Category Archives: bits of fiction

That Tickles

Some­times I feel like there are tiny gods crawl­ing all over my body. They itch like crazy, or maybe it is more like a tickle; but not the kind of tickle that makes you gig­gle with delight but more the kind that makes you shriek and squirm and wet your pants just a lit­tle bit.

A Pause for Maintenance (Day 79)

He pulled over to the edge of the paved path and stepped off his bike. Yes, the rear tire had gone flat again; he had really hoped this would stop hap­pen­ing since he had fixed that pro­trud­ing spoke head, but here he was again. I had been a while since he had had to per­form

Can’t Take It Back (Day 78)

You have missed me, haven’t you? Of course, you have also missed the way my hair fell across my face when I was read­ing in the library, and the way the light from those lit­tle lamps shone across my face. You miss the way I answered the phone, too: con­fused at first at the silence at

Identity (Day 77)

I won­der if you have any idea who I am. Obvi­ously, you know my name — or at least the name you know me by. (See how I did that: sow­ing seeds of doubt right from the start? You can’t be too care­ful.) But what can a name really tell you? It gives you some­thing to

Blink and Rub (Day 76)

I rub the inner cor­ners of my eyes, very care­fully at first, using only my fin­ger­tips, then fiercely, back and forth over the whole eyes with my clenched fists. What­ever is going on beneath my eye­lids responds instantly: the feel­ing of spiced gravel returns. I close my eyes, will­ing myself to do so gen­tly (for

Running Dog, Sitting Boy (Day 75)

The boy sat in the dust of the gravel dri­ve­way, his chubby pale legs stretched out in front of him. He stared down the line of the dri­ve­way west, directly into the set­ting sun. In that intense glare of fiery yel­low it was had to make out the dog already van­ish­ing around the bend at

Motorcade (Day 74)

Run­ning through the pos­si­ble sce­nar­ios in my head that would explain the fact that this lone police offi­cer was hold­ing up traf­fic on a week­day morn­ing in Sep­tem­ber along this scenic but busy park­way, a motor­cade was not in the mix. Clearly I am not psy­chic. (I never for a moment thought I was, or

Turning (Day 73)

The first autum­nal morn­ing always caught her by sur­prise. It always seemed too soon, not because she didn’t love fall best of the sea­sons – she did – but sim­ply because it seemed out place fol­low­ing as it did so sud­denly upon weeks of swel­ter­ing sum­mer. It seemed too much of a won­der that the

It is likely you will fail to comprehend the full significance of this until long after it is all over (Day 72)

Even then, it may take years to see how all the dots con­nected into the big pic­ture, the pic­ture none of us knew we were draw­ing. The way this all started, it seems like it was always meant to be a part of some­thing larger, some­thing (dare I say it?) greater. The thing was, even

Turnabout (Day 71)

You had never intended this to be the way things would go, of course. Well, at first, admit­tedly, you hadn’t been sure how you wanted this all to work out, not exactly. You prob­a­bly expected that it might not work out at all, not for you in this city, or at this school, or between