Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

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!

Ellie was always a little concerned when Dr. Harrison pulled her aside. Nurses in the hospital were often on the ragged edge, and incurring the displeasure of one of the residents was a great way to get fired and poison a possible reference. But as soon as he mentioned the name Monica, unknowing sort of quiet came over Ellie.

“It’s happened again,” Harrison said in a low voice. “The cancer ward this time.”

“Tell me all the details,” Ellie said. “You know you can trust me with this. Who else would even believe it?”

“Monica drew a picture of our senior oncologist with a little girl on his shoulder. I’m positive she meant Dr. Shakur because they’re the only one in that entire ward who’s bald.”

“And?”

“You’re probably not aware of it because you work in pediatrics, but there was a girl in oncology with stage IV liver cancer. They had actually taken her off her regimen and were providing only palliative care, but the test this morning showed she’d gone into remission. Shakur was really fond of her, and was pretty broken up over the whole thing. When he heard the news, he went into the ward and gave her a piggyback ride.”

“Just like Monica’s drawing,” said Ellie. “When are we going to tell people about this? It’s the third time this month.”

“The fourth,” said Dr. Harrison. “I didn’t tell you about when Agatha Chambers died. You’ve got enough on your plate as it is. Monica drew her as an angel, it wasn’t anything disturbing.”

“I say again, when are we going to tell people about this? This could be a situation where curing every illness is one crayon drawing away.”

“It could also be a coincidence,” Harrison said, “or at least dismissed as one. Do you really want to be the one who squashes the miracle by trying to study it? By putting a price tag on it?”

“You sound like you’re afraid, doctor,” said Ellie.

“You know what really scares me?” Harrison said. “If I’m the one who lines up ruining that poor girl’s life and she decides to draw me in a noose.”

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

It was really a rather remarkably freeing decision. Once she decided, Anna felt a lot of the stress and anxiety that had bedeviled her over the last few difficult months starting to peel away like layers of a rancid onion. Throwing on a few close that happen to be on the floor in the bedroom, and not even the least wrinkled ones, she went out to the balcony that she shared with the vacant apartment next door. In fact, she was the sole remaining tenant of her four-unit building, and one of only 15 people in the entire complex, a complex originally built for 100.

The others had moved away due to the spiraling downward trend of the neighborhood, which is the only reason and Anna had stayed: it was the only rent she could afford on her meager salary as a waitress and substitute teacher. The weight of that knowledge, and the various valuable things that have been burgled from her apartment over the past six months, were one part of the puzzle. The intense feeling of inadequacy that had dogged her heels all the way to South Carolina was another. Everyone had expected great things of the valedictorian, even if it was of a tiny rural school. Her professors at art school had been a rhapsody of praise and encouragement.

And yet here she was, the shadow of squandered potential hanging over her head like the sword of Damocles, until her decision.

She drug a lawn chair out to the balcony, one that until recently been serving double duty as a dining room chair, and set it near the edge. Then, she retrieved a bottle from under the sink, one that hadn’t seen in any use since her charcoal grill had been stolen.

Sam’s Club sold a big bottle though, and it was more than enough to soak every surface in the apartment in a dripping sheen of accelerant. Taking up a perch in the lawn chair, Anna lit a match and flicked it through the open door. Facing away from the heat, she listened to the smoke alarm sing its baleful song until it died.

Everything her life had been, everything she’d accumulated, was in that apartment. In choosing to sacrifice it all on an altar like this, especially one, like as not, to see her charged with arson, hadn’t been an easy choice.

But, as Anna heard the first sirens in the distance and the growing warmth behind her, she was convinced it had been the right decision. When they came, and asked her what was going on, she simply planed to shrug, and say “I needed to make a change.”

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

“Aah!” Chris cried out as the fangs sank into her neck. A few moments of frenzies sucking later, and she whas cast aside.

“What do you?” She cried. “How be? Why talk no good?”

“Because I’m a grammarpire, my dear,” said the creature, licking its fangs. “I’ve sucked every ounce of good grammar from your poor body.”

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

“Let me ask you something you may have been asked before. You say you believe there’s something inherently good in people, despite wretched examples to the contrary. How is that?”

“Let me put it to you this way. An antelope can walk as soon as it’s born; insects begin to feed as soon as they’re hatched. But humans are born helpless. If you abandon one of us after a day, a month, a year…we will die. And yet the world is full of adults who were raised, with all the care an nourishment that implies. Someone loved each and every adult enough to see to it that they didn’t perish. It might not have been a pure love, it might even have been a love born out of fear. But what else can one call the effort required to bring forth a complete human being? With that indelible love a requirement, for all of us, how can we not have a similar spark of compassion?”

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

Swid is a new, intensely luscious, combination of three distinct and differing things.

Tangy, soft, and sweet, Swid charms in a European manner.

Designed to tantalize, Swid is or soon will be available everywhere.

Swid is safe, all-natural, and harmless.

Swid is love.

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