a surfeit of kids from the local college looking to get a vaguely exotic drink on from overpriced Mexican beer. Next, Maya sat at the bar. Soon, she was surrounded by a maelstrom of revelers, and it was time for the second phase of her plan.

Reaching into her jacket, Maya produced a handful of ketchup packets she had snagged from the McDonald’s across the street.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

“An’ be ye warned, lad,” Guss croaked. “She’ll appear before ye in comely form, a woman o’ th’ wood as it were. An’ she’ll drip promises out o’ her lips, lad, like syrup. Spout a lot o’ nonsense about th’ power she has o’er the wood, a lot o’ nonsense about bein’ a goddess. But dun ye believe it.”

“Let’s say I did believe it,” said Jin, uncertainly. “Believed what she said, was captivated by her beauty, and gave her a knackstone. What then?”

Guss looked Jin dead in the eye. “Then you’d best hope we’re jus’ talkin’ maybes,” he growled.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

The curious thing about Vandenberg’s Arch isn’t the technique used in its construction. It’s fairly mundane masonry, built by a civilization with a firm understanding of the arch. Nor is its location particularly puzzling, as it’s within a glacial valley that’s been inhabited for millennia, with easy access to quarries.

No, the curious thing about Vandenberg’s Arch is its angle.

The arch is set into a sheer cliff side that falls down to the river below. However it goes up, and it goes up at a nearly 45° angle. If it were meant to bridge the river, there is no cliff of similar height on the other side, simply long low set of rolling hills. If it were meant to provide a way down to the valley floor, it’s most assuredly pointed in the wrong direction.

the edge of the arch is crumbled, and material has clearly fallen away at some point. But the no debris on the valley floor, nor is there any nearby, and no indication of what the construction’s original size or purpose may have been. Vandenberg himself, describing the arch in the travelogue that wound up indelibly attaching his name to it, said “it’s as if someone got it in their head to build an arch to the stars.”

There are some crackpot theories which would see him proved right.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Heyward Banister was a local carpenter on Elsewhere Isle who was well-regarded for his acumen. In preparation for his retirement, he built a set of three duplexes to rent out for a steady income–the Banister Arms Apartments.

But, whether due to illness, dementia, or a previously unknown obsessive-compulsive streak, Mr. Banister refused to certify the buildings as complete and ready to be rented. He insisted that their stairs were “wrong,” and furthermore that they had to be fixed before he would suffer anyone to live there.

As a result, the Banister Arms duplexes saw their staircases rebuilt in their entirety three times. Landings appeared and disappeared. The angle and steepness of steps changed. After the second rebuild, Banister was seen angrily tearing out his days-old handiwork. Asked by the local paper what had happened, Banister simply said: “There’s a problem with the stairs, and I’ve taken steps to correct the problem.”

Ironically, it was the steps that would be the end of the rebuilding process. Midway through what would have been the fourth rebuild, Mr. Banister took a step onto nothingness and fell from the second story to the ground, breaking both legs. His medical bills, along with the sunk costs of rebuilding the place so many times, led his wife to finally step in. She declared the apartments livable and had another carpenter finish the stairs.

To the day he died, though, Mr. Banister insisted that the steps were “wrong” and would loudly declare such to anyone who would listen. “I just know,” he’d say, “people are staring.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

It’s the wreck of the S.S. Llama. It was 15 weeks out of Lima Peru with a cargo of llamas, the llamas were originally intended for a large-scale agricultural experiment in California, the so-called Llama Scheme that saw them as a way to terraform the desert and make it bloom.

The S.S. Llama foundered in a rare typhoon on the shores of Elsewhere Island, which was then known by its Spanish name of Isla de los Piedras (Isle of Stones). The ship broke up on the rocks for which the island was named just after midnight, disgorging human and llama alike.

Despite being dashed against the rocks the entire crew and all but one of llamas were saved. The only llama that they couldn’t save was Swimmy Dave (actually a female), the only one who loved to swim; he swam in the direction of Santa Monica and was never seen again. Legend has it that there have been Swimmy Dave sightings all over the Southwest and rumors of a secret llama colony persist to this day

Survivors of the wreck founded the first llama farm in North America on Elsewhere Island, and when they were approached by search and rescue ships, they refused to leave their new home and instead traded soft llama fur for badly needed supplies such as steel pans, medical kits, and toilet paper.

50% of the modern inhabitants of Elsewhere Island descend from these original unwilling colonists, as well as 100% of the llamas. Alas, inbreeding in the llama population means that llama farming is a very minor portion of the island’s economy today and most lot of farming is done strictly for subsistence or artisan purposes; most modern llama fur comes from llamas in Tibet.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Not many people know that dromedary camels and Bactrian camels can interbreed. Their hybrid descendants usually have either a large misshapen hump or two humps: one small, one large. Their descendants are fertile and can produce further hybrids, though anything other than a first-generation female hybrid and a male Bactrian camel tends to produce offspring that is runty and bad tempered.

In the 1880s interested in the potential of camels to be used as beasts of burden in the vast interior of the Great Sandy Desert, British husbandry experts attempted to breed a Bactrian dromedary hybrid with three humps. Through a careful and expensive program of crossbreeding and back-breeding, they were able to produce a three-humped dromedary named Herbert in 1891.

Named after Lord Kitchener, the senior British Army officer who took a personal interest in the project, Herbert proved to be a hardy and sturdy beast of burden. With his three homes he could travel 75% further than a dromedary camel without water, and he was also capable of bearing a 50% heavier burden. While having three people ride him turned out to be impractical, Herbert was easily ridden by two people if saddled in the areas between his large humps.

A test expedition to Alice Springs in 1892 produced extremely positive results, not least of which because Herbert was generally gentle in temperament and fond of his handlers. Lord Kitchener gave his personal go-ahead for the husbandry experts to breed an entire herd of three-hump type camels for use in Australia.

Unfortunately, Herbert himself proved to be sterile as a result of the extensive breeding put into his birth, and further experiments failed to lead to a three humped camel that lived longer than a few minutes after birth. As such, the program was terminated in 1900, and Herbert was put on display in the Melbourne zoo for the remainder of his life. He was a great favorite of children in his time there, and was housed with a female dromedary jokingly named Fitzgerald by people who knew perhaps too much about Lord Kitchener’s personal life.

Though Herbert himself died in 1918, he gave his name and image to a local Melbourne rugby club that played as the “Three-Humpers” until 1967, when the changing nature of the word “hump” made the moniker untenable.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Some people think that being out alone in the void must be exceptionally lonely. Those are the people who have never realized how lonely a crowded room can be, how desolate a busy city square appears to someone whose pursuits are of the mind.

Out here, on the ragged edge of the void and what is known, I am immersed in a crucible of creation. I can marvel at sights that no one else has ever seen or will ever see, sights no better or worse off for having been observed. Glistening nebulas in the dark, stars in the throes of a violent death, black holes messily devouring entire solar systems.

The most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen is a binary star rising over a planetary ring on an Earth sized world. With a blue star and a red star set against rings of shimmering gold, and of vast plain filled with spindly biomass almost resembling Earth’s fields, I lingered for almost an hour, speechless.

I think in that perhaps the most striking thing about that vista were the strands of gossamer poison in the air. It was a cyanide-based ecosystem, one without a planetary magnetic field of any size to keep hard radiation at bay. Literally everything in that gorgeous tableau was capable of ending my life, and even the hour that I did stay wreathed in an environment suit probably shortened my life by a year or more.

But it was worth it.

The most beautiful sort of deadly loneliness.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!