Category: Fiction

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(You can read last Tuesday’s episode here or click on the tag for all the episodes!)

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“Oh, you really shouldn’t have said that,” the gravelly, familiar voice behind the blinding light said, “you really should have pretended you didn’t see Ralph’s face. I thought we taught you better than that.”

“Oh Holy Shit.”

The light swung away from his eyes…..and onto his partners, which were wide with shock, as he supposed, were his own. He had to crane his neck to see his partner, who seemed much cooler and more collected than he felt, but that was part of their training too. But his eyes gave him away. Remember to control your eyes next time, he thought to himself. Unbidden, Robert Redford’s voice came into his head and said, “yeah……next time.

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(Last Saturday’s Episode ………..you can read all the past episodes by clicking on the tag!)

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The first thing she saw was clouds. Clouds against a sky of a deeper and darker blue than she had ever seen before.

But there was something funny about the clouds. And come to think of it, there was something funny about waking up and seeing clouds. And come to think about it even more there was something funny about waking up at all since she didn’t remember going to sleep. The last thing she remembered….well, she couldn’t remember the last thing she remembered. So she concentrated on figuring out why the clouds looked funny and why the sky was such a deep dark blue…and so oddly shaped. She thought she had it figured out for a second, it was right on the tip of her consciousness, something about the edges of the clouds being made up of little squares. But instead of figuring it out, she faded back out…

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Tuesdays Episode

He almost forgot to notice what a strange and memorable sensation this was, high speed para-sailing behind a train, in a strikingly beautiful Arizona desert twilight. So he noticed it. Then he stopped and ran a weapons and systems check and patted the pocket where the bagel and the UV light were, just in case.

Now that the spools were reeling them closer and closer to the metal roof of the train, they had to pay close attention to aerodynamics and be ready to react quickly to gusts of winds and….oh shit, was that a fucking BAT?  

Cross posted from My Left Wing and my little blog Wild, Wild Left

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(Last weeks episode!)

The train had slowed down to one hundred and sixty miles per hour for the curve. The noise and the rush of wind were still pretty damn impressive when you were standing in a little cave 5 feet away from it as it was passing though. As soon as the last car had passed he stepped out onto the tracks, right next to his partner. Together they triggered the toggles that would unfold and inflate their parawings. He was now struck by just how many large pointy cacti were on the walls of the canyon…and by how high the canyon walls were…and those sharp looking boulders on the canyon rim over there. Suddenly, he decided that this was perhaps not the best plan that The Center had ever come up with. He gave a quick tug on his harness and bent his knees. Cactus or no, this was gonna hurt.

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(last weeks episode)

The Center had gotten the tip about the train 16 hours ago. The techs downloaded the Sat imagery along the full length of the tracks selected the best locations for intercept, they narrowed it down to a canyon in Arizona and selected the premium approach. He and his partner had studied both the computer simulations and the polymer topographical 3D model of the site as they prepped and on the plane. They knew the territory as well as was possible without having been there. He had selected the fucking bush he would sit in from the photos while they were still three hundred miles away. They had HALO’d in 9 hours before the train was due. In case the opposition had scouts coming or were laying sensors before hand. The latest Sat imagery had shown nothing that could possibly be a sensor in place when they dropped. The Sat techs would tell them if any scouts were in the area as the intercept time approached.

Greetings, literature-loving dharmaniacs!  I apologize for my two-week hiatus from the series, but the demands of real life took me away from the computer longer than I expected.  And what better way to celebrate a re-start than by picking up with a writer whose work is so recent, the ink is practically still drying on the page…

How do we form our identities?  Do we rely on our parents, our neighborhoods, or our religion?  What happens when those sources are compounded by immigration, or by mixed families, or by social circumstances that don’t align in ways that suggest convenient ways of defining ourselves? 

At least one author is diving headlong into this mess… And she’s doing it with style.  Join me below for a conversation with one of England’s most talked-about young authors.

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(Last episode)

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After 8 hours of sitting completely motionless in a fucking bush, he stood straight up from a half lotus. He did not grunt or stretch. Or spit or scratch. He did almost yawn though. Truth be told, he was on his feet before he even really knew it. Most people have two levels of operation, conscious and unconscious. People like him had three, conscious, unconscious and duty.

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(Last weeks episode)

Chapter Two

His young hard, coffee colored body was covered in a gleam of light sweat as he ran. Lungs pumping, legs pistoning up and down, his arms thrusting out for balance or pulling in to put on a burst of speed. Inside, the blazing star of raw youth burned and powered him. He didn’t notice that he felt no separation from the jungle. Running through jungles was what young men were made to do. It was one of their less destructive evolutionary functions.

He wore just shorts and sneakers and his sneakers created the drumbeat he ran to and his heart matched it.

The world he lived in then usually had three colors, blue green and brown. But when he was running there were only green and brown, of course there were hundreds of shades of green under the canopy of the jungle…and several different colors of brown, from tree trunks to the shifting colors of the dirt on the game tracks that he ran, as well as the different shades of brown of the many small rivers and streams he jumped over like ….NOW… or waded quickly through on his journey avoiding as much of the jungles bio-diveristy as he could. Then out into the sunlight for a quick dip in the pool that the village worked on keeping clear of predators…. and on good days, Mom’s banana pancakes before school.

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(Last weeks episode)

She finished her flakes, did the dishes, and poured the rest of the coffee into her Teenage Mutant Ninja travel cup. She went to the wall safe and loaded up her belt and her bag and her boots with the tools of her trade. Since their surveillance of Tan’s henchmen was over, she was headed downtown to HQ to fill out paper work and wait for her next assignment. At least it was warm. She grabbed her shades and her car keys and headed out the plastic front door.

(Last weeks episode)

She woke from a dream about babies with fins and gills.

That had been happening more and more often since they had met with the genetic designer at Paul’s hospital. She made a mental note to try and observe if it happened on nights after they made love. Then she forgot it. Like almost every other couple on earth, they wanted a baby. Unlike many, they actually had a chance to bring a new soul into this world without it being a tragedy. Or at least a bad joke. They had been cleared by the government, and when Paul finished his residency, and assuming she made her promotions on schedule, they would have the money to afford one child. It had been Paul’s idea to talk to the geneticist, since he was a friend and there had been no charge.

The rich had been designing their babies for years, but from what she had observed in her nightly wanderings through the gossip of popular culture, it hadn’t seemed to improve them much. The talk with the geneticist had creeped her out. And, it seemed, on a pretty deep level, judging from the dreams. She wished they would stop. But then, she wished a lot of things would stop.

Last weeks episode

She palmed the Bio-Scan at the entrance to her Burbclave (she had heard the term was invented by a sci-fi writer way back in the 20th) and they rolled through the gate. Half an hour ago they were in inner city Philadelphia, now they were in a whole other world. Sure it was the cheapest clave around, and built on land of questionable toxic lethality, but it was what she and Paul could afford. Even though she still found it mystifying how the designers thought that making a replica of a London neighborhood in the 1930’s…..just before it got bombed into smoking rubble by Hitler, was a good marketing idea. What with the current state of the world as it was. But it was nice, in  a sort of gruesome way. Plastic brick house fronts that looked almost real, with stoops and plastic street lamps, cobblestones and neatly trimmed green hedges behind black faux cast iron fences, window boxes and London mail boxes and piped in birdsong and all.