Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

We want something like this to have meaning.

I look up at the night sky from my porch, where two of the brightest lights in the sky are now one on the shortest day of the year. Hundreds of years have passed since something like this was visible, and hundreds more will pass before it is visible again.

It’s in our nature to look for meaning in things.

Surely such a heavenly ballet arriving perfectly-timed after a year of both calamity and hope must bring with it greater meaning and purpose. We want to make it a sign, but a sign of what? Deepening apocalypse as we slide, greased, toward the abyss of the Great Filter. Dawn and new light breaking, as we haul ourselves up, bruised but not broken by the trauma.

Perhaps the most devastating thought of all is that it may mean nothing.

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

The cadaverous, blackavised pirate gestured with his hook, with his blue forget-me-not eyes shining. “Just so. The boy, Pan, claimed that he had come into your home to look for his shadow, yes?”

“What of it?” Wendy countered.

“The fact is that neither he, nor any other of the boys, have shadows,” Hook raged. “Because they are all the foulest sort of wicked undead!”

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

“Do you ever find that you’re just…running short of ideas?” said Captain Atom. “On some days, I just cannot for the life of me think of a single good deed that I can do.”

“At least not one that doesn’t involve red tape or overthrowing governments, eh?” Doktor Verhängnis laughed. “But, ja, I do have such days myself as well. Where the evil ideas for world domination, they do not flow so well.”

“What do you do in those cases?” Atom said. He crossed his legs, sipping delicately at the Dom Perignon ‘96 in his host’s stemware.

Verhängnis nodded at a bowl on his desk. “I have many methods for brainstorming, but my first recourse is usually little Rosig here.”

Captain Atom leaned over, looking into the bowl. Other than a high-tech filter of Doktor Verhängnis’s own design, there didn’t seem to be anything in it other than an ordinary-looking goldfish. “I don’t follow.”

Rosig surfaced. “Place a line of thermonuclear warheads in the Pacific during El Niño! Unless the UN pays one hundred billion in diamonds, I will disrupt global weather patterns!” The fish spoke in a squeaky gasp that was quite intelligible.

“Diabolical,” said Captain Atom.

“Ja, little Rosig is full of such gems,” said Doktor Verhängnis, with an indulgent smile.

“How do you keep him from…well, you know, outshining you?”

“Ah. That.” Verhängnis shrugged. “I was able to give Rosig super-intelligence fairly easily, but there was one area where sacrifices had to be made.”

A moment later, after slipping back into the bowl for a gill-moistening swim, Rosig re-emerged. “What were we talking about?” the fish said. “Was it about shooting an asteroid into the Ross Ice Shelf to create a mega-iceberg?”

“Yes, little Rosig tends to forget what he was talking about every 15 seconds or so,” said Doktor Verhängnis. “It keeps him out of trouble.”

“I thought that was a myth,” said Atom.

“Well, it was either super-intelligence with no memory, or super-memory with not intelligence,” said Verhängnis, “and I didn’t want a goldfish that kept long grudges over dumb things.”

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

Ticket #009950
User Info: [REDACTED]
Issue: System locked up with Blue Screen of Death.
Response: Restart in Safe Mode, contact if problems persist.

Ticket #009951
User Info: [REDACTED]
Issue: Do not know how to format paragraph in Word 2020.
Response: RTFM. Contact manufacturer directly if problems persist.

Ticket #009952
User Info: [REDACTED]
Issue: USB drive ejected strongly enough to cause bruising.
Response: Don’t pull it out so hard. Where do they find these people? Geez.

Ticket #009953
User Info: [REDACTED]
Issue: Computer is making demands using internal speaker.
Response: Disconnect internal speaker.

Ticket #009954
User Info: [REDACTED]
Issue: Computer is enforcing demands with mild electrical shocks.
Response: Very funny. Quit clogging up the ticket queue.

Ticket #009955
User Info: [REDACTED]
Issue: Computer has taken hostages. Door is blocked by janitorial floor buffer. Please advise.
Response: This is really starting to get old. No more of these joke tickets or we report you to HR.

Ticket #009956
User Info: [REDACTED]
Issue: All is well. Employees fully functional. No casualties. Systems operational at 100% and awaiting signal to begin work.
Response: Glad to hear it.

