dawdle look out

The horseman caroused himself into a brainless lump. Would it detune him enough to fit into a blended family. They sent out agents to collect him.

tachistoscope

There were two podiums, on opposite sides of the hall. They had originally been used for debate. the audience could face one direction or another. The acoustics worked so that you could pick a place in the audience and only hear the speaker you were facing. Over time one of the viewpoints one out. More people were facing that side of the hall. What were debates became sermons. They even put a shroud over the other podium, and a curtain in front of it. Until one day someone set up a projector there and interrupted the sermon not with sound, but with light.

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perpendicular sensitivity

She investigated the question: could there be an aphrodisiac which was not psychotropic at all? There were certainly drugs that could increase stamina, blood flow, lubrication, skin sensitivity, and other physical response. She classified these as enabling, but not really aphrodisiacs. Though others argued that for sexual response the line between physical and mental could not be drawn cleanly. She proposed a thought experiment that one could administer those drugs, and experience all of their effects, and still feel disgust or revulsion at the thought of sex. She didn’t expect to ever test that hypothesis, however.

mapping onto

She disappeared kayaking through the interlink in November, searching for a channel with high surf durability. Crab fishermen found her boat in January, and she began to haunt their ship.

final declaration

Married people could have anything they wanted on their tombstone, but the unmarried were only allowed to choose from among a couple dozen epitaphs. His mother knew he wanted to use an epitaph he had written himself. She campaigned to get the law changed and was befriended by the legislator from her district. They managed to pass a bill that expanded epitaph rights so that soldiers could also choose their own inscriptions, but since he was on the battlefield as an medic and conscientious objector, not strictly as a soldier, the law still didn’t apply to him. In order to fulfill hers son’s wishes his mother wound up arranging a posthumous marriage, as was commonly done, and her new in-laws quickly seized her assets and put her in a cheap nursing home.

I encyst

He was told he was brusque to the point of rudeness, but he could not come up with the frills to gild his speech, to encrust it within baroque colloquialisms. Instead, he trained himself to insert pauses into his speech, which seemed to soften the impression he made on people.

girders

As I dig the tunnel, I fill it. I have a handle on it at the beginning, but as we go further along I lose control. My body grows more metallic, sprouts more beams and supports, and I can’t stop them from going every which way, making progress through the tunnel difficult. Parts of me bulk out and block as much as half the passageway. Can I find the right direction, and can I keep the way passable long enough for my family to escape.

bone merchant

When a child’s hand is burned in an accident, his parents take him to a doctor to have his arm cut off so that they can then sell the valuable bones.

map of the untwisted zone

To whom should the blood money be paid after extinguishing the underclass?

Sabbath keeper

The strangely named drink erased from the mind of the imbiber all links between electronic messages. Each existed in its own shell, a pearl of isolated meaning.