breaking the seal

The rest of the orchestra followed the singer as he fell out of tune. He had faltered. Something had hiccuped in his chest. But as he recovered and found the orchestra was with him he decided to ride it further. Months later he was asked to give a lecture about that night to a group of music students. The teacher had been there and had recorded it. He asked the teacher to loan him the tape so he could review it to prepare for the lecture. Once he had it, he erased it.

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fingerprint comb

One of the thief’s special tools was a comb-like appliance that had a different fingerprint on each of its teeth. The problem was that if he used the same ones consistently they were as distinctive to him as the ones on his hand.

cross drive

The insects crawling out from under the first base were drawn to congregate there by a fig, half rotten and half desiccated, which someone had hidden under the stiff bag. It was part of a spell cast by the local boosters club-slash-coven.

sharpener

Was she a relative? A slave? Merely a body servant? Did she service him sexually, or was he too old? People asked these questions about the young girl who did all of Homer’s cooking and washing up, prepared his bed and guided the blind poet down the road. They did not think to wonder how much she critiqued his recitations of the previous night as she performed these duties, or which helped him more.

uneven fear

The lack of sleep eventually became a measurable cultural impediment, but so many things would go wrong if we backtracked it was hard to choose between stasis and upheaval. Dithering at top levels became irrelevant thanks to a wave of leadership from the bottom.

cohesions

The equipotential region stretched around the accusative case in an elongated flare like the tail of a comet. Conjugation dilated its focus. No squadron of polymaths, no matter how deliberately assembled, could temper it. Their studies did reveal, though, that it was not creating or even widening the chasm. It was in fact not just warning of it, but creating a buffer zone around it.

foster

She was the spirit of the month of April incarnate: cold, breezy yet weepy. How, some wondered, was she to nurture anything. Yet the child prospered under her care, perhaps because he was just the right age for her kind of attention. In order to catch her approval, he cast his ambition on what she might want tomorrow, leading her expectations like a gunner leads a moving target.

non-normal distribution

Fuel was delivered without vehicles, or wires, or tracks, but through the air, floating on fields shaped, controlled, moved and distributed by an operator muttering into a radio at a control station many miles away. When he was jostled, his coffee went flying, and so did the fuel, scattering in globules large and small.

disbud

The psychotherapist wore progressively more frightening clothes the longer he worked with a patient.

repression cry up

Many were punished when a counterfeiter took over the official announcements of subjects eligible for parody. Tricked or no, the debasement they performed was real.