At the end it’s only Léglise and me, but for us it has always been that way. Our countries and our friends and our duty have always hung off of us like husks, and at the center is only Léglise and me and our information. We trade it back and forth, each from his own nation to that of his enemy and then to the home office again, in envelopes that ( Read more... )

Summer, Mulzer, anyone else reading, can you guess the words?

Chris, Ryan, me, say something (if you can and want to) about the pieces written.

            “The Nile?”

“There are places along the flood-plains where the horizon is an unbroken sea of reeds.  A man could wander lost for weeks mere meters from the banks.”

“And the Gobi?”

“By day, the sun chars the flesh from your bones; by night, your teeth chatter beneath the blaze of stars.  Your satchel ( Read more... )

SEE the famous weight-lifting amoeba, Single-Cell Jack, born on an ill-fated morning in northern Ukraine, and residing of late in St. PetersburgI guess I just gravitated toward cities. You have country people and city people and they can tell you why it is, say stuff like ‘oh, the city’s alive’ or ‘oh, I just feel connected with the forest’ or ( Read more... )

Jakob Walter, German conscript ( Read more... )

This week, I'm not going to tell you the words at the beginning; I'll post them at the end, after the readers have had a chance to guess what they are.

The pigeons and sparrows lifted off and flew out low along the rows of apartments, and some of them got away. With the great fat steel belly groaning like that we all should have known to run, for all the good running did. Anyway if my heart was going to break it was just as well. If we were all going to forget each other and spiral away from ( Read more... )

I was just twenty when I pitched my last game.  A star at Midwood High, I was recruited right after graduation only to discover that the wicked change-up that made me the most feared starter in the Southern Minnesota League was just enough to make me indistinguishable from the other young recruits in Double A.  I pulled in $850 a month from the ( Read more... )

I was losing a game of relationship baseball, had been losing to my roommate Cathy all summer, and losing badly. Just about every day barefoot Cathy would bounce into the apartment, her shoes held over her shoulder by a single strap as she bounced towards the hallway corkboard, to move one of her blue-tipped pins around the bases that had been ( Read more... )

cascade (Ben)
baseball (Chris)
birth (Ryan)