I have a date.

It is July 4th. It is 1776.

Two days earlier, the British landed on Staten Island unopposed. Theirs is the largest fleet ever seen in North America. General Washington and a ragtag army are fortifying lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights. He barely has cannon. He has no cavalry. He has no ships.

I have a temperature.

Jefferson kept a record of these things. At 1 pm in Philadelphia, it was 76°F.

I have a room.

The Assembly Hall of the Pennsylvania State House. The tables are covered in green cloth. Flies coming through open windows pester the men from a nearby stable. There are Windsor chairs, a chandelier. The final draft of a political declaration rests on the table.

There remains dispute about what was signed, if anything, on July 4th. Jefferson, Franklin and Adams insist the declaration is signed then and there. John Hancock signs first. We know that the unheralded Charles Thomson, the Continental Congress secretary, signs directly after. Now there are two.

It's not hard to imagine each of the delegates coming up front in turn to take a close look at the parchment on the semi-circular table. Possibly they came forward to verify what had been agreed and amended in the heat of argument. At last, here they stood in rough consensus. They leaned over a mortgage they’d now sign with their lives.

The New York delegation to the Second Continental Congress is in the crosshairs. They have everything at stake: their homes, their reputations, their families. While they are signing, news from New York Harbor is arriving by the hour on horseback.

By winter, New Jersey’s signer John Hart will have fled his property and hidden in the woods. By the end of the war, Abraham Clark will have refused to use his political position to fight for his captured sons. Many of the men’s homes will be occupied, their families ravaged and scattered. They know the stakes.

The majority of the remaining fifty-five men will sign shortly after the 4th, by which time the circumstances will be even more dire. On August 2nd, they will queue in a line, by geography, North to South. They will take a turn at the silver inkwell, the sand caster, the quill holder.

They will lean the side of their hands against the table or parchment and look down at the document to get their bearings for signing. They will scan the elegant header down to the last line. Whether they read it or not, they will know the oath there, their pledge of Lives, Fortunes and sacred Honor. Some of the men who know him best will look at the scale of John Hancock’s signature — thick and long as a hanging noose — and think, “That is like John. I must sign smaller.”

And each, stepping forward in turn, will think, “And here I go.”

They will find their empty space. They will dip the nib of a prepared quill and feel the pressure of the tines. They will hear the soft scratch, the sprinkled sand on the parchment to blot the ink, the puff of breath to blow it clear.

They will look up at the other men who have already signed it.

Treason.

Done.

New York City will be lost within weeks. Before the end of the war, every signer from the New York delegation will have lost his fortunes, estates or sons.

*

The Declaration contained a lengthy set of Grievances against the Crown. Those grievances spoke to their moment. Two hundred and fifty years later, they speak to ours.

Among the grievances against King George III they mortgaged their lives to redress are these:

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good

• He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither

• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world

• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

• He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone…

• He has sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

Happy 250th, America.

That’s all, folks. We’re off to drinks and dinner.

I’m looking for subscribers who would be open to reading my stories as I prepare to submit them. I’ve stopped posting stories here, but I’m still at it. I’ve been hunched over my laptop writing furiously, swapping out red typewriter ribbon, throwing reams of paper into the air, kicking chairs (but not so loudly I wake Mel at two in the morning), and generally, you know, writing fiction. Add this paragraph to the pile.

Here’s what’s in play:

1. A faux piece of long-form journalism about a legendary tattoo artist of full-body tattoos, the art world, and the inability to see the beauty in front of our paintbrushes. This might also be the spine of a strange novel.

2. The prose-poem I very briefly excerpted a few weeks back called The Ark where God buries New York City under slow, incremental snowfall.

3. Flash fiction of four drafts of an obituary.

4. A short story about a groom who has serial weddings (but not marriages), his put-upon best man, original Astroturf, a St. Bernard that skids off a miniature golf course and over a cliff, a wedding in Zorbs… I’ve never written anything farcical before. Very, very difficult.

I don’t really know what I’ll send and when, but I’m looking for readers who can help me “workshop” these pieces as they emerge. I won’t need a book report, but I will need to get in your head a bit.

“Yes, yes, no, no, not so sure, never, okay, come-on-now, maybe yes, you must be kidding…”

Let me know in the comments, through Substack messaging, or email at adambnathan@gmail.com.

It’s not a contest. Family and friends are welcome.

Narrative outline for a creepy story:

The Super

At the Vet

1. Claudia Tolliver, 74, lives alone in a four-story walkup. Has a fancy for the superintendent. Loves her two cats. Only real friends. Loves her garden on the roof.

2. She takes her cats up on sunny days. They lie with her in the garden bed.

3. She notices one of her cats is thin one day, too thin.

4. Cancer.

5. The cat has to be put down.

6. It is.

7. On an impulse at the vet’s she steals a Persian cat from a carrier in a deserted hallway.

8. She has shocked herself, but justifies it that the other cat shouldn’t be alone.

The Rooftop Garden

1. She’s guilty about the theft, but she loves the Persian. Her two cats get along. She takes them to the rooftop garden.

2. Late summer, she notices her cat is skinnier than the Persian, sluggish, weak in the direct sun. She’s concerned.

3. She stops bringing them up to the roof garden together. Doesn’t want her sick cat to be alone. She’s always solicitous of them being together and not separated.

4. Doesn’t want them lonely.

The Stairwell

1. Soon after, coming down the stairwell, she hears a dog bark at her— but not just bark, snarl violently behind its apartment door.

2. This happens repeatedly.

3. It doesn’t seem to do it with anyone else. It hurts her feelings at first.

4. There is no way the dog can know it is her.

5. This begins to unsettle her.

6. She begins to test different ways of disguising who she is to see if she can past without the raging dog.

7. Nothing works. It doesn’t matter whether she walks softly, removes her perfume...

8. Eventually, she stands on the stairwell as it rages, terror settling in.

9. The dog just knows it is her.

In the Garden

1. One afternoon in the garden alone now, a dog begins to snarl at her from behind the heavy rooftop fire door.

2. She cracks the fire door and tries to calm it.

3. It is rabid, hateful, horrible. It’s the first time she’s seen the dog up close.

4. She is afraid to leave the rooftop.

5. The dog settles abruptly.

6. The superintendent is behind the door.

7. Is it his? No.

8. Can you please take it away? He does.

9. Later, she comforts herself in her apartment with the cats, sitting on the kitchen floor.

10. Her original cat is wasting away, dying.

The Stairwell

1. She starts to follow other neighbors into the building so that she won’t have to walk by the dog’s door alone.

2. But… there is no barking when she is together with someone.

3. Her courage grows. She knocks on the apartment door to speak to the owner.

4. The dog is quiet, affectionate now. There is no hate in its eyes. It is so friendly in her presence, she feels too foolish to mention the problem.

