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Short stories

Deus Emeritus.

The saints were worried.
God had been known to take the occasional business trip, leaving Heaven in the capable hands of His apostles, but this — this was unheard of. What in the world could have led the Almighty to bestow divine powers on a newlydead? The scale of the crisis was evident from the fact that Saint Peter, who rarely left the Pearly Gates except to speak to God, had interrupted his administrative duties to lead an impromptu meeting in the saints' boardroom . . . Read more.

Enjoy your meal.

"Hmm... toothbrush?" asked Kéhba.
"Personal hygiene device," said the corpus, "operated manually, traditional means of scrubbing dirt from the teeth. A few billion citations."
"What about this one: McNuggets?"
"Nothing on that."
"It's using the upper-case script in mid-sentence, so it's a person or a place, right?"
"Person is likely," said the corpus, as a colossal list of names faded into view on the surface of the wall. "As you see, Mc is an ancient patronymic, and Nugget occasionally appeared as a name . . . Read more.

Fly-by-night.

I am winged and I fly.
I soar, soar into the majestic depths of the air, with the wind ruffling my wings as I turn. Here are no paths and no gravity, no constraints, but an eternity of radiant blue filled with breath and life and sunshine.
I chase the horizon, arcing over well-kept gardens. Below me . . . Read more.

Small Things.

There is a queue of traffic in front of me. I glance out of the car window and notice that an undertaker has gone into business in the high street. The nagging reminders of mortality are everywhere.
Sometimes I wonder whether I would care if she died. It is difficult to imagine. Perhaps her doctor would contact me and break the news that one of her lumps, interminable as food scares, had actually been infected and cancerous; . . . Read more.

A story about robots.

There was, at one time, a race of mechanical men. Who had originally brought them into being, none of them knew, and none of them cared. No matter. Their creator, sentient or otherwise, was not there... was not, in their sphere of knowledge, anywhere... was quite probably non-existent. The mechanical men were here and many in number.
They were surrounded by an ocean. Water? Perhaps. It was a . . . Read more.

Creation story of the Iyakotu.

This is the first story of Eiutu, the First-and-Every, decider of all things, who dwells under the earth and hears all that happens; Eiutu the interpreter of ripples and tremors.
When Eiutu was new, finding himself alone in the world, he created two beings for company. Those beings were Nua-of-the-sky and Riyea-of-the-water.
Nua is the sky-shepherd, the puller of clouds, who who jumps from sky to sea in one heartbeat. It is Nua who makes the weather. He sculpts the clouds to form . . . Read more.