I've organized this in such a way that my older, less--how to put it--good stories, are delineated along the left column. In general, to proceed downward thru the list is to proceed upward in terms of quality.

The right column contains the sparse stories written during my modern era. It also contains technical information about how to create your own personal web page, which is all residue and space saver from the site I used as my template. Fascinating stuff. YOU decide which narrative is more interesting.

Old Stories

Smothered in the Womb

I was on the floor, gagging on my tongue and having a generally grand experience, when my wife interrupted me, as she sometimes does.

“You realize,” she said, “that you’re not steering.”

That had occurred to me, however briefly.

“What you’re doing,” she said, this time with more accusation, “is illegal.”

I didn’t want to argue, as I was blissfully content. We were in the Window Room, my little observatory on the universe. Without it lay a billion white-hot furnaces pinned to a numb and bitter black backdrop. I could feel the stars on my skin, pulling me, inviting me toward them. My space vessel, the Crushing Ascendant, hummed around me, singing songs of praise to the celestial community, divine and yet all within my reach. I rose from where I laid, as though carried by neighboring angels; the silica glass in front of me, the medium separating our faux atmosphere from the void, had peeled itself away. I stepped forward and was at once transfigured. I breathed, and light issued forth from my nostrils. The stars approached, not bashful in the least, as light out of light poured from me and commingled with their own. I spread my arms to embrace them, my brothers-to-be.

“Stop it,” I heard from behind, but I wasn’t willing to be distracted now. I awaited the transformation of my ears, so that I could finally be spared the nagging.

“Go away,” I said, still staring ahead, “or I’ll burn you.”

There was silence for a moment, and it was breathtaking, if not permanent. Then, I heard, “I want a divorce.”

Startled by this, I spun around, and everything else was lost to me. I fell to the floor again and landed hard.

I later emerged from a pitch blackness to be greeted by my wife, her swollen belly leaning over my head.

“You’re suffocating me with that,” I told her.

“Blame it on our unborn child,” she said.

“I had the most welcome dream.”

“No dream,” she said. She held up one of my syringes, and I reached for it instinctively, as it contained the smallest residual trace of the LSD-derived hallucinogen that I so fancied. Her face was tired, but she didn’t seem at all concerned about me. “I witnessed the whole thing,” she said. “Again.”

“Oh.” I took the syringe and looked back at the Window, noticing that it was sealed. I knew then that I was contained within my vessel, snatched back to sobriety, and struggling to cling to even the slightest memory of my earlier concupiscence with the cosmos. Worse still, I was alone with my wife. The horror of it all. “Lilith—”

“We’re leaving you.”

I looked to the Window again, toward infinity.

“When we can,” she said, qualifying her promise.

For as long as I’ve known her, Lilith has never broken a promise. I recall that on the day we met, five years ago on Earth, she swore that we’d be married. Or rather, she swore that we’d be together forever, so maybe she did overshoot the mark. Never mind.

I was already piloting the Ascendant then, and I chanced across her while on a brief visit to Earth to replenish my supplies and restock items for exportation. She was working at the British docks then, at twenty-five years of age, my own age.

We went to grab a bite at a dockside restaurant, because I was on a limited timetable. I was anxious to dispense with the chatter and traverse the bases, so to speak, while my feet were still firmly on terra firma, but even then, Lilith blathered on about every little thing.

The clincher was that her parents had recently passed away, leaving her with no one and nothing. This was the main subject of our conversation. She was very distraught about this, I would come to find out later, but back on that day I was still consumed with what she could offer me in the short term. I leaned close to her at the small round table overlooking the docks, loud and busy with incoming and departing ships, and I whispered in her ear, over the ruckus and in my unending charm, “How would you feel for me if I offered to scatter their ashes across the heavens?”

I had only intended it as a pickup line, but she, the blighter, took it at face value. She latched onto me then, my beautiful satellite, and insisted on accompanying me to the depths of the universe. I thought, why not?

