Joel and I sat at the bar in Sade and Dora’s Lounge in the Decatur, Alabama, Holiday Inn; we drank Heinekens from the bottle and wished they were Guinnesses.
It was a bright spring afternoon. Overnight the world had become radically green, and we were a little overwhelmed by it, sitting in a darkened corner of [...]
Because days are brighter in the Great Pyramid of Giza, nights are darker. When one goes there for a midnight picnic, as the Dark Child and I did some months ago, one should carry a very strong flashlight with plenty of batteries. Night has a way of overwhelming electricity in the Great Pyramid, swallowing it [...]
His name was Churchill. Or Winston Churchill. Or Winston. I never really got it straight. For the sake of this story I’ll call him Winston, mainly as a tribute to Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s 1984, a character with whom he had a good deal in common.
I should have learned his name, and [...]
In a dream I saw Jesus hanging on the cross, bloodied, battered, suffering. But he quickly tired of it and said, “Enough! This is silly.” He pulled a nail completely through one of his wrists, extracted the other, then loosed his feet and hopped to the ground. He took off the crown of thorns, kicked [...]
Everyone knows Renault. Born in 1900, he was among those who, in the Jazz Age, caught the eye of Gertrude Stein and was regularly invited to her salon. He achieved this coup by degrees: First by charming Alice B. Toklas and then by painting a portrait of Miss Stein that was second only to Picasso’s [...]
It is late and we should not be talking. Instead we should be drifting in separate carriages toward the edge of sleep: I ought to be solving in my dreams Newtonian gravitational equations and considering the moon’s effect on human tides, and she should be drifting into astronomical declinations, rearranging in her own precise way [...]
In case you hadn’t already figured it out, I am a shape shifter, a person of no definite mass or form, one of only a handful like me, destined, almost certainly, to extinction. I don’t mind it. Now is the hour of rigid things, of scientific structure and technological accuracy. Fascism always brings with it [...]
Let’s take a break from our regularly scheduled program of fiction (proceeding apace, thanks for asking) and have a brief civics lesson. For a number of Whistle & Fish readers, this will simply be a refresher course; the rest should pay careful attention.
We’ll start with a review of the soldiers’ oath, a pledge made by [...]