5. It is only one-on-one that the dog barks at her.

6. When she gets near her living room wall, another dog begins to bark.

7. She sits with her two cats in the dark, the one listless on her lap.

8. She whispers absently that she needs to bring it in.

9. She does not.

Rats

1. She encounters a rat in the street. It hisses at her, skirts around her in a tightening perimeter, looking for an angle to race at her.

2. A second rat appears and the first settles.

3. A man walking his dogs passes by and she escapes, keeping close to him.

4. The man enters his apartment building unexpectedly.

5. When she turns back, the rat is tracking her with its eyes.

Lapcat

1. She doesn’t take her cat to be put down. It is dying in her lap.

2. When it dies, she’s afraid to remove it. She doesn’t want to be alone with the Persian.

3. The Persian begins to swat, hiss and slash at her.

4. She drives it out into the hallway. It continues from behind the door. She stands in the kitchen helpless.

5. Her dead cat still lies on a towel on the kitchen floor.

The Super

1. The Persian abruptly stops hissing and swatting beneath the crack in the door.

2. It’s the building superintendent at the door.

3. She denies ownership. “It’s not my cat. It’s not my cat.”

4. She has the superintendent take the cat away.

5. She tries to settle herself. Talks to her dead cat.

Knock at the Door

1. The superintendent knocks on the door.

2. Oh, so very, very gently.

3. He doesn’t, won’t go away.

4. “Just checking on you,” he says.

5. The insistence in the knocking grows.

6. “Are you alright in there? Are you alright in there?”

7. He won’t go away.

8. She’s terrified to answer the door and have him alone with her.

9. She sits on the kitchen floor with the dead cat in her lap, petting it, using it to soothe herself from the knocking at the door that will not go away.

Yikes!

Two of them have no beginning, middle or end. The third has only a beginning, middle and an end. And I only have the faintest outlines of characters.

But I’m poking a stick at these three, hoping a hot spark will pop out of the fire and onto something extremely flammable.

My mind.

Sketch #1: “Beta”

So, say, there’s a woman who owns a fancy boutique. She’s an Alpha, and she has a Beta frenemy who works for her. The Alpha is sleeping with the Beta’s husband.

The Beta begins to steal from the shop to get her back, and, when caught thieving by her own husband

— and here’s where it gets interesting—

she doubles down, letting her husband see she’s stealing, challenging him to rat on her with his lover.

We watch shame turn into a weapon.

That moment.

Right there.

The eye contact.

I dare you.

Sketch #2: “Rear View Mirror”

So, this woman picks up another woman’s child from school every day and brings him home. And every day, let’s have her start to take longer and longer to return the child, grow subtly crueler. I imagine the two looking at each other while it gets dark in the car. The child now answers in monosyllables. I’m not sure yet whether she’s ever u-turning.

Ok, so, yes, it’s sociopathic, but…

… if you stayed right on the early, fine edge of sociopathic behavior, when the character is testing sociopathology rather than committing, there’s a story: a character’s values clashing in the growing warmth of runaway rage.

Sketch #3: “Game Over”

So: Hijackers. Passengers communicating in hand gestures. Guns kicked under seats.

In this story, the bravery and violence are absurd, cartoonish. Opens right into the action, a terrorist charging down the aisle yelling out. For twenty seconds, my character is the God of Anti-Hijackers.

Then he’s killed.

Boop.

What the hell? The story rewinds.

It plays out identically to the first time, but the character gets to business class, before,

boop,

he’s ejected out an exploding exit door!

A third time, he’s right up to the cabin door shooting and blasting every which direction, galley carts sliding into toilets, but,

boop,

the character gets shot just as he — she? — is about to get into the pilot’s cabin to save the day.

Then that’s it.

Three lives.

X.X.X.

Game Over.

We never get into the cabin. She’s run out of lives.

What’s this all about?

The disappointment of being deprived the violence that is your birthright.

To My Younger Self (As of Last Monday at 4:30),

I am traveling back in time from next Sunday (your time) to let you know you are strong, and brave, and I love you, and I’m so, so proud of you. It breaks my heart when I think of what will happen to you over the next six days dealing with Verizon to port Alannah’s unused phone number.

You are about to spend five hours ping-ponging from chatbot to chatbot, human to possibly human, all the way to inhuman. You’ve been so good, but you crack and begin to cry out Assistant! Operator! Supervisor! as you’re dragged through a phone routing system like you’re leashed to a runaway horse.

You will banter with scores of helpful assistants who assure you that they can help you and be patient for one little sec. If there is one thing they are trained to say is “thank you for being so patient.” Other than the little slip when you type “this is fucking outrageous” to a chatbot, you’re a saint.

On Tuesday, bless your heart, you’ll spend another two hours on the phone.

Whoops. The line will cut.

A text will arrive: be patient. You’ll get a call back.

Hahahahahahhahaha.

On Wednesday, the nicest person on planet earth will say “Jesus, that’s terrible. I’ll get this fixed. No one should have to wait seven and a half hours.” While you both still believe he can fix it, you will learn to play the ninety-two second hold music solo note-for-note.

Jesus or no Jesus, he will give up on you.

At the eight hour mark you will not have reached a supervisor, but you’ll have a ticket number. You are Charlie, and it is a golden ticket, and they’ve promised you not just a call by Friday night, but a resolution.

You will see the future as clearly as I now see the past. Tears will brim.

Because you can already see where this is going.

You will never get that call.

You will, however, get a text on Saturday morning while doing the leg extension machine. Someone named John will call you “shortly, “ but be warned: he will “close this ticket if you do not pick up.”

110 pounds of lead weight will smash down loud enough to set an alarm off. You will charge out into daylight and a clear sightline to a Verizon tower so you don’t miss this call.

This call will never come.

A text will come.

They will close the ticket.

At hour ten and a half you will write a letter to yourself, this letter. And you will promise yourself that you are strong and brave and you can get through this, and you will cry out Operator! and Assistant! and FCC! and pray that even one of these calls is used for training purposes.