In time, I did come to appreciate her. If I didn’t, I would have jettisoned her long ago. But she, not unlike me, found a degree of freedom in the space-faring profession. For myself, I had dreamed since childhood of being one with the universe. My foray with the hallucinogens began as a means to bridge that accursed gap between the love I held for the stars and the realization that I could never chance to reach out and capture one to be my bride. It was simpler for Lilith; she wanted to run and hide from her troubles, not knowing that, eventually, I would become one of them.

On this particular trip, she and I were hired as an adjunct to an interplanetary humanitarian aid organization, vested with the task of delivering food and other essentials to former colonial planets whose citizens have no association with their mother countries and would otherwise be left to die on inhospitable and unforgiving worlds, cold husks and bare planets with thin natural atmospheres and scarce oxygen. I hold these people to be whiners and shameless beggars, but this does pay well.

“I don’t care about the money,” she said while I examined the syringe to make sure I’d used every last drop. “Our child isn’t safe with you.”

“You’re overreacting. He doesn’t mind.”

“You’ve got to take control now.”

“Right,” I said, leaving it at that. I rose and was at once seized by an unfamiliar feeling. Lilith was oblivious, and she was about to make her dramatic exit to the opposite end of the ship where she would sulk for the rest of the trip.

As she rushed for the door to the ship’s interior, I stumbled back toward the Window. I would alternately gaze outward and snap shut my eyes, gauging for the feeling. In short time I was able to surmise that we had stopped moving. I stood there, confounded.

Things became clear a moment later when my wife made a noise in front of the door that she was so anxious to pass through. It was the sound, apparently, of a man’s fist striking her face with some force.

I turned and saw Lilith doing a dive for the floor. Her eyes were wide, but below them her nose was actually split apart and leaking a bit of blood. As she fell, she let loose a sort of sneeze, and a little red nebula sprayed from her face.

A large man stood beneath the threshold. He was a darker fellow, and he seemed to be in a frenzy. Thick chains hung in his left hand, the kind I use in my cargo hold. I shrugged and thought nothing of this display, as I’d hallucinated about some terrible fates befalling my wife before. Usually, I’d applaud them and shout, ‘Encore!’

This was different.

“Orada kal!” the man shouted, and he pointed a small firearm at me.

It was unlike my delusions to speak in foreign tongues. I remembered my wife. She was on the floor now, prodding at her face with her fingers to appraise the damage. Then I remembered her womb, and I became very defensive.

“Who are you?” I asked the man, demanding that he explain himself.

“Adm Bayezit,” he answered. He raised his gun higher to the level at which our eyes met. “Konuşma,” he said, and I didn’t think to ask him anything else.

He made a bid to bind us together with my chains. My wife didn’t put up a struggle, as she was dripping like mad and in shock about it. I didn’t offer any resistance either because…well, because I was still out of it, in disbelief that my ship could be boarded without my knowledge, or still reeling from the aftereffects of the hallucinogen. I was impotent and confused.

Our abductor corralled us to the middle of the room, forcing us to sit on the floor, our backs pressed one against the another. He tied a complex knot about us, fastening the chains first around our abdomens, and then looping them underneath our arms, between our legs, and over and around themselves. Without a word, he left us then, leaving through the door of the Window Room, and closing it behind him.

The room itself is unlighted. Deprived of the spillover light from the exit to the rest of the ship, the Window Room assumes an ethereal quality, assuming, in some respects, the aspect and appearance of the abyss unto which it surveys.

“My face,” my wife gurgled, and with her nose crushed she sounded like a ship communications operator.

“Mercifully, I can’t see it.” The chains weren’t very accommodating.

“I feel like I’m on fire.”

“You’re drenched in your blood, darling.”

Myself, I felt chills that seemed to course across my chains and up my spine. We were angled in such a way that, to look to one side, we could each turn our head toward the Window. I did so, and I could feel from without the biting temperatures of space.

“We’re going to die,” she said. I didn’t want to hear her now, but she was a wreck, and I pitied her.

“No,” I told her. “He’s a hijacker. He only wants the ship.”

“How long is he going to leave us here?”

“You should go ask him. You speak crazy talk?”

“Stop it! This is serious.”

“I know.”

“He can do anything he wants, and we’re just sitting here on the floor.”

