Superfluity: A Love Story
Nell Payton
The night wasn’t as much romantic, tender, tranquil, too short, interrupted, stolen, torturous, unyielding, lonesome, or squandered, as it was dark.
Brutus
Maxim Loskutoff
I like Caesar, but he’s getting old.
Body Parts
H. C. Turk
They knew without looking that the moon was full because they were having body parts for breakfast.
Group Living Among the Higher Primates
Stephen Malloy
The second time the Primatology Club met the football team, they presented their posteriors in a gesture of subordination, but this, too, was misinterpreted.
Concerning His Computer
D. A. Hosek
He sits at his computer, a brand new MacBook Pro purchased on a Tuesday morning when he would normally be at work but his old laptop has died and since there’s no hope of being able to work without a computer, he was forced to go to the Apple Store, walking rather than taking the “L” or a cab because in any event he would have to wait for his wife who controlled the family finances and thus had sole access to the credit card with which the laptop would be purchased so he might as well save some money and get some exercise although the heat left him drenched in sweat and he thinks maybe he should have gone home and changed his shirt after he met his wife at the Apple Store on this hot August morning and chose a laptop from among the models that they had in stock which meant he didn’t have the luxury of making the sort of customizations he would have liked to make, if he could afford them, like having a faster CPU or more RAM installed by an underage underpaid overworked laborer at a factory in China employed through at least three levels of subcontractors in order to establish an unbreakable chain of plausible deniability when the inevitable questions arise about why a 9-year old girl from a rural province was working 16-hour days, seven days a week making electronic products that cost far more than her annual salary and surely as Henry Ford once proclaimed (as attested to by the voice of Leonard Nimoy in one of his video games) that the ideal for an industrial company is to pay wages high enough and keep prices low enough that the workers who make the goods would be able to buy the goods which is all well and good when it comes to making Model T automobiles that come in any color you like as long as it’s black and it’s so far back in time that people still call them horseless carriages but what about the workers who make Tootsie Rolls or gumballs or even those fancy fair-trade chocolate bars they sell at Whole Foods at a price higher than his whole week’s allowance when he was a kid, and he imagines those workers being paid in candy which would make things even worse for them since they wouldn’t be able to pay the rent and they’d have horrible teeth from eating all that sugar but at least they have jobs and that reminds him that he really needs to make a dentist appointment before the insurance runs out at the end of the month.
