The dead language revives. Where are the things it has words for?   #   When a man died in archaic Greece, his wife was compelled to spend one night with the body, to ease its passage to the next world. Many of these women remembered, for the rest of their lives, their marriage to a stern, unbending, silent and truculent corpse.   #   The sun god forsakes his subjects every sundown, leaving a more tolerant god in charge of our doings in the … [Read more...]

Preparing his closing address to the jury, the defense attorney is having problems with his spell-check program. It keeps changing “accident” to “murder,” and “innocent” to “guilty.” # There is machine karma – you didn’t think they’d be exempt, did you? Dead machines have another life as a different kind of machine. Wicked ones come back as garbage disposals or cat-litter-box scoops. # My search is for someone worthy of being followed. Someone who will respect me, might even turn … [Read more...]

“You’re all puppets!” the street-corner speaker ranted. “You’re slaves of liberalism!” Bystanders shook their heads and conferred among themselves. Should this be “persons who are puppets,” or “persons with puppetism?”, or what? The speaker took advantage of this distraction: the strings of the bystanders were once again jerked. # Life isn’t like the brochure said it would be. I want my mommy back. # Are they all robots? He cuts one up to see, realizes that a robot need not be gears … [Read more...]

[Continuing the journal of Diane McMurphy, a patient in Bad Shepherd mental hospital, “The Asylum”]      Certainly I wore torn old clothes when I went on a rant. Before I was put here, that was. “Shoes and shirts must be worn,” and mine were about as worn as anybody’s. Certainly I bathed not too often. This gave me a sort of license, you know, the clothes and the smell, and the remarkable fact of being female. What if I were to stand in the middle of Charles Street in a clean, pressed pants … [Read more...]

     Formerly Joe owned this place. Formerly Joe cooked up chicken-fried steak hot beef sandwich potatoes and gravy two vegetables (your choice, but always carrots and peas), hard-perked coffee, two eggs any style they felt like serving,      and Edna waited table.      Formerly Joe knew all of us here in town, and we all came in one time or another, sat around and talked, ate up paid and left.      Joe’s place was always there; we never thought about it much, even when we were there. … [Read more...]

Larry is convinced he’s living in the future. Everything here is strange, confusing, unexplained, he tells people. He wonders what happened between his time and now. Why are there so few people? Why is there no rain?# Your life membership has expired. The plastic-card destroyer is knocking on your door with the butt of his scythe.#We’re free to do one thing only – the rest is given. We will always consider it our worst mistake. But it was our greatest achievement.# A god may possess you, or two … [Read more...]

     A few months after he bought the house, in casual neighborhood conversation Alfred discovered that a woman named Emily Hartness had died in that very house a few years before. A natural death, they said, but still Alfred was bothered. He lay awake that night, wondering if old Mrs. Hartness had died in that very bedroom. Well probably, he thought; it was the master bedroom, after all.      He couldn’t sleep, moved to the living-room couch. But he couldn’t sleep there, either; suppose she … [Read more...]

        Tronn joins the crowd for the evening’s dismemberment, but without much interest because he’s gone several times before, and tonight’s honoree is undistinguished. Last week it was a vice-mayor, the week before that a general of the unsuccessful war. Every three or four evenings, no one can figure out why a particular victim is selected. Who will the next one be? There are odds-makers. The whole process seems to make little sense to Tronn except as cheap entertainment for the masses, but … [Read more...]

Out of pity, we discard our wornout memories where we know the poor will find them, perhaps at least once remember food, laughter, warmth. # In the land of Oobla-Da, even before one opens one’s mouth the other nods, smiles; or shakes, frowns. But this other does not speak, because one knows exactly what he would say if he were to speak. One merely nods, or shakes, or kicks, or gouges. And then the other – [“No one speaks there, for everyone knows what everyone else wants to say.” Eliot … [Read more...]

[Continuing the journal of Diane McMurphy, a patient in Bad Shepherd mental hospital, “The Asylum”]      I’ve saved telling you about the best visitor for last: the President himself, in goodly godful person, came by for a photo-op one day, preceded by Service agents pretending futilely to be Secret, bomb-sniffing lemurs, radiation detectors that however didn’t pick up the vibes the Aliens are beaming at us from Mars (so says one of us here in Ward H, who receives these vibes from the cell … [Read more...]

     “No one believes that Smith personally knew that…” said the talking head. It was the inevitable “no one is saying that…” or “no one believes that…” Who is speaking for me without my consent? I did not delegate my mind to the talking head. It’s worse in a democracy, because the agreement of the people must be claimed, even if not obtained; only an authoritarian regime needn’t acknowledge the space your ideas exist in. Bill Watson concluded these thoughts with the realization that no one … [Read more...]

A landscaper makes decorative uses of people; he places them in masses in front of public buildings, heads cut off and stuck in pots. Millions are horrified. Pundits proclaim. Many newspapers are sold, how-did-we-come-to-this posts posted. The next day, something different happens. # There are adult-ed classes on how to deal with boredom, but they aren’t very interesting. Most of those who sign up drop out. # A world without representation – each thing is itself and not like … [Read more...]