“I’ll ask him for a cushion if he comes back.”

“You still don’t give a shit,” she said, but I thought I heard her chuckle. I imagined her face, then, cratered and obliterated beyond repair, but smiling for a brief moment. I cannot usually conjure such an image without the assistance of mind-altering drugs, but it overcame me all at once, and it was so clear. I knew that we would get through this, if only because I had my wife by my side. I was glad to have her.

“Remember,” I told her, to calm her and to win her back, “that these pirates are simple bastards. They get their fill with booze and money, and so they rarely find occasion to kill anybody.”

“What will he do with your ship?” she asked, and I caught the vague impression that she was testing my composure.

“I don’t know,” I said, and the thought of my being grounded without it made me shiver under the links of the chains. “After he drops us off, he’ll go pick up his buddies, they’ll sail the seven space ways while getting drunk and munching off humanitarian aid supplies, and they’ll all laugh it up, singing slurred songs and pissing over the rails.”

“Where will you go from there?”

“Right back up. I’m a professional, with tenure. I’ll be put on another ship, maybe co-pilot for awhile.”

“I told you I’ve had enough. I don’t like this place, the blackness all the time. I want to settle down.”

“You won’t come back with me?” I asked, unsure whether to rejoice with the knowledge that I might soon have achieved my solitude or to repent for what I’d done to shun this woman.

“I didn’t want any of this,” she said, and she despaired that I hadn’t sought to comfort her further.

“I know,” I said.

“I want my child.” She sniffled and, turning her head, strands of her long hair flipped over onto my shoulder where I could see them. “And you.”

It wasn’t only the abduction that was driving her emotions. The stars outside the Window seemed to embolden her; they ignited her passion and tilted her mood to their axes. As they kindled her to state her feelings, the legion of luminaries at the same time hung in their framework to convict me.

“I apologize if I’ve neglected you.”

She stretched her neck back, pushing my head forward and causing me to bow.

“You’ve turned a blind eye on us all.”

That may have been true. I had embraced the folly that I was omnipotent and that my sight pierced as far in this empty realm as that of my glistening idols. Now, I was bound in chains and reduced to captivity. I felt ashamed. In supplication, I faced the Window and sobbed.

Aware that I was faced with a decision that would govern my course for the rest of my life, I was moved to weep, not because it was a difficult choice, but because it didn’t require any consideration whatsoever, and because it revealed to me what an unfeeling creature I’d become. I chose the void, then, and despite my proximity to her body, it was as though Lilith were already gone, off living her life beneath a bright blue sky, her child gazing out with wonder onto white clouds, unaware that they weren’t brilliant or magical enough to keep its father by their side. The universe was my lot.

“I love you,” I whispered to it, through the glass.

My wife was overtaken with spasms, as her whole body shook and, for the first time, she cried. “I love you, too,” she said, and even the words were shaking.

But she had misunderstood.

Over the course of the next twelve hours, I slept. The moment I awoke, she started up with a vengeance, apparently trying to make up for lost time.

“How do we get help?” she asked.

“Don’t bother me yet.” I yawned and managed to fumble my fingers into my belt.

“Do you have a file?” she asked me when she felt me struggling. “Can you cut us loose?”

I shushed her. “Face it, love,” I said. “We’re here for keeps.”

“You don’t have a file?”

“I only carry important items.” I withdrew my fingers from the belt, prize in hand.

“No.”

“Consider it my morning coffee,” I said. I wasted no time, plunging the syringe into my hip without forethought of the consequences. It was typical of my habit.

In moments, I began to jerk against the chains, throwing my weight to assume a better position, one that straight-on faced the Window. I was unsuccessful, but it didn’t matter. The show had begun.

A new form was beginning to take shape in the cosmos, coming into view as a gleaming light from beyond. I recognized its structure, and I drooled in anticipation of its company. It was a mass of interstellar particles, joining together into a cloud compacted by gravity. Ghostlike in appearance, it was light-years in diameter. Despite its deathly appearance, out of the innards of this apparition would emerge newborn stars, fresh and bright and at the start of their cycles. I asked it to sing to me, and I listened.