Barry Manilow: Mandy...

Mandy: What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.

B: Oh, Mandy...

M: You can’t be here. You can’t keep showing up.

B: Tell me when will our eyes meet? When can I touch you? And when will I hold you again?

M: How about never? I’m married, and he’s going to come out. You need to go.

B: Time in New England took me away to long rocky beaches you by the bay.

M: I didn’t know it was a date, Barry. Providence isn’t a date.

B: It seemed to disappear as fast as it came.

M: Well, you can say that again.

[Verse comes around again. Barry doesn’t know whether to get louder or softer.]

B: I write the songs that make the young girls cry.

M: Really, Barry? Maybe they’re not crying for the reason you think.

B: I’ve been alive forever. It’s a worldwide symphony.

M: Oh, I sure hope not.

[Key change]

B: It’s from me. It’s for you. It’s from you. It’s for me.

M: It’s from me? Really? That’s Projection 101.

Husband: Who’s out there?

M: It’s Barry. Remember Barry?

H: Why’s he singing?

[Second, abrupt key change]

B: Looks like we made it.

M: I wish you could hear yourself. Stop doing that with your arms. You look like you’re holding a package.

B: Oh, Mandy...

[Barry turns from the doorway, descends the porch steps, and slowly turns back at the sidewalk. Mandy has disappeared into the house. From behind her, suddenly, softly, strings swell, as if from every backyard in the neighborhood. Mandy reappears, looking back out through the screen door.]

B: And I’ve looked high...

M: High...

B: Low...

M: Low…

Both: Everywhere I possibly can...

[Barry heads steadily towards the porch.]

B: High...

M: But there’s no…

Both: Tryin’ to get the feeling again.

M: Alright, you got me, and you have to go. Stop twirling.

[Barry leaves. Mandy gets back in bed.]

H: Who was that? He can really sing.

M: And trust me. It wears.

A person can vacation anywhere, but most people go to the places everyone else goes: four-hour cruise-ship islands, rubber mat ski-rental locker rooms, rental car offices that sell insurance. They struggle with paddleboard levers, trudge past boardwalk shooting galleries, hunt for exits out of famous museums.

There’s always rain and 95 degree heat. Pecans. Fudge. Salt-water taffy. Tour guides that want you to sing. There’s one day left.

And lines. Lines to lines. Lines at theme parks, ski lodges, all you can eat buffets, and gift stores to buy magnets for coworkers because you can’t go back empty-handed. There’s jostling onto city tour get-on get-off buses, jostling to find two adjacent seats on the upper-deck, jostling to get the left ear of the international headphones to make a sound.

And disappointments: whales from a quarter mile away, icebergs that don’t calve, fish that don’t bite and backs that are starting to hurt.

Somebody left soaking-wet black socks and underwear in “your” hammock that have to be removed them with a stick.

… aaah, but some people go to Norway, borrow rowboats without asking, paddle to the center of vast lakes ringed with the late-afternoon silhouettes of pine trees, jump into freezing cold water, clasp hands somehow around an oarlock, laugh until they sigh and fall asleep on seat planks. There are eleven more days.

They lie back and stare up at the stars. He tries to remember the names of constellations he once memorized in high school. There are eighty-eight. Now he can only think of twelve.

She hums the only piece of Norwegian music she can think of, something by Klieg, no that’s not right, Frieg maybe. After she’s hummed her song for a bit, he recognizes the tune. It’s Grieg, not Klieg. Now it’s their song together. They couldn’t have done it alone. More laughter. Northern Lights. Their voices carry over the water.

They can’t possibly make love in a rowboat, right?

Wrong. He bets nobody else has ever done it.

Have.

Haven’t.

Dawn.

Then just the two of them stealthily returning a rowboat on an unnamed fjord in Norway.

This little guy was inspired by the first line of someone else’s story which was inspired by a writer’s prompt, both of which happen to have been written by the same person, a former employee of the Eagle Harbor Bookstore on Bainbridge Island, WA. Fellow writers, you can find her pencil-chewing, time-sucking, dastardly writer prompts via the link below.

what now?

writing and talking about writing and other things (but mostly prompts)

By mary g.

for i have known the world: street lamps through a window in Shanghai, hiss and steam, the soft palms of a child’s hands tucking me in foam.

i have known youth at sea, my brave companions huddled beside me in the hold, dreaming of the world to come. i do not know what became of them.

i have known the tumbling of city streets, the clatter of the hand truck, the heights and depths of merchant shelves. men and women held me to the light, gazing, testing their dreams against me. i saw hope in a thousand faces.

i have lived in the fragrance of warm cotton above the mighty rumbling of dryers, outlasted a legion of bare bulbs that set like suns, ranged by garments piled as mountains. i have made my bed with the runaway socks and the ragged cloth and the burned-out nightlight. i have been born into the resolutions of January, abandoned in March dust, and born again.

i have known sorrow in the darkness of a basement broom closet, longing to press my dimpled flesh into supple thigh, to know the dew of surrendered spine.

in my grief i took refuge in a torn cascade of drapes beneath a king-sized bed, and in the darkness there, i knew friendship, settled by the purring chin and the warm breath of a house cat, royal and patient and wise.

i have known the rainy stoop and the sunlit brownstone, the rummage sale and the giveaway box, tobacco dirt, palaces of cardboard and glass.

i have stood eye to eye with dogs, large and small. they retreated, all.

i do not know what is to befall me in this modest encampment, but here i stand. my scars are stories and my wounds gratitude.

for i have known life, and i will carry the memory of the arch of a grandchild’s foot rolling upon my back, the sudden flight, and a single burst of glorious locomotion.

A week before I set off for Japan, I bundled a collection of stories written over the last two years and shipped them off to the agent that represented my memoir Finisterre.

Assembling them, I liked what I saw: particularly Howl, Pigeons, Jack London, and A Box of Rain. But nine others hold their own. I’m deeply proud of the work, and it kills me that I’ll have to tell my agent that I spent their first publication rights on Substack. They may find new life in a collection, but otherwise I’m sitting shiva.

Twenty-four stories dead in Kyoto.

Publishing a story a month has been the source of the deepest joy for me. To throw oneself into a story and then have the heady pleasure of being read, right then and there, what a thrill that is. To Click Post and Be Known. How I’ll miss it. It is a guilty spiritual pleasure, but it’s spending all of your money on the way to the fair. It needs to stop.

