I’m very happy to announce this morning that my short story “The History Within Us” is up at Clarkesworld Magazine alongside a fine story from Gord Sellar and an interview with Kij Johnson.  You can read my story here.  And you can find the full issue here. The story’s genesis is an interesting one.  My father had several old reels of film from when he was a boy, back in the early 40s, which he had recently converted to DVD.  On one long weekend we added his narrative voice-overs, so he …

My daughter is a tree in the desert. She doesn’t move; the world rushes past her. I sit in her thin, angular shade, against her diluted-green trunk, and listen as she gossips about the grains of sand as if she knows each one by name. I try not to think about her mother, the green woman, but cannot help myself.

THE FEW MINUTES I had to spend in the Institute’s waiting room were my least favorite part of coming up to visit my mother. It felt more like a dialysis room, the visitors sunk into the overly-soft couches and not speaking, just drinking orange juice and recovering. There were no magazines and no television, just cold air blowing from the vents and generic music flowing with it. I’d finished my juice and was beginning to brood on my dislike for overly air-conditioned buildings when my mother arrived attended by a nurse.

ME AND JAZZ waved at the Goodbye Girl as it flew overhead, the gold and blue gossamer wings like butterfly beats, the silver cockpit shimmering in the afternoon light with tiny silver threads looping down and around it. We saw the paint we had splashed on earlier in a drugged out mania, the orange and blue and the bright burning red — making it into star shapes and star patterns. Just so my gal Mary Mary May could find her way home across the many patterns of glowing suns.

The flyers and placards sprout from a multitude of locations all over town, all displaying the same graphic (the iconic walking man featured on Walk/Don’t Walk traffic lights and signs), although the text is different, unique, in each instance: “J. Juniper Jellyfish walks tomorrow,” “J. Lemon Stegosaurus walks tomorrow,” “J. Wombat Fishbone walks tomorrow,” always that same pattern of nonsense words preceded by the initial J. No one knows who plasters the notices on lamp posts, bulletin boards, tree trunks, brick walls, flag poles, shop windows, mailboxes, front doors, and errant animals too slow to avoid coverage, so fast are the scouts, the ahead-runners, quick and silent and invisible, like ninjas.