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My library gig and my love of baseball have one thing in common: they both bring my childhood back around when I least expect it. Explaining our local quartz exhibit by producing a “diamond” my f...

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Most technological advances become routine after a decade or two. It’s a quirk of our incredibly short lives. It needs to work like that for people to not go crazy. The wheel or radio, the intern...

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We must’ve looked like idiots up there in the Thruway overpass, shadows cast against those long nights and the longer highway beneath us and we probably were. Indistinct shapes pumping arms at sp...

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In the beginning, there was a light. A brilliant light. A hot searing light. An endless light. This light illuminated all, that all was everything. Everything was already there and that everythin...

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I minored in religion at college, this much can be agreed on, it says so in Syracuse University’s archives. This is at least a fact. Not a seminarian thing, of course, world religions, comparativ...

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The family dog Ollie is thirteen or fourteen, hard to know with rescues, and at this point in life is almost totally blind. It doesn’t get him down, other than doggiebetes, he’s hale and hearty f...

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My favorite parable isn’t Christian actually, it’s Buddhist or, anyway, Buddish. It could be from any faith with a monastic tradition but as I remember, it was told in Buddhist terms. I believe m...

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Sir Gladhand had surely seen the world and, as he watched, the world had just as surely passed him by. He was a hero a dozen times over for whatever that mattered but lately it didn’t feel as tho...

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“It’s a fool-proof plan,” she told her, “it’s a fool-proof plan and you know it. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.” Her sister looked at her askance, a brief silence punctuated by rifle exchan...

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In a flash, you can bridge the impossibly-vast chasm between the lonely islands of two human minds, forging a connection there like a welder with a burst from their hot torch. BRZZPT. The connect...

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what an honor is to not die young and pretty, what a privilege it is to instead just wind down, simply wear out. How often it is a person doesn’t get to experience ...

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“What happened to my powers?” The intrusive thought sped through her mind from time to time. She had no idea where it could’ve come from, but each and every time, she pushed it down and away beca...

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The good news is that your last nervous breakdown could be your very last nervous breakdown. The bad news is that there’s a couple of different ways that scenario could actually unfold, good or i...

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We want to go to the stars. The movies make it look easy, the television makes it look easy, little blinking lights, press a few then liftoff, there you are. The fantasy is understandable but I w...

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“Is this place hallowed,” asked the cleric, canvassing what remained after the awful battle, “or is it merely hollowed-out?” “I don’t follow,” replied the bard, his only friend who had survived t...

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He nicknamed her “Autumn” and she thought it was adorable, she thought it was a reference to the dark brown of her eyes, the rust-red of her hair, her freckles like speckles on a half changed map...

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A labelscar is a word within a word. Or maybe it’s more of a word without a word. A labelscar is what gets left behind when a word has stood for so long that the world has changed around it but i...

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The communists shot Laika into space, just because they could, just to prove a point. This wasn’t for the science, of course, it was a dominance play, to show off to the world. They knew that she...

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“The hardest thing in your life is rarely something you do once or a handful of times,” she said, “no matter how difficult. Childbirth, killing in war, those take seconds or hours.” She allowed h...

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While you were sleeping, the spirit entered your room and sprinkled magic inspiration all over the keys, but the thing that did so was no muse, it was instead The Devil himself. Or herself, somet...

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We always talk about how long we get to live but we so rarely talk about how long we’re going to be dead, a number so close to infinity that it’s functionally indistinguishable from the infinite ...

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There aren’t enough books where the mystery writer tries their hand at detective work and turns out to be terrible at it. There would be more of them, I reckon, but few crime novelists would care...

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If we are lucky, very lucky, this life will have been as if it were a trip to some grand amusement park when we were children, so well-themed and so immersive we could have all sworn that it was ...

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“I am what I am and that’s all what I am,” the old sailor muttered, half to himself, half to no one, “and I guess what I am is tired. Just tired.” He still clenched that corn cob pipe between his...

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One of the most common ice-breakers is that eons-old question “if you could go back in time to anywhere in history, where would you go?” and while in theory it can be telling, in practice, the an...

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