But there’s more to it. Substack is an awful place for fiction. Awful, awful, awful. It’s too long for inboxes. It asks far too much from readers. It is a graveyard for nuance. I’m chasing after readers while they are jogging.

I have the same number of subscribers in April of 2026 as I had April of 2025, and I’m writing better than I’ve ever written.

Pigeons, for fuck’s sake.

*

So voila, a reimagined site: Kneejerks.

I know some of you are sitting shiva now. Some stories disappeared before you even read them. But it’s still me. I still have opinions, a penchant for make-believe, a funny bone and soft spots. As do you. I hope you’ll stay with me on this new trajectory.

I’m constraining posts by length and time. Under five hundred words, I will post to everyone. When I drift over, the posts are for paid. This will both keep me honest — I want lots and lots and lots of people to read me — and it will make sure paid subscriptions receive distinct value. Because, honestly, I do run over.

I plan to write creatively as well. Compact. Less beginning, middle and end. More back-of-napkin. More often, I hope.

*

I have never done the marketing legwork my writing demands. The clock is ticking. I have not abandoned my one hundred stories mission. I have the backbone of a sprawling trilogy:

Gabriel’s Horn

Amanita and Clathrus. The Grey Men and the Fish Lady. Terror. Tattoos. The depths of adolescent loneliness. Stand clear.

Bow.

Readers, I want you to hold my work standing by a bookshelf in a bookstore — oh, hell, I’ll go all in: you’re standing in a bookstore in Kyoto — and I want you to think, “I know that guy. He writes Kneejerks.”

Stick with me.

Taking a break from all things written and subscribed, a due break.

Here’s a repost from years ago on my life as a beloved, senior monk in a Japanese monastery.

*

I imagine myself passing away in a wood and bamboo room at a mountaintop monastery. I’m not sure how or when I get up there, but something significant will have to happen and fairly soon because the years are starting to click by now. Anyhow, it’s all very cinematic. Very Eastern.

In my ever so simple mountain monastery room, I leave behind nothing but a neat parcel of my belongings wrapped up in rice paper and scratchy brown twine. My monk’s robe is folded into a perfect square and placed in front of my empty teacup – a simple wooden teacup that I insist on cleaning myself even into my final hours. The teacup should be positioned exactly in front of the little square futon where I once answered my visitors’ questions. You can put a flower, like an iris or something, across the top unless it looks too staged or bulky on the teacup.

Outside my window I’d like to see the ancient Kirosawa Cherry Tree, grief stripping its petals in an April breeze. A ten-year-old should be able to tell you that the tree “knows” I’m gone. Earlier in the good-bye film you’ll need a set-up scene of my character very patiently pruning that same tree at dawn, with tiny, dandruff-sized Bonsai snips accumulating around the foot of the wooden ladder. You can worry about the details on how all that comes about, but obviously, nobody else should ever be seen tending the monastery trees but me.

At the exact moment I depart, let the cherry tree shot roll for a bit. Park the camera on the tripod, pop a fresh roll of film on there, turn on the wind machine and point the lens at the cherry tree. Get yourself a cup of coffee. Don’t be afraid to push the “this is an awfully long shot” envelope. Very Japanese. It’s okay if the audience starts to wonder if maybe it is the last shot in the film. (Spoiler: It’s not.)

As far as music is concerned, I’m thinking simple, soft, background farm sounds like chickens clucking occasionally mixed in with extravagant bursts of women wailing from one of the sheds. Maybe some creaky hinges and doors opening and closing off-camera. That can be people scurrying about doing whatever people do when somebody’s died on a farm. But real quiet and subtle so you can still hear the crying. I don’t want some over-the-top violin soundtrack. It’s not John Williams who’s died. It’s a beloved old monk. I can’t afford to lose the Zen payoff of my entire life.

Then slowly begin to montage all that with the other monks in long, silent procession as they lose their deep reserves of calm and weep convulsively without moving their heads. In cutaway shots one of the senior monk’s hands should reach to brace itself against the stone stairwell. It should be clear from information in an earlier scene that something like this has never happened in the monastery before, definitely not to the head monk character anyway.

Don’t force it, but I’m thinking we might have been competitors somehow, but with me being the “not competitive” one who wins in the end. And now the head monk also knows and, of course, I tried to tell him both directly and through parable.

I’d also like a scene with pilgrims who came on foot some ridiculous distance to see me but arrived too late because then I was dead already. They should learn of my passing from the sandbox gardener. Don’t even let the gardener look up. He should inform the visitors over his shoulder and keep raking. Because everything that happens is perfect and for a reason. And this is perfect, too. It turns out that this was the message they came a thousand miles for and what they needed to hear: “you came too late to meet him.”

Only that. Nothing more:

“You’re too late. He’s gone. You wanted to meet him. You didn’t.”

Dut-dee-dut-dee-dut-dee-dut.

This, my friends, is What Life Wanted You to Know.

Ouch. I love it. Oh my god! It’s perfect. I’m getting enlightenment tingles. Look at my forearms!

For credibility it would be better if the visitors aren’t English speaking. Have them be Portuguese or something. I want humble, poor Mediterranean people who pick a religion and stick with it. Please don’t use Americans.

Then, in the very, very final shot, you should have a close-up on a long-stemmed ink brush faltering suddenly mid character or hieroglyph or whatever you call them. The Japanese should be translated in an italicized subtitle to let the audience know that the word was “Sorrow.” Consider spelling it wrong for authenticity.

If you had a know-it-all friend who studied Japanese in college, he would nudge you in the theater and whisper that none of the Western words for sorrow can even begin to get at what this word means in Japanese, but that “sorrow” is still the best translation without resorting to koan.

And then it’s over and I’m gone forever and guess what?

You didn’t get to meet me either.

I love it.

It’s perfect.

Thoughts are coming at me at a thousand miles an hour this morning. I rarely post the day I write, but this morning, people, we are coming at you live, live and unedited from downtown Cobble Hill Brooklyn, where not a single man, woman, or child has any idea of what is about to hit us, and it is all very exciting.

Snow, baby.

Snow.

Real snow.

24 inches? 16 inches? 157 thousand inches?

Zero inches, of course, wah, wah, wah, is a very real possibility, too.

Anyone who’s ever loved meteorological predictions that take out entire seaboards knows “oh, so sorry, only zero inches” is always a distinct possibility, and let’s face it, the likely scenario. This is New York City, not Nebraska.