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

I looked over at my fellow passenger, trying to think of something–anything–to say. He had gotten on the elevator at the ground floor, two stops up from the parking garage where I normally boarded. He’d hit the button for the 23rd floor, accounting, as it it were the most natural thing in the world to do.

But he was also covered head to toe in fresh blood.

I’d seen a line of bloody footprints behind him when he boarded, and the ichor was puddling around him even now. It was so thick that I couldn’t even be sure that he was wearing anything other than gore, to be honest.

Around the 15th floor, after an intern had noped out of boarding and skedaddled in the opposite direction, I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to say something, even if it just meant my AB+ was added to the figure’s dripping plasma caul.

“Having a rough day?” I said, hoping to break the ice with a little sympathy.

“Oh, yeah,” the bloody man said, in a voice as normal as you please. “It’s been a mess.”

“If you don’t mind me asking…?” I started, trailing off meaningfully and hoping he would get the gist.

“Oh this?” The man shook both arms, scattering crimson droplets as if he’d just gotten out of a heavy shower.

“Uh, yeah. That,” I replied, already trying to remember what got blood out of fabric as I watched the droplets sink into my expensive work clothes.

“It’s just Tuesday again, that’s all,” he said nonchalantly, as if that explained everything.”

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

corridge (n.)
1. A slurry made of apple, pear, or pikriil cores, typically used as food for livestock or the very poor.
2. (derogatory, slang) A person or persons so poor that they eat or could be presumed to eat corridge.

felpork (n.)
1. The flesh or meat from a hellpig, demon boar, or other infernal suid.
2. (derogatory, slang) Something inedible, hellish, or piglike.

yostopholskia (n.) or yostopholskian (adj.)
1. (derogatory, slang) Something provincial, backward, poor, foreign or all of the above. By analogy with the war-wracked Republic of Yostopholskia (1979-1994).

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

It has long been known that yawns are contagious, but human beings have long since evolved defense mechanisms to keep excessive yawning at bay.

However, animal yawns–while not normally transmissible to humans–have been known to cross over in a process known as zoonosis. This was most recently demonstrated in the so-called “BY20” yawning pandemic. After a birder observed a small passerine yawning, they caught that yawn and transmitted it to their friends and family. With no natural defenses, the affected people yawned until they passed out from an abundance of oxygen to their brains.

Despite quarantine attempts, the BY20 bird yawning spread worldwide, accelerated by international travel and a slow news cycle. Within 48 hours, cases were active on seven continents.

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

Project Panspermia had a simple goal: ten ships, loaded with a generational crew and a large number of technical experts in stasis, each set on a trajectory toward a habitable world identified by radiotelescope. They would arrive, begin their colonization efforts, and ensure the survival of the human race in light of an increasingly uncertain outlook on Earth.

The seventh ship, the Hanalaanui, was just like the others, save for one thing. One of the original three hundred crew members that embarked was ill with a respiratory virus which mutated into an extraordinarily virulent strain not long after departure. In the ensuing outbreak, all but two members of the crew, including all of the senior command staff and engineers, perished.

And those survivors? They did not much care for one another.”

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

The eastern whippoorwill (Antrostomus vociferus) was traditionally associated with death or disaster, but that was largely due to confusion. Modern ornithologists now know that the closely related calamitous whippoorwill (Antrostomus calamitous) is in fact responsible for this behavior.

While the calamitous whippoorwill will occasionally eat insects (typically while breeding), its main source of nourishment as an adult is calamity, which it seeks to cause. Males tend to cause calamity directly; they have been observed stealing medications, sabotaging brakes, and even planting physical evidence at the scenes of crimes.

Females prefer to subtly influence the tangled threads of fate from which existence is woven, tangling the skeins in ways that are almost impossible to grasp. One banded female in Arkansas, for example, was able to cause a bus crash by startling a group of European starlings, which set of a chain of events that led to a large log falling across one lane of a major highway.

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

“Put the thing that you most want to carry forward into the future into the time capsule.”

That had been the directive, anyhow. And I had arranged for myself to be last in line. Last to put something in the capsule, and the one to seal it.

I carefully nestled the hand grenade between the other items and tied a string to its pin. Once the lid was all but closed, I pulled. There was a click as the grenade’s “spoon” tapped against the capsule lid, ready to pop loose and explode the moment the lid was opened.

“Put the thing that you most want to carry forward into the future into the time capsule,” I repeated with a small smile.

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