CURRENT ISSUE

Cautiously she re-entered the building, slowly making her way through the hall and the lobby, trying to get a view of Ollie’s office. As she passed through the lobby she was able to catch a glimpse of Ollie’s door, which was open, and Agent Blackwood was standing just inside having another heated discussion with Ollie. Kate decided to cut through the back hallway on the way to the kitchen, that way she would not be detected and she could sneak up on the conversation.

The specimen was brownish, somewhat round, and no bigger than the top of my limb. Its amorphous shell was partly cracked and there was a crystalline substance inside it. My sonar indicated that it was made of nearly pure carbon. I pressed harder on the edge of the crack with two of my limbs; the crust peeled off and fell on the ground.
At that instant, a dazzling light from the crystal penetrated my optical sensors. What a beauty! It seemed as if the crystal was grateful to me for rescuing it from a long captivity, and so it rewarded me in the only way that it could.

   “Pomegranate juice, the granater the better, forget the pommes,”amazed that at her age, her vocabulary was still so creative-svelte-experimental, passing the bread shelves on the way to the counter.
     “Whole wheat, daaaaark rye....”
     “Laquelle tu veux...”
     “Don’t try to camouflage your bio-chemical ignorance with Français, it doesn’t work avec moi...”
     Getting to the counter, turning to ask her if she wanted any chocolate-coated raisins, turned...but she wasn’t there...but everything in the cart exactly what she would have chosen if she were still alive.

  The fire spreads like a flesh-eating virus across the big top, incinerating the canvas roof and spattering hot ashes onto the cold grass below. Hay bails catch on fire and chaos surrounds us in every direction. Fluorescent embers fly through the air, landing on top of my head and igniting my hair. The elephant is either oblivious to the stampede or she just doesn’t care. Camels, tigers, and liberty horses storm past her, as the ring master cries out for help. The hollering reverberates though my ears, rattling my skull, piercing into my brain. A terrified orangutan is clinging for dear life to the collar of a screaming zebra.

Rebecca fantasized that life was a lottery ticket or a pull of a lever,
that one of the bunch in her pocket was a winner or the slots were a redeemer;
but life itself was not real that was strictly for the mentally insane at the Elgin
Mental Institution.
She gambled her savings away on a riverboat
stuck in mud on a riverbank, the Grand Victoria, in Elgin, Illinois.
Her bare feet were always propped up on wooden chair;
a cigarette dropped from her lips like morning fog.


Sheila Wellmon screamed when Herbert Lott came out of the men’s room. “Oh, my God! Your face!” she said.
     Then she put her hand to her mouth and ran. Herbert stood in front of the door to the men’s room and watched Sheila run and scream down the hall. . . .

Herbert Lott worked for the International Electronics Corporation. IEC hired him a year ago, when he finished the basic electronics course at Clinch Valley Technical and Vocational College. It was his first real job.         

  I’ve long since realised my twin brother Mick leads his life completely at random. For instance: he gets a job, a plum job. All goes well for a month, but then the boss makes a pass at him. She’s plain, almost twenty years older than him, and she has a husband whose desire has wilted, apparently. If he just sleeps with her once a fortnight when her old man is playing bowls, she’ll see to it that Mick gets a nice bonus at Christmas, and after that his own department is only a matter of time. So what does Mick do? Does he lay the old coot? Does he heck? He comes over all virtuous. Rings me up and asks me what I’d do.