We are jilted lovers, all of us, pining hopefully through years of underwhelming calamities, waiting for the Big One that stops time and human civilization and closes schools, which I’ll come to.

Anyway, this Nor’Easter just might — please, please, please — finally be the one. Imagine my “please, please, please” coming from a fed-up child, head cast backwards, arms rigid at his sides, imploring the heavens in deep and guttural groans of frustration.

Now, shhh...

Hear that?

That’s rain.

The rain is just beginning to tap, tap on the living room air conditioner that I still haven’t taken to the basement — “Sweetheart, it’s February” — and, let me tell you, gentle readers, that plucking rain is going to turn to snow at some point after 1pm, and then our little blizzard is going to push on through like Little House on the Prairie for three days and four nights. The brownstone sidewalks will be littered with lost mittens, trapped Ubers and men having heart attacks, shovels jammed firmly into wet snow drifts, dogs in foot mittens, Donner parties, etc.

So, here I am, like a big kid, typing away, dreaming of yesteryear and school closures coming over the kitchen radio. Those early pyjamed mornings as an elementary school student, standing in the kitchen like it was Christmas morning, more excited than actors on Oscar Day, waiting on the school closure report. No holiday could compete with this.

They even scheduled these impromptu inclement weather holidays into the school calendar. Gather around, my little Global Warmers: they tagged three days on at the end of the school year.

Why?

Because They Knew The Storm Was Coming.

*

Some of you may remember school closure announcements.

Others may remember radios.

… West Windsor School District, Princeton Day School delayed opening, Pennington Prep, Flemington Friends Academy…

… Still not Hopewell… who is running New Jersey?…

And again, five minutes later…

…West Windsor School District, Princeton Day School is now a full closure, Pennington Prep, Flemington Friends Academy, Hopewell Public Schools…

Hopewell Public Schools!!!

No three words every created such joy in our little Hopewell hearts than those three words coming from WHWH 1350 AM.

*

That is, we don’t have one of our “so-sorry-people, it was zero inches,” and provided this storm is as once-in-a-decade as advertised, then my current story will turn out to be an act of deep, awe-inspiring soothsaying then you’re going to have to trust me.

Why?

Because I’ve been working on a story for the last couple weeks.

And it about a snowfall in New York City.

Yes.

Correct.

A snowfall.

“I began to snow,” it begins, curiously.

THE ARK

If I don’t have a heart attack in front of the building shoveling later, maybe story 25 for April?

*

25!

I’m almost a quarter of the way to 100, if you’re still here and counting along.

*

So, yes, Story XXIII, ‘Untitled,’ was brief.

Eleven words, two quotation marks, two periods and one little em-dash.

There it was.

I knew early on I’d have one piece of microfiction.

I would wait until it arrived. Then, it did, and there it was.

And I want to say this: if you think I just typed

and went on my merry way, you are seriously mistaken.

I have never spent so much time on two sentences in my life. I poked and prodded and swapped and situated and cast and recast and settled and unsettled until I was throwing pens across the room.

It needed to be a story, for starters, with a beginning, middle and end. It needed to engage the reader. It needed every word to do a load-bearing job. Even the carriage returns were called to duty.

To wit:

I needed the “out,” for example. Otherwise it would be the simple idea of crying as in weeping, which sacrifices ethical outrage somehow.

Can’t repeat the word hit tonally, but there was more than that using “struck” the first time. “Struck” introduces something formal and rigid that creates a personality, even a back story in the father.

The late-breaking change (after posting twelve words in the teaser post, was a discovery, too. You may have noticed I removed the “only” from the puzzle and swapped for the em-dash. Now, eleven words. The em-dash adds temporality, a new thought, something defensive, a moment left to the imagination of the reader.

My rule for microfiction, and I have no idea if this is a thing, but it became a thing for me: the “story” needed a beginning, middle and end. I believe I got there. The moment had a before and after. And, I believe, the narration also has a long-after feel to it, a moral residue that has stained.

I believe you can visually see the child looking at the father, if not turning up to him.

Heavens no, it couldn’t be daughter. “Man hitting girl” would completely derail a reader. But “child” was too distant. I needed the possibility of letting you bring a face to the son.

The ethical root is, of course, the story. If that isn’t clear, then I failed and no amount of explaining the story’s meaning here will rescue me.

The order of phrases and clauses mattered. Story XXIII was like testing jigsaw puzzle pieces. Every pattern was tested for fit until it popped in snugly.

Interestingly, my co-authors all went subtly different directions, according to their particular muses.

Some else really bothers me: I wasn’t clear the story needed — in addition to the quotation marks and periods specifically called for — the silent, Almighty Holy Ghost of the paragraph return.

Untitled is an entirely different story without a paragraph return.

I mean: in microfiction it might not even be a story without the paragraph return.

My Left-Brain Editing Mind is now confronting yesterday’s Right-Brain Enthusiasm Mind’s gushing output after watching Episode 6. The one half is thinking the writer who typed the following opinion should be in a twelve-step program. The other half is sticking with yesterday morning’s grenade blast of unadulterated enthusiasm.

“Let me start at the end. Six seasons from now, naming your child Carol will be the equivalent of naming a child Hermione.

Paraguay Manousos and Air Force One Mr. Diabaté will be popular reference points of the same water-cooler-jug caliber as Breaking Bad’s Jesse Pinkman, Mike the Enforcer, and Gustavo the Kingpin.

For the next six years, viewers of this show are going to lean forward on their couches like they are reporting on hurricanes. Hands are going to lift to mouths in slow-motion. Everyone else is going to hear shouts and sobbing from the family room.

We are in the land of tour-de-force storytelling with one of television’s great premises and a team that knows how to do it justice.”

Here is what my long-suffering internal editor salvaged from the right-brain blast radius this morning.

Many scenes and references assume you’ve seen the episode or that you are comfortable with spoilers.

CARAMEL TIME

Generally speaking, writing advice is worth what you pay for it, and even that isn’t true. Witness Substack. But at some point over the last couple years I learned that in fiction, the more tightly you focus on a specific sensory detail, the more you pump the brakes on time. There is an inverse relationship.

We live in a moment of breathless video cuts and sensory hyperactivity. Images flash and scroll on our phones, our work computers, at our dinner tables, in our cars. I can barely read a novel, my attention is so restless.

