Alt: Actor Peter Sellers in a suit is standing in a room with a globe and a music stand saying, "We must find that woman." Probably from the first Pink Panther film, A Shot in the Dark.

One easy way you can trust your readers is to not spoon feed them every single little bit. You don’t have to provide explanations for everything. For example, there are some foreign words and phrases that most Americans (assuming your readers are Americans) just know. Which words and phrases? These are phrases and words like bonjour, aloha, shalom, déjà vu, mañana, pasta e fagioli, omega, fjord, and carpe diem. Most importantly, these are words that you really do not need to translate for your readers. But words like shemesh, limpia para brisa, or folgen? You’d better translate them. By the way, in order, that’s Hebrew for sun, Spanish for windshield wiper, and German for follow.

Looks like Lizzie Borden is Vital to the Timeline is published by Riverdale Avenue Books!

Samantha is buried under rubble somewhere in Arizona, thinking that there’s been some sort of an earthquake. As her calls for help turn to whispers amidst the dust and debris, she hears a bark and sees a person in full protective gear come to save her. While things should have been looking up for her, the rescuer lets her in on what happened.

I think the idea of a haunted radio station is pretty nifty. And one of these days, maybe I will have the time and the ideas and wherewithal to expand this one into the kind of story it always should have been.

For this short story about a breakout from an alien prison, I harkened back to some old World War II prison break films. And, I got to thinking about the mechanics of it. Consider this: unlike in the Second World War, there’s no one who is sympathetic, willing to hide you. There’s no way for you to truly blend in with the rest of the populace, even if you speak their language fluently. And it would be hard to appeal to someone’s sense of kinship or decency. After all, at this stage in human development, what sort of kinship could we possibly ever have with an alien race?

Sibling rivalry shows up a lot in my fiction, in particular my shorter fiction. But in this short story, that fact of life for so many of us takes a deadly center stage.

Almost ripped from the headlines, the plot is essentially of a MAGA true believer screaming at his Congresswoman and her aide. I took a lot of the plot from the very real news story of Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan being threatened by MAGA protesters.

If the first casualty of war is always the truth, then the second is bravery. Sure, we all talk a good game. And people may end up trying to do the right thing and show courage and all that. But they’re terrified. We’re all terrified. The invading army seemed like a joke at first. They’re smaller than we are. And they’re invertebrates. How could what are essentially midget alien squid ever pose a threat to humans? Oh, but they could, and they did, and they still can and do.

The idea behind this short story is that prejudice in real life can sometimes seem almost random. After all, humans may shun people who have darker skin tones than they do. But at the same time, they may see similar people with tans and think—that’s attractive. Or normal, or even beautiful. And if you stop to think about that for more than a few seconds, you should come to realize: damn, that’s nuts.

As the narrator says: I grew up in the mountains. There are still some homes without electricity or indoor plumbing. I know because I was brought up in one. We ate wild game on the good days. On the bad ones, we would forages or make do with whatever was on the already-bare pantry shelves. My father didn’t believe in charity or government handouts, so we got neither. He would rather starve, and so that extended to us, that he would rather see us starve than take a handout. At least I was an only child. That was most likely the sole bit of good luck my family has ever seen. When I was six, I realized some nearby children would go someplace during the day. I asked my mother about it, and she said I shouldn’t talk about it anymore. Schools are of the devil, she said, and reading never did anyone any good because the only things to read were sad and painful things.

The genre is science fiction/school story. The mood is educational and a bit playful. Or, to use a zeugma, it’s a bunch of bits of writing and computer memory.

Whenever we as a species are truly able to perform this task, I feel that it would be a vital part of our overall development. This is the kind of activity that will be revolutionary. It will thoroughly alter the course of our history. As such, it deserves a far more subtle and in-depth treatment than in this little throwaway story.

I had to fudge the ‘facts’ by making the alternative material horribly polluting. It was the only way to make this tiny piece work at all.