The System woke the Agent twenty-four hours before it woke the President. That was the protocol. Twenty-four hours would give the Agent time to secure the bunker and to become clear-headed enough to serve the President’s needs.
Tag: Fiction
A man hit his dog on the head
A gifted storyteller wrote: A man hit his dog on the head. At first, I took this to be the finest story I had ever read. Concise and spare, it did precisely what a good story should do: it created a space into which I could make an imaginative leap.
Story: Recursions
Fenton pulled off his belt and shoes and dropped them into the plastic bin along with keys, spare change, wallet, and reading glasses. In another bin, he laid out his carry on, a small backpack in which he had stashed a T-shirt and underwear, tooth brush and deodorant, and a discreet baggy of cocaine.
Story: The Gentleman’s Club
— I’m looking for a man who knows me so well he could finish my sentences but loves me so much he keeps his mouth shut.
Story: Chad and Stacy go on a Date
Story: Road Trip with my Dad
I just got back from a road trip with my dad. We drove the northern route through Ontario i.e. we started on Yonge Street in Toronto and pointed the car north. Theoretically, if you keep your foot on the accelerator and don’t hit a moose, a couple days later you’ll end up in Rainy River on the Minnesota border.
Story: The Three Body Problem
All down the street we’d been fighting ’til we passed the drug store where Mandy saw the ads in the window and they reminded her that she was having a certain female problem with itchiness so she told me to wait outside with the dog while she ran inside to buy whatever it was she needed that was advertised on special in the window.
Story: A Conversation Some Time Ago In Lascaux France (in translation)
A: Yeah, well, I’ve learned a thing or two in my travels, you know (which, incidentally, are far more extensive than yours), and one of those things I’ve learned is a word, a simple word, and you wanna know what that word I’ve learned is? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s cant.
Story: Sleeping Giant
He shoved me into his change room and the plywood door swung shut like a coffin lid. I wriggled out of my jacket and trousers and imagined I was Harry Houdini locked in a cage suspended over a raging river.
Story: meeturmatch.com (i)
Against my better judgment, I go up with the woman to her apartment. Objectively speaking, it’s, like, a smart thing to do. The woman is clever, fun, good-looking and (most important of all) eager.
Story: Nessie
Niels Bohr had nine items, one too many for the express line, so he had to wait in a regular line behind a woman with five snot-nosed kids and two buggies overflowing with groceries. Bohr wondered if something had happened to the space-time continuum to make his wait in line seem more interminable than it already was.
Story: The Six Sheet Rule
It started with a three-day blackout. They got the grid online again, but never back to the way it was. From then on, there were rolling blackouts, at least a couple hours each day. There was talk of crumbling infrastructure, but that was only half the problem.
Story: Conspiracy Theory
Through an act of subterfuge, Mandy got Lloyd into emerge. She sat him down in a waiting room of scraped knees and moaning bandaged heads and said she had to go to the counter and request an old x-ray she’d forgotten to pick up.
Story: The Great Depression
Our next case study concerns a young man named M. who presented at his family physician’s office complaining of symptoms consistent with a major depressive episode. The physician referred him to a psychiatrist, Dr. N., who prescribed Zoloft and implemented a biweekly course of psychotherapy.
Story: Lust
I can’t remember how I got here, but it feels like I’m in a TV series. Maybe you know the one. A plane crashes near an uncharted island in the middle of an unspecified ocean. The survivors confront various challenges, including their own sordid pasts.