But on Friday night, key scenes in Pluribus unfolded like dissected origami: the slow-burn gem of a scene at the casino table, Carol’s meltdown in the luxury suite bathroom, the Hitchcockian egg sandwich breakfast at the hotel room countertop, and every last crossed-out journal line and spin of the ham radio dial. Then Manousos watching Carol’s video. The last scene a master class in slow, and less is more, and the suspense of watching facial muscles for clues.

Feelings and thought appearing like Polaroids. Exquisite human detail.

Then high-speed 2x doors slamming, cityscape panoramas, Tunisia.

Caramel time, all of it. In and out, slow and fast. This is counter to everything right now. It is neurologically brain-altering.

And somehow, each of these tiny, specific moments are becoming load-bearing for a story as epic as the entire planet.

PHILOSOPHY

Most importantly, the show matters.

Who are we together and alone? What does it mean to be an individual, a point of consciousness apart from all other points of consciousness? What does it mean to be a point and not a line? The show is framing this beyond ethics.

“Do you seriously believe the world is a better place now just because it is peaceful?” I might tattoo that quote on my arm.

And how do our principles constrain our relationships? The principled turmoil in both Carol and Manousos speaks to profound questions of integrity.

Isn’t our desire to be included in groups in constant opposition to our desire to be true to our principles? Don’t groups demand a self-destructive mind-meld and an inevitable ethical and behavioral conformity? So what is it that stirs our humanity in these two principled loners standing against the world? Why do they resonate?

Could the set piece rejection of Carol by everyone on the entire planet speak any more powerfully to this? Carol is all of us in that luxury suite bathroom in Vegas. She is, bless her, everyone who has ever been stuck with the weary burden of their principles and the personality life has foisted on them, by whom I mean everyone.

And then, wait!

A few scenes later we suddenly have two principled loners who must rely on each other! What a beautiful paradox for the characters and for the viewer. You and me against the world.

Isn’t this connection between isolated points of consciousness what Love is? Can you even have love without separateness? Can the Collective “Us” in the story truly love? Or is their kindness always a “smile through a veil?” Who do they love? And how?

I get that they don’t pick apples, and they are ethical to a fault, but who do they love?

Undoubtedly, we’ll learn more. Roller-coaster psychological story jolts seem to be a given here. For me one of the jolts on Friday was a line of dialog from Mr. Diabaté:

“Ultimately, this is not about you, [Carol].”

Now the group is having its say. We are torn between all of them. As we all are. What does it mean to care for others? For groups that need our help?

It may take six more seasons to work through all this, the dramatic waves growing in each of them.

This is a world.

MR. DIABATÉ

Mr. Diabaté’s character has snuck up on us, no?

It couldn’t be any more gripping—not to mention the contribution of the actor himself and the art department. What a sound stage of spa bubbles and self-portraits they have surrounded him in.

There is an obvious structural weakness in his soulless, hedonist heaven. But not so fast on the facile dismissal. His actions hold a tantalizing logic. Because he’s more than a hedonist. Much more. He is growing more three-dimensional by the episode.

And in the depths of Carol’s global social exile and despair, Mr. Diabaté tucked her in and made her breakfast. The relief! Thank God for others. It was like eleven billion people tucked her.

And it’s like he’s watching her, considering her case, weighing her up as an ally while managing a growing unease.

But thank God he’s a hedonist in the meantime!

Think of what he is constructing for himself at the gambling table! It is a self-evident hell—I think, hope— but it is a deeply alluring hell. He has surrounded himself by the trappings and satisfactions of the flesh.

What makes him interesting, though, isn’t the harem of ladies, it’s the theater of poker table confidence he has constructed for himself. The cosplay of the soul. It is the rigging of effortless social interaction and gracious dominance in his favor. He has found the genie’s bottle, and he wants his chance to rub it.

Look at Diabaté’s smile at that poker table. It is a real human who has gifted himself a James Bond smile.

The Devil is at that table, and the Devil’s got game.

“All of this shall be yours, Mr. Diabaté.”

Yes, this is landmark television.

6.

0.

Falling, falling, falling.

November 16th, 1965.

For a better timeline vantage point, “I Got You, Babe” was top of the charts.

Friends were over last night. Melanie was in her Hospitality Zone. The work she puts in! Table setting below. I played my iTunes favorites, which solved the recurring “what-music-do-we-play?” challenge.

“We shall play my music,” I declared in my Adam Declaring Voice, with maybe a little too much emphasis on me, me, me.

I had a birthday song: I chose the crackling, fireplace warmth of “We Have All the Time in the World.” Louis Armstrong was not correct on this matter. I have the calendar to prove it. But if you’re at the dinner table and everyone is laughing, you can close your eyes for a fraction of a second, and hear he was possibly on to something.

I baked my own cake and candied my own kumquats.

Before the sleeve rolling up, I laid the counter out like a chemistry lab, each ingredient in its own little white container. There were four Earl Grey tea bags simmered in milk. Whip cream peaks gently collapsing like snowy elf hats. But only until they had a sheen!. Crap! It turns out we already had vanilla extract. Wasted trip to the store. An overly cautious judgement call on flour past its expiration date. Too close to the recipe’s end, there was a near miss forgetting to fold the Earl Grey concoction into the egg whites. “How the fuck?”

Swearing.

Cake no worse for wear the table reported later.

Small pictures were placed around the table in cute little stands (see below.)

Friends were asked to guess where I was in each photo. Turns out: Bainbridge Island, the summit of Mt. Rainier waving a mountain ax, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, the Luberon in the South of France (some disputing on this location), a headshot photographer’s studio in Soho. The mystery man leaning perhaps too confidently over a wooden fence holding a wedding top hat.

England.

There was marveling at hair loss. Someone asked Melanie if a picture of me at eighteen was me. The cognitive disconnect between interior and exterior age is a problem I’m increasingly working through. I stare at old photos of myself like I’m trying to unscrabble a Rubik’s cube.

I broke out my favorite story about my acting career.

Years after the collapse and the tail between my legs, I found an entire thread about myself online. It had the most adoring thing I’ve ever read about myself. This was followed a few comments later by a comment so rude about me it crossed into hilariously funny. Perfect for a dinner party when things are starting to loosen up.

No, I will never tell you.

