Are your hands and feet dry, love? Because I want you to be comfortable. You must listen to my story.
—in Brain Harvest (2009)

July 11

I will be struck by lightning on July 13.  I know this because I saw a unicorn in the desert sky earlier tonight. Its cockroach body and feathered wings cast shadows on the ground.  Lightning forked from its horn, like decisions in my life.  Decision to move to Phoenix: fork.  Decision to finish my degree: fork.  Decision to date Maddoc: fork.  All the lives I rejected flash across the sky and are gone, except the one that will strike me.  In two days, on a Thursday.  Thursday the Thirteenth.… MORE »

You have to understand how it was.  No doctors.  No hospitals.  Most of us hadn’t seen civilization in months.  Years, if you counted the fellows who camped here last winter instead of heading to Sacramento.  We each had a pick–most of us–and boots, and clothes, and dreams.  We were covered in mud and never came clean.  That’s what we shared, all of us ‘Niners.… MORE »

We rarely joined strangers in realspace for entertainment.  But everyone made an exception for the Starshow.

Thousands of us glided into the cold arena.  Earth sky expanded above, black with glittering stars.  I hovered to admire it.  Nothing like the stills on the soothing channels.  This was real, past the terraplastic shells and beyond the poisonous air.  I’d been Inside for months–ever since the last Starshow.  Being Outside stirred something primal in me.  I stored the image in my visual files for later.

Next to me, Shaylia–my second foster-spouse–gasped as she looked overhead.  She broadcast a joyful icon.  “Welcome to the Starshow,” I told her.… MORE »