This month’s first story is “Canine 401(k)” by Gina Sakalarios-Rogers. I liked this one (if “like” is the right word — it’s not exactly a pleasant premise) because it’s such a clear vision of different personalities: rule-oriented and results-oriented, emotional and cynical, idealistic and pragmatic. Next we have “Dragonslayer” by Peter McLean. It’s a fantasy. […]
Ed listened to the six o’clock news on the booking officer’s small radio. The reporter described him as remorseless, a cold-hearted murderer. He slumped in the hard plastic chair, cuffs pinching his wrists. According to the reporter, Ed’s twenty acres was a killing field containing “massive piles of dog carcasses and bones clearly visible from […]
Krin looked sheepishly at the dead bear. “Well,” Mika suggested, “I suppose we could always just, you know, say it was a dragon.” She was sitting on a rock a little way off, under the shade of a forest oak, checking the fletchings of her arrows. She’d put three shafts into the poor bear before […]
All along the farmyard gables the swallows sat a-row, twittering uneasily to one another, telling of many things, but thinking only of Summer and the South, for Autumn was afoot and the North wind waiting. And suddenly one day they were all quite gone. And everyone spoke of the swallows and the South. “I think […]
If you’d like to read his previous columns, you can find a complete list on his author page. One of the first things I learned about English prose style, far back in the ancient days of grade school, was that I should vary my vocabulary. Repetition of the same word (other than prepositions, conjunctions and […]
This story collection is an exemplar for Short-short Sighted #26, “Again Again Again: Repetition”. Todd and I were having a beer at the Folsom Grill, and I said, “You know, I saw Angela again today.” “Yeah?” he said. “Where?” “At a department store. She was there with some guy named Jim. Scruffy beard. Kind of […]