emboss

He got tired of hearing about raising “consciousness” and insisted on a new term, but met with no success. he became cynical about it, and embraced an ironical use of the term as he was sent out again and again on conscioussness-raising missions, because he was so good at it. 

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surprise

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coagulant

Neil’s father had fostered a community feeling in the ice cream parlor, with plenty of large tables featuring painted chess boards and a stock of other board games waiting to be borrowed. That changed after Neil changed the recipe slightly.  He added a thickener to make the ice cream slightly more resistant to melting. It had no discernible effect on the taste, but after he started using it he noticed sales go up dramatically. He found that it was making people depressed, and they turned to ice cream for solace. his store grew more crowded, but quieter, as people sat alone.

flat

He had decided to give up carbonation for lent. He ordered the syrup so that he could combine it with flat water normal water, but it wasn’t going to arrive in time. So he opened a cola bottle and let it sit uncapped in the refrigerator overnight. The other members of his household did not understand what he was trying to do – they mustn’t have, anyway. They threw the cola out. He tried to argue with them, and their response was that if he was giving up carbonation he could just as well have water. He didn’t need the sugary chemical-laden syrup. He sought counsel from his priest.

reconnecting

I spent a pleasant long weekend the other day visiting an old classmate of mine on the moon, where he has gotten as a supervisor in the cheese-mining operation. We went out for lunch and drove past it. We stopped and got out to take a look at the operation from the side if the road – he wasn’t able to bring visitors onto the work site itself. He then took me to his home and I met his wife briefly, which reminded me of our school days when he would keep moths and crickets in little cages and take them out when I wasn’t there. After all there was no one else of his species at the school, so he couldn’t have a girlfriend or anything like that. And with my own prurient internet habits, who was I to judge? I did draw the line at cockroaches, however.

bargaining

She sat down and wrote a catalog if all of her good and bad points. And then all of her boyfriend’s. And then she started going through her classmates, cataloging all of their traits. She assigned prices to each trait, and then as a course of self improvement she would pick a fault she wanted to get rid of, find a good trait of equal value and try to replace the fault with the benefit in her daily habits.

sealing

When he first set himself up as a seal hunter off the coast of Tasmania, the natives came and insisted he take a woman in trade for some of his supplies. She was such an expert seal hunter that when they offered him another later he took her without hesitation and set her up on a neighboring island as a subsidiary enterprise.

hung on

He threw down his weapons and reached out his hand in capitulation. I took it, and worms crawled down his arm and on to mine. they bit into my skin with needle-like teeth.

predominance

After his entombment noise seemed misbegotten. Whenever there was light, there was no sound. Whenever there was sound, there was no light. The voices he heard in the darkness could not be tied to any faces he saw in the light.

weaverbirds

The artist received a commission from the minister for health and social affairs to put on a decomposition exhibition. The ministry would supply the birds.