I frowned down at the menu. “Breaded toast?” I read aloud.
The waiter, a skinny, animated little fellow who bounced around like he physically couldn’t stand still, smiled at me. Or rather, he flashed his teeth at me. It seemed almost like a rictus instead of a true smile.
“Indeed, sir. It’s available as a side dish with any item, or included with many of our entrees.”
“Yes, but… what is it?” I asked. “I mean, you can toast bread, but what’s breaded toast?” Continue reading
Sitting on the faded fabric of the seat, feeling the familiar rumble of the car rattling over the tracks rising up from beneath him, Richard finally let himself relax. The effort came slowly, and he had to force himself to take the first few shaking, unsteady breaths, but he felt his muscles slowly begin to unwind.
This was all he needed, he told himself. A few minutes to relax. He needed to stop thinking about it all, how it was all falling apart.
Just relax. Continue reading
I woke up and frowned. This wasn’t right. The whole world had gone yellow, and a pervasive smell crept into my nostrils, carrying strong notes of overripe banana.
After a few seconds of physical paralysis, my brain established that yes, I still did possess fingers. I reached up and removed the banana peel from where it sat draped over my face, and looked around.
A plastic roof only a foot above my head leaked sunlight, revealing that I sat in a metal container, about six feet long and three feet wide. Several parts of me ached, suggesting that I’d been tossed into the container, but my fall onto the steel floor had been cushioned by several bulky and half-torn bags of assorted garbage. Continue reading
Lord Herrington stepped up to the podium, gazing out at his audience. The usual learned men of London had gathered for the Royal Society’s monthly presentation, but he also saw a multitude of members of the public in the audience as well, looking eagerly up at him.
With a sigh, Lord Herrington resisted the urge to reach up and adjust his pince-nez. Word of his return from the New World had traveled quickly, making him something of a celebrity among those with an adventurous mindset. They’d come tonight to here him tell his tale, hoping for glimpses of another world, one far beyond their own humdrum lives.
He intended to speak of his observations on the biological variations in life, but he sensed his audience’s hunger for more. They didn’t want to hear about varying adaptations in the hooves of Cervidates to adapt to the moist jungle environment.
So as he wound down his speech, Lord Herrington decided to throw a bone to these common folks who had come out to hear him speak. Perhaps, he thought to himself, he could ensure that they did not leave completely disappointed. Continue reading
In retrospect, after midnight on a Friday evening in college is not the best time to make a deep, mind-shattering discovery about your best friend.
“Are you serious?” I howled across the table at Barry, pelting him with Hershey Kisses. “You don’t like chocolate? Man, what’s wrong with you!”
Barry did his best to block the shower of small projectiles, but he didn’t want to let go of his beer bottle, so several of the little foil-wrapped chocolates pinked off the glass container. “Nothing’s wrong!” he insisted. “I just don’t like the stuff, okay?”
“Nuh uh, not okay,” I said, shaking my head vehemently back and forth. With all the booze sitting in my stomach and pestering my liver, the head-shaking gesture made the room spin unsteadily, but I clamped both of my hands over my ears until the wooziness passed. “Who doesn’t like chocolate?” Continue reading
“Three… two… one…”
Counting under my breath, I ticked down the fingers, bracing myself against the crumbling stones. Just after I hit “one,” the ground shook beneath us, and a mighty roar filled my ears, leaving them ringing despite the earplugs I’d inserted. They said that we wouldn’t have much sustained hearing loss, but who believed them these days?
“You were early, I think,” Harry said next to me, after the ringing and echoes had died away.
Across from me, Donson nodded. “Yep. Half a second or so.”
“I’ll get it next time,” I replied, as we hauled ourselves back to our feet on the still-quivering earth. Continue reading
I looked around the office, trying to control the anxiety building up inside my chest. Just breathe, Jake, I told myself. You’re just here to find out how it works. You haven’t signed anything, haven’t agreed to anything yet.
Whoever designed the office, at least, had been well aware of the anxiety that its visitors might feel. Most of the walls were paneled in dark wood, and a large fountain in the middle of the room sent a small waterfall cascading down amid lush green vegetation. I felt more like I’d accidentally stepped into a spa, or perhaps an upscale massage parlor, rather than a dating service.
“Jake Hoffman?”
I glanced up at my name, and saw a tall, efficient-looking brunette in a tightly tailored navy suit looking back at me. “Yeah,” I said, rising up from the low bench where I’d been sitting and gazing blearily into the stream of falling water. “That’s me.”
She smiled at me, an efficient and businesslike smile that she’d probably practiced a thousand times in the mirror. “Right this way, Mr. Hoffman.” Continue reading
Even when all things are considered, fish are fairly stupid creatures.
Admittedly, there’s no real reason for them to be smart. The buoyancy of water means that they can build up much more muscle and fat mass, and although they need some complex three-dimensional trigonometric calculations for determining optimal paths through an environment where height is more than just the “the empty space above my head”, there’s not a lot of real intelligence in a fish.
Perhaps, at some point in history, a short-lived branch off of the evolutionary tree showed some signs of real intellect. Maybe, at one or more times, a fish blinked, looked around at its fellows swimming through the water all around him, and thought to himself, “Hey, I wonder who created this maze where we all hang out!”
That fish was probably the first to be eaten by a dolphin, because instead of swimming away like his fellows, he stopped and tried to negotiate with the dolphin. Continue reading
“So as I see it, the big problem is the bell curve, y’know?”
Riley focused on dealing out the cards, watching their blue-and-white backs slide away from him across the smooth wood of the table. He wished that his deft fingers were sensitive enough to feel the patterns of ink printed on the reverse, to know their identities without flipping them over. Karsten’s chatter was little more than background.
Across the table, Hale grunted. “Bell curve? Karsten, what’re you talking about?”
“Society!” Karsten responded instantly. “C’mon, you can’t deny that the whole thing’s a crock of shit, just goin’ to more shit, isn’t it? Go on, put your hand on your heart and tell me that things aren’t worse than before.” Continue reading
The whole thing happened, when we get down to it, because of a vanilla frappuccino.
Why the general requested a vanilla frappuccino, no one knows. Maybe he felt especially parched that day, as he stood in the dusty, hot command tent and shouted orders at his inferiors. Maybe a couple neurons got crossed in his brain, and he had a momentary flashback to a conversation with his teenage daughter, who was going through that particularly disagreeable phase in her life when she felt as if she ought to be completely independent, despite still needing her parents to provide her with everything.
In any case, when the unfortunate lieutenant who pulled that week’s “drinks bitch” duty sidled up to the general and asked if he’d like something to drink, the general spun to glare at him from beneath stormy, overgrown eyebrows, a pair of gray caterpillars writhing across his face.
“Vanilla frappuccino!” he snapped at the hapless lieutenant. “And make sure it’s cold!” Continue reading
Missing Brains 