“The door,” I heard it say, as its light became even brighter against the Window. Then it grunted, made guttural noises, and I felt my chains slip away. I rose again, off of the floor and towards the Window. I asked it if I could join it out there, for all time, in its bosom. It hesitated for a moment; then, with the rancor of a great big bang, I heard it scream, this celestial mother, as if in birth pangs. Shocked and thrown off balance, I fell again from the utter shock of its cry, landing on the floor and departing to the blackness of sleep.

I awoke to more sobbing. I was confused because my wife was now bound facing me, her womb to my chest, and she was naked.

I began to question what had happened, but she spat in my face as tears streamed off her cheeks and down onto her bare breasts. She raged then, thrashed about and bit the flesh of my face. Spending all the strength in her soul, she wept, became limp, and fainted. She remained upright, fastened tightly to my body.

Having had a few bad trips, I had returned to a reality not much better. Lilith had been violated during the time that I conversed with the cosmos. Our abductor had entered into the room and, with my attention…diverted, he had loosed us and ravaged my wife before me. And now, she awakes.

“Lilith?” She opens her eyes, but not quickly enough. I feel her convulse.

“You’ve killed me,” she says.

I don’t find the dignity to answer.

“You must hate me,” she says, her voice picking up pace and racing to match the rhythm of my heartbeat, “to bring me to the heavens but cast away my soul.”

“Stop it!” I cry. I attempt to turn away from her, but we are conjoined. I spin to face the Window, but all the stars have gone blank behind the obstructions of space, leaving no light and no warmth.

“Look at me!” she yells. I cannot see, but I do as she says and I face her, cringing.

“Tell me why!”

“Why?”

“Why you hate me.”

“I don’t.” I am afraid of her now. We’ve never been so close, and I’m afraid.

“Tell me!”

“I want,” I say at last, “what’s out there.”

“What’s out there?”

I look in that direction, finding relief in the escape from her darkened eyes, but my companions are nowhere in sight. “Nothing,” I say, but I keep turned my head from her.

“You bastard.” She laughs at me, a mocking stranger’s laugh. Then, she becomes still. “It’s dead,” she says.

For the rest of our lives, we do not say a word.

Days pass in starvation and fatigue, and we each feel death embrace us, from our outer extremities inward. On the sixth day, I sense her stir, one last time. Her heartbeat flutters against my chest, and then, with a sinking feeling, I know that it is happening. My son passes from her form, in silence, and stillborn.

In minutes, her heartbeat slows to a flutter and ceases. I wait with her, but the smell is unbearable. I fight to get away and, because the chains lose their tautness due to her body’s sudden loss of substance, I am able to slip free.

I leave the Window Room and don’t look back. The light from the rest of the ship is blinding at first, but I make my way to the control room. I enter into it to find, on the ship’s console, that the navigating system has expired too, most likely because the pirate was too unfamiliar with the technology to keep it functioning or otherwise because he became too inebriated to operate it properly. Checking its last recorded point, I realize that we have strayed far from course, far from charted territory, to a place from which there can be no return.

I see, seated at the command console before me, Bayezit, sans culottes. His head is flat and red toward his forehead, and his hair there is strewn about in magenta-stained clumps. Realizing our situation, apparently, he decided to dash his brains out against the walls of our floating tomb.

I don’t pay him undue attention. Pushing him aside, I check the fuel gauge to find that I have only a few days’ fuel left and no discernible direction in which to steer. I sit in the chair beside his pitiful form, uncertain of how to proceed. I am not sure that I want to proceed, and that’s when I recall my one solution, my last resort, my only means of escape.

I leave the control room and am drawn toward the bow of the ship. At the terminus of the bow, I had installed a door—a hatch—that opens onto the void. It is quiet there, at the one end of the ship, and I find something in the stillness to be comforting.

I decide to join my brethren, then. I peer out the porthole to find that only a few have returned into view. I gaze with my eyes for several minutes, realizing that once I am flung to the cold reaches, I will never see anything, not ever again.

