night sky

I was thinking of th starry night sky and how wondrous it is. Every time you look at it there is something new to see, something new to understand. So beautiful. I am awestruck. But it wasn’t the nght sky. It was your face I was thinking of.

and here’s his horse

A young man native to a colony is on homestay to its mother country. his host family takes him to a local museum. one of the displays is horse of the missionary who proselytized the young man’s country, mummified and sent back to his homeland as a gift, in reverence. he doesn’t feel comfortable correcting for his host family – that the horse, an animal that had never been seen in that land, was killed out of disgusted wonderment the pickled and sent back in insult by the obstinate pagans who were eventually supplanted.

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incident in the clouds

The teacher stands at the head of the platform, the students by their desks. They look out past the edge of the platform to the orange clouds below. Someone has seen something moving with apparent purpose from one cloud to another … turning, and holding still while current-swept wisps of cloud stream past it. Then it dives back into another cloud. The sun shines golden above. One of the students forgets himself enough to address the teacher informally: “what does it mean?”

After this chance discovery of a fluidics class on a field trip, the academy organizes several remote viewing forays to the same planet in order to investigate what could possibly be new, alien life. However they find instead that they have unfortunately stumbled on one of the hidden operations of a criminal syndicate, and a struggle ensues between syndicate and academy.

remote infatuator

The jilted lover, while spending an drunk afternoon watching tv at home, is inspired by a viewing of E.T. He rigs up a bicycle, some ham radio equipment and a bulk order of pheremones, and through spite builds a machine to make his jilter fall in love with first this one now that one in a series of jerks and assholes. Sated and then bored with her, he turns the machine upon others whom he thinks it would amuse him to see fancy against their inclinations or interests. He focuses its power on his mother in the middle of a whim he then deeply regrets.

bleach

Pett can only be aroused within earshot of ocean waves. He hopes someday to move out of the colony, and live where he can get different colored clothes. For a while he bleaches the standard issue, which earns him a form of celebrity, or at least notoriety. After he starts to take advantage of his fame, his friend counsels him to give up the practice entirely. He warns, “Fabricated acclaim contains its own besmirchment.”

sky resown

In a cave, a cluster of eyes roll to look up at the streak of light lad by the journeyer’s trek across the ceiling. A young hero has ventured to re-seed the cieling with the plants whose fruit drop down and feed this community. One of the elders, upon his death, finds himself looking down on the community as one of these plants. If his transmigration is not unique, but a natural course of the mind, what happened, he wonders, to the minds of all those who perished when these plants had dwindled to almost none?

stoichiometry

A young man takes up chemistry as a hobby. Concepts such as equilibrium and laws of conservation lead him to long contemplations of balance. “For every ablation there is an absorption,” he repeats to himself. He applies the maxim to morality: would he add to some else’s being good by being bad himself? He becomes rude and then turns to petty crime. However he has no one to measure it against. He enters a relationship and treats his partner badly. She doesn’t stand for it and sends him to a Christian minister who first tries to convince him that he’s not thinking about it in the right terms. He then tries to use those terms to explain how Christ has changed the equation, but that gets him nowhere as well. Being very ecumenical, he recommends that the fellow visit a Buddhist priest. The Buddhist explains karma and argues that there is so much bad karma, so much suffering, that there is more than enough for him to try to balance with goodness.

treatment

A group of twelve year old boys convince themselves that they have ingested an unknown parasite, and they try to treat it themselves. An appointed secretary keeps a notebook of the symptoms and their response to treatment. They start with a pharmacopeia they arrive at through consensus, and finally they decide on surgery. They draw up their own tests of competence to decide on the surgeon and then draw straws among the rest for the first patient.

jennie and alexandra

The friendship between Alexandra of Denmark, wife of King Edward VII, and Lady Randoph Churchill (Winston’s mother), with whom Edward had an affair. One of the things Alexandra initially found charming about Jennie was her reaction when Alexandra brought up the story that Mrs. Churchill had a tattoo of a snake encircling her wrist: “Oh that fucking rumour. That was another girl that worked at my magazine. I’m amazed that this subject keeps coming up, and frankly wish I had gotten the thing.”

figureheads

He waits until the catnip plant was bedded in to remove the fence and netting. It then lures in the wildcat, which he is able to kill with his atlatl spear-thrower, which he has named “the second coming.” He has the wildcat stuffed by a taxidermist with whom he has formed a friendship which makes him uncomfortable. He then poses the wildcat in the living room with the other figures. Maybe the grouping will be infused with a new strength, and make his daughter concede to doing the the chores. The daughter snorts in disdain.