Tag: Issue 18
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Is This Part of the Play?
A Ten-Minute Comedy Characters Nic, Any Age or Gender Olive, 40’s – 70’s, Female Setting: The Audience, Right Before the Curtain Goes Up “I pray you.” ~ William Shakespeare (A theater. NIC is seated in the audience. OLIVE approaches NIC. OLIVE seems hesitant. She looks around, and then –cautiously– sits next to NIC.…
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Manifestos
Singularity In 1993, mathematician Vernor Vinge warned against the coming technological ‘singularity,’ an event he predicted would occur between 2005 and 2030. The event: basically, robots take over the world. Vinge felt ambivalent and said more or less this: The robots are coming, the robots are coming, the robots are almost here. I am excited…
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How to Talk to Kids About Snails
This little girl, who has no right to remind you of yourself, stands whining by the terrarium with grubby fingers smearing the glass. Grubby, you think, not to mean dirty or soiled but instead as a term of relative comparison to denote resemblance to a grub. You have not yet chosen the week’s vocabulary words…
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Undertow
The rain drives so hard that Nick imagines it puncturing the roof of the Saab. He peers through the wiper blades swatting at the windshield and rechecks the gas level. The Texaco shouldn’t be much farther. Just beyond the McDonalds and that bail bonds place. If only they could get through this intersection. He’s lost…
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Respecting Mystery
The core labor of my writing life is the process of coaxing characters into the world of my fiction. It’s a process analogous to a portrait painter working for that crucial moment, as Paul Klee described it, where the free inspiration of the artist must yield to the demands of the thing coming into being:…
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