There was a particularly special gift: Melanie framed three pictures of the family for my wall: one of my son leaning tight against my daughter-in-law, an engagement picture. Then Melanie in the center, in the snow, a a furry winter coat hat circling her face. Our gentle matriarch. Then daughter leaning left against dad, the two sitting on a Brooklyn sidewalk in yellow leaves. A real smile for the camera. The picture frames have heft that mean business. They will go over my piano. I will accidentally allow them to be seen on Zoom calls from time to time.

They are my people. They are beautiful. “Yes, I agree.”

At midnight, my friends counted down to my birthday like it was New Year’s.

This morning, the kitchen looks like a war zone. There are wine bottles in gift bags hiding around doors. I have confused whose gifts came from whom. A chin-scratcher of a problem.

Shit: the whip cream was left out. I had no idea we had so many plates. You can count them in dishwasher cycles. It seems someone gave me a supply of curious candy. However many years are left for me in Fate’s hourglass, I will never finish this supply. If I have grandchildren, I will need to remind myself to move them to an upper shelf when they race from room to room like little terrors, stopping only for candy.

This morning, I’m aware I can play the “it’s my birthday, I’m not helping clean up card,” but the devastation stretches across three rooms, and that dog won’t hunt.

Sixty wasn’t as cruel as forty, but kinder than Kamikaze Fifty.

There are adventures yet for the two of us that are coming into focus like Polaroids. One will be a trip to Japan with the family next April. A much, much, much longer time in France, a “foot to the earth” in Paris, if the stars align. It’s okay if they don’t. It’s all okay.

I bought myself a new electric guitar. Oh, the poor neighbors. The best toy I ever owned was a convertible. The second best might be this guitar.

My best friend called yesterday from Los Angeles.

After a five minute ritual of “what the fuck do you want?” whenever we pick up the phone for each other, the two of us talked for a good hour. I can’t remember a word of it, so it must have been a good call.

He never misses a birthday. Ever. Not one.

Alannah called a few minutes ago. I spoke quietly since Melanie was still sleeping. My son will call later today.

They are both doing well, out in the wide world, three thousand miles in either direction.

Alannah is, I learn, working on a Substack post. Every time she tells me she’s writing something, my heart skips a beat.

Daniel and I will go skydiving in Moab before I hit sixty-one. It’s on the calendar now. I think about this at 3am. I try to imagine smiling for a video photographer at terminal velocity.

But there’s no one I trust more in the world to jump with. Somehow that we’re both jumping together makes it easier. He’s my secret parachute. These moments as father and son are cement.

And so, sixty…

I have a small handful of sharp regrets, but I wouldn’t swap them out, even if I could. It might have changed everything after.

And I certainly wouldn’t want to do the first sixty over. Jesus. Once was more than enough. I love my wife. I love my friends.

And…

Here we go…

Parachute open, falling falling falling, taking in the view.

And All the Time in the World.

best words, best order is an occasional feature of 100 Stories, celebrating brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive 100 Stories in your inbox.

The Nomination

“Jill” is the semi-anonymous writer—and illustrator—of Life Litter, a wide-ranging collection of essays on travel, people, marriage, nature, children, battles to save pubs, and what she might call “litter.” Hardly litter.

I discovered her work reading about her experience getting high in Williamsburg, an essay (travelogue?) that came with its own Venn diagram, not to mention a Substack Featured Publication medallion. After that, I was off and running.

She has a fierce intellect, suffers no fools, holds herself and others to high standards, and fights for what she believes in. She also happens to be very, very funny. Quite the mix.

Jill has a book on the way, and I suppose we’ll get her last name then, but if you can’t wait, consider these essays to tide you over. I’ve taken complete liberties with the essay titles: On Getting High, On Penis Terrariums, On Adultery, On Pubs and Enshitiffication, On Mortality.”

– Adam

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Ode to Oxford

A friend once teased me that wherever I lived I thought it the best place in the world.

We worked together and I often banged on at him about the amazing places I had lived in London. Wapping, with its potted histories of pirates, riverside hangings and sunken jetties. Rotherhithe’s foreshore, peppered with ancient beads, coins and clay pipes. West Norwood too, where I wanted to know everything about the hidden River Effra, the old Great North Woods and the brooding cemetery on my doorstep.

Writers mythologise our internal narratives: that’s what we do. We mythologise wherever we happen to be and whomever we happen to be there with.

I know I’ve done this everywhere. I also know I was wrong about everywhere but Oxford.

Marvellous as all those places were, nowhere tops Oxford.

It’s a funny thing: there’s a long tradition of having to pretend to be bored and unimpressed with the majesty of Oxford when you’re a student. Being awestruck is for the tourists, not for those who hurry unseeing to the library. We must keep shtum, not talk about how amazing it is to eat at high table or how endless are the corridors of journals in the Bodleian. For heaven’s sake, be cool. Take it in your stride.

Well, I’m not cool and never have been. I think Oxford is magic and I’m happy to share it. We’re not in the Middle Ages; I’m not some elite monk trying to keep literacy all to myself.

To Oxford: the city of books.

— Jill, Life Litter

Trigger Alert: this is travel porn on airline miles disguised as travel porn.

Melanie and I are in Tuscany. That’s Italy if you don’t get out much. Italia, of course, if you do.

If I look out from my Room with a View, I can see Melanie floating in an aquamarine pool. Your correspondent writes to you from an obscenely beautiful, recently renovated castle in Tuscany. Undoubtedly, the locals call it a castello, but we haven’t met any yet.

One of our two Da Vinci length dining room tables is situated outside. We have a flower bed where butterflies hover over the lavender like Snow White’s bluebirds. (I’ve tried to capture it in video, but it’s not the same as being here.) The ceilings are so high, Melanie called them “Sistine-like.” Not everything is perfetto: the pool-side grass is too green, and you can make out the outlines of freshly-laid sod.

Are you still here?

Then, I continue.

In the late afternoon we drove in from Rome. We had pizza off of the highway and a charming conversation with an Autogrill worker who described the pizza in almost impeccable English. We arrived during the magic hour light of sunset shaded only by the tall stands of cypress trees, just past the vineyard on the bordering hillside. Surely, Roman soldiers once encamped there.

Last night, at our dining room table, there was Under a Tuscan Sun laughter. We had fresh pasta. Bright red tomatoes were carved into thick slabs adorned with delicate leaves of basil descending as delicately as autumn leaves over the spaghetti. A new friend who reminded me of Stanley Tucci showed me how to twist the pasta as you settle it which is as aesthetically pleasing to watch as to eat. Bezosian.