So I look out at my place of eternal rest, leaning against the door and causing it to fog with my final few breaths. That black expanse, bereft of any design, serves as a scrying plate on which my dying mind can project its raging thoughts. Through some seizure by the pangs of regret, I imagine myself back on Earth, in a common cemetery, sitting atop my tombstone, my head tilted downward, enamored by the dirt at my feet. For the first time, thoughts of dirt, of Earth, are inviting. I envision a casket, hewn to fit my dimensions, with padding, and a pillow on which to rest my head until the day of resurrection. Perhaps my stone is set in a family plot.

The stars, today, are impersonal to behold. Nevertheless, I anticipate feeling it, the touch of space, which I’ve simulated so many times, followed by a quick death and a future for all time with the stars. I caress the handle of the hatch, and I notice that my hand is shaking. I withdraw it, then, pausing, and I turn back to return to my wife’s side.

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Painful Delivery

She spotted her mailman making his way through over two feet of snow to his mail truck from her driveway.

“Bert!” she called out to him.

He paused by his truck and looked at her. He could barely hear or see her, as a violent snowstorm was raging, and the evening sky was prematurely darkened by thick clouds. He was wearing a green and red checkered scarf with fuzzy black earmuffs.

He pointed at his chest with the thumb of his gloved hand, as if to gesture, “Me?”

“Come back,” Della hollered in her slippers at her door.

The mailman shrugged and trudged his way back toward her through her unkempt driveway, being submerged almost to his knees with every step.

“Hi,” she said, smiling, when he arrived at her door after several minutes.

“Don’t you have someone to shovel this driveway?” he asked, his teeth chattering.

“Oh, that,” she said, throwing her head back. “I haven’t got around to that yet.”

“Can I help you with something?” he asked.

“Yes, I’d like you to mail a letter for me.”

“Where is it?”

“I’ll get it, you wait here. Would you like something to drink?”

“Not now, ma’am, thank you.”

“Come on, how about some eggnog? It’s the season.”

“Alright, ma’am.”

“Wait there, I’ll be right back.”

Five minutes later, she returned with her letter in her left hand, her right hand empty. The mailman swayed back and forth, trying to generate warmth in the snow through constant motion.

“I’m out of eggnog, but here’s the letter.”

He took it and walked back to the truck, only for Della to call out for him again, signaling for him to come back. He started back up the covered path, trying to retrace his steps, but unable to see them due to the raging downpour of frozen crystals. He fell along the way, his face smashing into the snow. When he hit, a cloud of snowflakes became unsettled and blew back into the wind. He pulled himself up and made his way back to Della, who never stopped calling out to him from inside.

“This is for you, Bert,” she said, handing him a card in a red envelope. “Have a merry Christmas.” He took it and left the way he came: with difficulty.

On her way out to buy ingredients three months later, during a bright and humid day, Della again intercepted her mailman.

“Bert!”

He had just delivered her mail, and his back was turned to her as he approached his truck, parked directly in front of her driveway.

“Ben,” he said, his back still turned. He became rigid and tensed.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s Ben. My name’s Ben.”

Della paused. The mailman turned around and faced her, but he wasn’t in the right mood to smile. Irritated, he stood there below her stoop and made every effort to show the old woman what a bother she was.

“Oh,” she said. She tried to laugh away her error. “What did I call you?”

“Bert,” he said. He pronounced it with his teeth, as his lips were curled back when he snarled. He added, for further clarification should the woman be senile, “That isn’t my name.”

“On all the Christmas cards, I’ve always written ‘Bert.’”

“I know.” He sighed. “Listen, sweetheart, did you need something?”

Though embarrassed, Della shook off her discomfort. “I was expecting a package.”

“Not today.”

“It’s important.”

He stared at her. “Are you accusing me of withholding it?”

“No! No, I just—”

“Della, is this about your monthly Depends shipment?”

She backed away immediately, almost tripping on her stoop and falling through her screen door. She regained her balance and looked from side-to-side nervously, eager to know if anyone had heard.

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Della, I do read return address labels.”

“I don’t—”

“And I wouldn’t steal your diapers. I’m no old woman.”

“You have no right to insult me,” she said.

He hefted the strap of his mailbag higher onto his shoulder.

