Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Fairburn expects us to work together,” said Sexton. “I think I can forge whatever documents we need, get whatever costumes are necessary done. But keycards, biometrics? That is outside of my experience.”

“I have friends who still serve,” Kunstler said. “Contacts. They will be supportive if they know it could lead to my reinstatement.”

“Really?” Sexton said. “After all that?”

“There are still patriots in uniform, just as there are traitors,” replied Kunstler.

“Ominous much?” said Crys. “Sounds like you have a bunch of racist fascist insert-your-own-ist sleeper agents.”

Kunstler glowered. “Patriots,” he said. “People who know who, and what, they are.”

“Yeah,” Crys replied. “Fascists.”

“Come on, this isn’t helping,” Sexton said. “Fox, any ideas?”

The hologram shimmered. “Hook me up to the computer system, dearie, and I’ll show you just how useful I can be.”

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“The Gumdrop Kingdom?” Dean, the barbarian, said. “Really? That is so lame.”

“Well, you can take the road through the Hellblaze Realm if you think that’s going to be too sugarcoated for you,” replied Celeste, the dungeon master.

“Dude, let’s just take the sugar route,” Hailey, the rogue, said. “We can build levels. It’ll be easier.”

“Pretty sure I can work the body parts of the candy people we slay into some killer sugarmancy,” said Matt, the wizard.

“You’re such a murder hobo, Matt,” said Sam, the cleric. Matt, in reply, made an innocent “what, me worry?” expression with his hands clasped under his chin, Precious Moments style.

“All right then,” Celeste said with a sly smile. “Upon entering the Gumdrop Kingdom, you are beset by a tribe of Oreorcs. Roll for initiative at -5.”

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When he hatched, Tsee first knew warmth from the press of Cheer’s feathers. He then knew love from Took, who pressed a spider into his wide-open mouth. Light came later, and was its own brilliant discovery.

His nestmates, Purty and Sweet, seemed to lack the same energy that Tsee had. When his parents came, he was always first and loudest, greeting them with upturned mouth that they might fill it with love in the form of food. By contrast, his brother and sister seemed smaller, quieter. Took and Cheer fed them too, but Tsee was always at the forefront.

Cheer would sing and squeak softly to her children when she was on or near the nest, telling her of the love she had for them and repeating the gentleness she knew from her own mother. Took was less sentimental, urging the nestlings with sharp metallic pips. They had better eat up, he said, if they wanted to be big and strong enough to defy the many mouths open wide for them in the world.

Occasionally, though, Tsee would perceive another figure, a darker blur compared to Took’s red and Cheer’s auburn. It would dart in, a gift of food clutched in its beak, and warn away Purdy and Sweet with a sharp sound.

“Know that you are watched over,” the shape would whisper. “Know that you are loved.”

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I ruminate on the past a lot myself
Which is odd
Considering how little there is
To ruminate upon
The struggles of adolescence are
So far away
And yet
So near
Folks can’t always choose
What they care about
If something is your life for 4 years
When you turn 18
That’s 20% of your experience
Even more if you allow
For the first few years
Being blurry
At 40, I’d need to do something
For 8 years
To have the same impact
I was not poor
I was oh so very white
And yet I look back on the struggles
That consumed me
Body and soul
Most solely in my own mind
And I cannot help
But whisper
“What if…?”

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The cowbirds had been linking and clawing at the windows for days. We chalked it up to their stupidity and rowdiness, but after my wife accidentally left the window open when we went out for groceries, we learned that they had a much more cunning plan in mind.

We stood there, together, looking at the small brown-marbled egg laid in the middle of our master bed.

“We have some very ambitious obligate brood parasites,” I said.

“Let’s get rid of it,” replied my wife.

“I dunno,” I said. “I think, by the law of the forest, we need to incubate it and raise it as our own now.”

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In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

The concertmaster fell back, gurgling from the wound, while the conductor nonchalantly cleaned the sold titanium baton that he used for conducting…and murder.

“This is why you always hit your notes in the Orchestra of Evil,” the conductor added. “When the pay is this good, the reward for any mistake must be death.”

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Took and Cheer had their first brood early that year. Three eggs, laid just as the spring rains were dying down.

The eggs hatched, and the chicks emerged. As was tradition, the chicks were not to be named until they were able to fledge and leave the nest. Cheer was in charge of names, though Took would veto any he did not like. The first chick stopped moving after three days, and Cheer sorrowfully dropped it to the ground below, chirping out the name she had hoped to give it.

A day later, a squirrel found and raided the nest, making off with another nestling. Took had not been fond of Cheer’s proposed name for the child, but her sadness led him to grudgingly agree to consider it for one of the others. Then came the massive thunderstorm that washed out the treetops with high winds and torrents. The two remaining chicks perished, drowned along with their names.

Cheer dutifully began building another nest, but with no successful broods the year before, their first, she told Took that he was free to seek a more successful nestbuilder and mate. He refused, saying that he would stay true to Cheer even if she were sitting on rocks.

Took and Cheer’s second nest was four eggs that year, and a greedy raccoon took all four in one night, while Cheer and Took were out hunting for food. Devastated, Cheer promised that the next nest would be the last of the season. Took agreed, but repeated his early statement of fidelity.

As it was now mid-spring and food was plentiful, Cheer had no trouble laying, and soon two fresh eggs glinted in her new nest. One day, though, Cheer returned to the nest to find an egg she did not remember laying. It was slightly smaller, with subtle variations in color and pattern compared to her others. Her first thought was to eject it, but a warning pip from Took stayed her. He would explain why later, he said. For now, best to brood it.

For her part, Cheer whispered the names of her children–forbidden names not yet fit to be given–through the shells. Purty, you will be called, she said to the first. Sweet will be your name, she said to the second. And to the third, the odd egg she did not recall laying, she pipped the name Tsee.

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The next morning, Shiraki Teruo led Takenaka Chihiro to the home of Nishikawa Akira. They gently dismissed the servants tending to him, revealing a man that was blind and slowly dying.

Takenaka knelt down and unpacked the food he had brought. He gently fed the dying man, speaking to him for some hours as Shiraki waited outside. When the cook emerged, he had a sober expression on his normally jovial face.

“Is it your brother?” Shiraki said.

“No,” Takenaka replied. “Nevertheless, I spoke to him, cared for him a time. He mistook me for someone else, I think–a family member. I did not correct him. I think you will agree, Shiraki-san, with Rule 67: a lie can sometimes be a great kindness.”

Shiraki had a brief, unpleasant thought of Masako, dying in his arms as he assured her that their stillborn son was alive and healthy. “Yes,” he said softly.

“But he did admit that, during his years as a blacksmith, he once ran into another smith with the same name, another Nishikawa Akira, in a place far from here. It is not much, but I will follow where it leads.”

Shiraki nodded. “If your travels ever bring you back here, Takenaka-san, you will find yourself among friends.”

“I never hesitate to make them, if I can,” the wandering chef said. “It is my rule number one.”

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“No, no, no,” the first human said. “The CSI doesn’t work out at all.”

“What do you mean?” said the second human.

“Poor little Goldie is laid out cold on the windowsill,” said the first human.

“Yeah. He flew into the window and broke his little neck.”

“If he hit the window at breakneck speed he should have bounced into the garden bed,” replied human number one. “Not been laid on the windowsill. It’s almost like someone, or something, wanted us to think he hit the window.”

“Damn!” the cowbird, watching from the fence, said. “I knew Garfield couldn’t handle a simple hit!”

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