In our ensuite bedroom, the underground spring water flows softly over the skin, but we brought something to remineralize it. There is a bidet available if, per caso, we want to take it for a spin.

This morning there is laughter coming from the kitchen. Someone doesn’t know exactly how to use the cute coffee maker. Even the discomforts are charming! You have no idea.

We feel a kinship to the group that has taken over Venice where the More or Less Richest Man in the World1 celebrates his Festa di matrimonio in Venice with a glorious thousand man choir of Gondolier Singers and the pigeons of the San Marco bleached to marble white. Ah, Le Nozze de Bezos!

This is not another basta post to the sfarzo and eccesso. (from left to right: “enough”, “extravagance,” and “excess.”) This is kinship writ small. Anyway, we were not invited to Venice, so we are the little people making do. Haha!

*

With a band of fellow New Yorkers who have all chipped in together for this palazzo, the cost of our home for the week is less per night than when we took the kids to Disney World, so put your pitchforks down. In fact, it was less per night than the Lightning Line cheat the crowds passes.

We are staying at the “Motel 6 of Tuscany.” This is the equivalent of a fraternity renting a Jersey Shore beach home. Broken out over several credit cards, the whole thing becomes deliciously affordable.

Because it turns out, there’s a secret:

It’s called “villa math.” All you need are twenty-seven friends. If you don’t count the people we don’t know, then it’s only five. It took us thirty years of marriage, but Melanie and I finally reached our fifth friend, and this long-awaited trip became possible. We hoarded them like frequent flyer miles to make this work. Punti fedeltà di American Airlines!

Also, there is an extra room we didn’t fill. If we had, it would have been cheaper than staying in Brooklyn.

With posts like this, you probably find it hard to believe it took us so long to make that many friends. And with posts like this, it is very likely we dip, once again, below the five-friend mark after this week together, but right now, bambini, we’re in heaven.

Cinema Paradiso I call it.

I have to run, we’re off to Siena for the James Bond horse race.

Afterwards, join us for virtual dinner on the terrace at 10pm your time.

Ciao. (That’s both hello and goodbye in Italiano it turns out.)

best words, best order is an occasional feature of 100 Stories, celebrating brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive 100 Stories in your inbox.

The Nomination by Rebecca Hooper

“Susannah’s poems are like fires in the hearth; they leap and flicker and dance, wild and free and sensuous, yet in their hearts they are quiet and still – soft embers holding light within them, gifting their wisdom to the world with a hushed whisper. For me, the dance of the fire comes with the first read; the quieter gift comes with the next (and the next, and the next – I find myself reading and reading Susannah’s poetry and each time, there is something new). The Violet Tiger was one of the first Substacks I read when I joined this platform, and I was instantly besotted. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Susannah’s visceral, embodied, brave and vulnerable work has quickly made her one of my favourite poets. I chose Plum Moon Sighs to nominate for Best Words, Best Order because it is the very first of Susannah’s poems that I read, and it was the perfect introduction to her work.”

– Rebecca Hooper

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Plum Moon Sighs

The tongues of mad iris 
lick me, slowly soften the day’s lacquer. 
I bed her immaculate purples. 

Why a woman buddha? 
Her body half flowers, 
sacrum, illium, and folded legs 
are like fields that have been left alone, 
gone to seed, like words in the dark.

Indian summer takes me like this.
Under the Red Oak, acorns 
are umbilical. 
I lie with the spiked leaves,
turning brown. 

If I wake deformed, I would not be surprised.

I bleed like the sun, haemorrhage light.
The moon presses her bare teeth
into my burnt shoulder,
falls into me.

An unexpected flick of new life, 
its tadpole-tail in my belly.
I conjure myself with this body-made-vial.

From liquorice and star-filled obscurity
I birth myself anemone. 
Leave the mist as afterbirth
Lie fresh in the sparkling dew.

— Susannah Violette, The Violet Tiger

The Violet Tiger

poetry and art

By Susannah Violette

best words, best order is an occasional feature of 100 Stories, celebrating brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive 100 Stories in your inbox.

The Nomination by Julie Gabrielli

“I’d been an avid reader of Ben’s essays before participating in his first community writing project, “Same Walk, Different Shoes,” in December 2023. I was so taken with the quality of writers that the project attracted—and more importantly, the depth of care and encouragement of one another—that I circled back to catch up with his fiction. His serial novel “Harmony House” was underway, so I binged all available chapters, then eagerly awaited each weekly installment.

The story of six strangers crammed into an uber-sustainable tiny house on an isolated field deep in the Smokies weaves together many themes of interest to me. But it was the well-drawn characters and Ben’s trademark empathy for each, no matter how flawed, that held me. Yes, his descriptions and place-setting are superb, but the real genius is how, even a year later, I can still conjure up in memory those characters and their dilemmas and emotions. And talk about a twist! Hooboy, that story needs to be streaming on Hulu, now. I volunteer to design the house (although Ben made all the right choices himself, yet another dimension of his many talents).

Ben’s care and respect for the hopes and suffering of his characters shines through every detail and gesture in his latest novel, “Departures.” The premise of this one is powerful: what if you knew upon meeting someone, the exact date of their death? This is the shadow hanging over the life of one Wild Thorne, and it makes for all manner of difficult situations for him—and the people in his orbit.”

– Julie Gabrielli

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an excerpt from “departures”

“Her lips bent into a deep frown, and she nodded slowly. She reached up and touched his cheek with the palm of her hand. It was a tender gesture and Wild felt shame for enjoying the comfort of it. She kept it there.

“You see things, don’t you?” she asked, not allowing him to break eye contact. “You knew something was going to happen to my Marvin.”

Wild was too stunned to answer, much less come up with some believable denial. She squinted as if trying to look into him. Finally, she took her hand away and let out a sound that was something between a laugh and a sigh.

“Listen to me, talking nonsense. Now I sound like my grannie. Whatever it is you are, I’m grateful to you, Wild. If there’s ever anything I can do to repay your kindness…”

Wild’s face must have done something he couldn’t control, made some desperate plea like a kidnapped victim scribbling a message on a fogged car windshield. He opened his mouth to speak but stopped.”

— Ben Wakeman, Departures

Catch & Release

A free-ranging collection of creative work in the form of speculative short fiction and novels, songs, essays, and multimedia made with the intention of connecting and inspiring.

By Ben Wakeman