Museum Man

I can't sleep. The operation is tomorrow and they want me well rested but what difference will it make, they take my body and split it up, giving out my organs to the highest bidder or the cutest kid on a crowdfunding site. What does it matter to me if my body is fatigued, I …

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The Gods must be naff

It was from the dust - the thundered dust! - that Mickey plucked us onto his easel  - with spotless Hands! - to paint us anew. Glory, Glory, Glory to the Great Merciful Mickey and death to the traitor Zachariah and his followers. Death to Zachariah though we arrived here by his cursed Hand, by his vessel who …

The Death of Chrysippus

Chrysippus of Soli, so bold and clever, walked his bald head out for some sun. The warmth and cool breeze on its vast surface, he thought, would clear his mind of its burden - the invention of propositional logic - that he had just achieved. Brilliant as he was, Chrysippus did not consider the full …

The Game of the Century

A man may have two ideas in his head at once, even if they contradict. But when he chooses to speak he must choose to say only one. Except this isn’t a story told by a man but by a highly developed chess engine, equipped with prose-notation to analyse military engagements from recorded history. In …

Scholia #4

You are granted an afterlife of your own making, and this world is but an afterlife for those who have lived before, the rocks under our feet the souls who never wrote poems. So here I am, a boy writing and so I am to be: an oak tree in a new world, and when …

The Imp in Perfection

Ulises watched the wick burn low. He refused to give up and his hand refused to write, so there he sat and watched the wick burn low. On his desk lay a copy of the Beowulf manuscript, blank paper, and a family picture from his last birthday. In it, he stands next to his wife …

Rest in peace, Gene Wolfe

A great man and a fantastic writer, the only living writer I admired and the only one whose death I knew in advance would bereave me as if I had lost a close friend. Another good one is gone. But not forgotten, the flames of Notre Dame are now put out and all is in pieces, …