“Only trying to do my job,” he told her.

“I was just concerned,” she said, “because I need them.”

“You’re holding me up.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

“I’ve got sixteen houses on this block.”

“I only stopped you because I was on my way out to the drugstore.”

“For your anti-incontinence medication?”

“For ingredients!”

The mailman turned again to leave and dispense his burden.

“If you say so.”

Della retreated into her house behind the screen door. Remembering her mail, she opened it a crack, dispatched her wrinkled hand to retrieve it from the box, and shut it once again. She clutched her thick bills and curled magazines tightly to her chest and watched, hiding, as the mailman drove on.

He returned the next day and rang the doorbell, as procedure mandated when delivering an ensured parcel.

“Just a minute!” Della called out from her bathroom in a cheery voice, oblivious to who was waiting for her at the door.

“I’ve got your diapers!” he shouted through the screen door, but the loudness of his voice echoed even in the open outdoor air.

She lurched out of the bathroom, her hair fitted with a towel, and she approached her front door. Ben could not see through the screen, as it was dark inside and bright outside around him. Still, he pressed his face up against it, frowning, his eyes slits as he peered in, eager to invade her privacy.

“Just leave it on the stoop!” she cried from a few feet away, in her bathrobe.

He sighed. “You’ve got to sign for it.”

“Let me get dressed.”

“I’m on a timetable. Get over here now!”

Della was frightened, and she considered calling the police, but she convinced herself that she was being ridiculous, that there was nothing to fear from the mailman. When she unlocked the door and began to open it, the mailman grabbed the handle from the outside and flung it wide open, causing Della to gasp and pull back.

The mailman thrust a pen in her face, attached by a chain to an electronic signature device. “Sign it,” he said.

When she extended her hand to take the pen from him, he forced the pointed end of it into her palm. It poked her and she shouted from the prick, but she took it and did as he commanded.

When he wrenched the pen back out of her hand, his hairy arm brushed against her skin where his blue sleeve was rolled up. Her skin itched and she began to scratch that part of her that touched him. She crossed her arms and hugged herself, feeling absolutely vulnerable.

“Take your parcel,” he said, pointing down at it by their feet between them.

“My back isn’t what it used to be,” she said. “Could you hand it to me?”

“No,” he said, and he repeated himself.

Della became red in the face. “You’re not a man! Do you want me to call my husband over here?”

“Della, Mr. Williams hasn’t received a piece of mail in over seven months.”

She didn’t know what to say.

“Is your husband dead, Della? Did he die on you?”

“We were divorced,” she said.

“Did he leave you for someone who wears underwear?”

She refused to answer, and she knelt down to pick up the parcel. When she lifted it, the bottom came undone, and over a dozen pairs of diapers were scattered on the stoop. Della looked at the hole in the bottom of the box, and then her eyes caught a glimpse of her driveway, where several more pairs lined a path from her door to his mail truck.

“Did you do this?” she asked.

“That would be a federal offense,” he said, smiling.

“Pick them up now,” she said. “That package was ensured.”

“That it was,” he said.

“I want compensation.”

“Of course,” he said. “If you go to the post office, you can fill out a form. There is nothing I can do for you now.”

“Pick them up!”

“I’m on a timetable.” He checked his watch. “If you like, I can ask a few of your neighbors to help you gather them.”

“Why are you doing this to me?”

Ben grimaced and kicked off his shoes. Della didn’t know how to respond to this. He pulled off his socks to reveal his bare feet. Della screamed when she saw that he only had three toes.

“You did this to me,” he said.

“You’re insane!”

“That’s right.”

“Get out of here!”

“This is what happens when you don’t shovel you driveway like everybody else, Della! Because of you, I got frostbite.”

“I’m an old lady! I’m not responsible.”

“I could have told you that. But it doesn’t help me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“When I signed up for rain, sleet, and snow, I never thought this job would cost me my limbs.”

Della, for the first time, pitied poor Ben. As he stood there in front of her, she understood that she had hurt him, had cost him several pieces of his own flesh, and had ignored him for all the years that she’d lived on that street.

“I am sorry,” she said. “Would you like something to drink?”

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