mesmerizing

The company hired a mesmerist to hypnotize the staff into not feeling the cold. As part of his procedure he covers your head, he puts a cloth over both of your heads, his and yours, so you are cloaked in darkness, and can only hear his voice, and his breathing. Your breathing mixes together. You cannot see the water condensing on your two breaths, but you can sense it. You imagine your exhalations intermingling under that cloth. You smell his breath – it is minty.

Leo couldn’t remember anything past that, but as a side effect of this hypnotism, he stopped frequenting prostitutes.

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greetings

As part of her lesson on random numbers, a British schoolteacher assigns her class to write letters to ERNIE, the computer used to generate the winning premium bond numbers. Most write asking questions about how it does its job. One child, however, writes a letter of condolence to the previous version of ERNIE on his replacement.

curative

In 1552 the great gambler and mathematician Girolamo Cardano came to Scotland to treat Archbishop Hamilton’s asthma. What skepticism must Cassanate, his Excellency’s physician, have had to overcome to invite the rascal. But he was at the end of his rope.

revelation

Gus goes out to the wilderness on a vision quest, but Fred, his spiritual guide, seems to just treat it as a camping trip, a chance to get drunk away from the townsfolk. After two days of relaxing, during which Gus has been waiting for either revelation or direction, Fred asks, “Have you thought about what you’re going to tell the people you saw?”

organ failure

The party organ challenges the administration over the premier’s private scandal. The party fires the editor, but he refuses to go. He is locked out, but he has the newspaper unions on his side. They destroy the presses. In order to get the paper running again the party must find another press, and they go to one of the smaller papers. Meanwhile the editor is also trying to go to another newspaper, but he is warned away and flees the country. The union is also purged. Many are killed and more are arrested and sent to labr camps. The editor makes good his escape and in his exile writes a book about the whole affair. He goes on a book tour to promote it, and the cocktail parties intensify his feeling of impotence. His agent must talk him out of suicide severl times and finally gets him quietly into a private hospital.

message

Shipwrecked with a telescreen that’s connected to chat roullette.

allergens

the newly dscovered plant, an evergreen, proves prolific and spreads.once it reaches a certain population its spores start to sicken people. the drugs to counteract it are cheap but cause impotence. to procreate people must try to put up with severe illness, or visit a clean environment which is expensive to maintaina

pet

During his hospitalization he was given a pet, a small pear-shaped animal whose stubby limbs would grow longer in pace with his recovery. Keeping up with it as it became more agile would spur him to rehabilitative activity. Once he was fully recovered, he really didn’t want it any more, but it was illegal to put it down or give it away. He kept it in another part of the house and then finally in the backyard shed so that he didn’t have to hear its lonely weeping.

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metallic

they started grinding very fine meal by mixing grains of metal with the corn, then pulling out the metal with a magnet. the magnet starts to malfunction, and while ingesting the metal makes several of them ill, some note that having the metal grains mixed in the meal allows for new methods of cooking, if you can separate out the metal afterwards. an entrepreneur devises a home magnet for the purpose, but it depends on a new milling process that leaves the metal in.

circulation

I think i could save more money if I didn’t experience physical release when shopping, as if like Danae I were being made love to by the slack peeking out from behind matter’s curtain in the brief instant when badly-needed money is transferred out of my hand and into some distracted, uncaring shopkeeper whose children will spend it on costume jewelry, game cards, and drugs. They’re just going to waste it like I just did when I signed up for four installments to pay for the next useless piece of junk on an infomercial. That’s why i feel justified, part of a circle of life, when I rob those teenagers, snotty girls and nerdy guys, as they go in and out of the mall.