Sussex nights in early July do not stay dark for long, and by four o'clock gray creeps up on you from under bushes and from behind walls and soon you can easily make out shapes and features again. Half an hour later, it's as good as day.We had stayed up talking right on through the night against a shared, and much enjoyed backdrop of Joni Mitchell, Stealers Wheel, Ralph McTell, and even some George Frideric Handel, sustained by deeply held and shared beliefs. It was timeless talk. ...

Now, I have only three left.I had seven, the seven Reri gave me. I hid these where I thought they would never find them, but they are ferrets and have found four of them so far. Four, and now I have only three left.They can come at any time but they cannot hurt me.By law they can search any Reader's place anytime they wish, and they do. And I know they will come and search my place again and again, that they will keep looking until they are certain I have none left.

The warm March sun had shone all day. Although the air remained frigid in the many shadows, out in the open the surface snow was now melting in its glare. Then, as commonly happens in early spring this far north, when the sun began to set and the shadows to grow longer across the snowy field, the partially melted snow surface froze and soon the entire meadow was covered by a crust of icy snow thick enough in places to support a walking man, thick enough everywhere to support almost any chi...

There are as many Gods in this universe as there are beings. And the game we play is called "Touch." It's a form of spiritual hugging. Easy to begin, pretty much impossible to bring to a close.How it came about: Before the beginning of the universe, before there even was a universe, we all held hands—well, figuratively speaking. We touched, I guess would describe it (hence the name of the game), and touching we synchronized, and synchronized we decided (on three, everyone: 1-2-3) t...

I am Kurr. I am young at seven hundred seasons.I am not yet wed, I have caught no manchilds, and the mountain thinks me odd.But as with many things, when I sit to think on this I see that what is seen as odd is often seen through odd-seeing eyes and that is what I tell myself, that I am not so odd perhaps as the mountain thinks I am, and this I sometimes tell my father and sometimes tell his father and sometimes tell his father too who is over four thousand seasons old for ...

Harry felt fractional: part man, part air.His flesh-and-bone part was squashed to four feet three inches by a fate and gravity too cruel to forgive, and the remaining two feet—he saw himself, his real self, as six foot three, not an inch shorter—see-through dream.Just his luck to have overshot the medical definition of dwarf by a solitary inch (which denied him certain medical benefits along with some extra helpings of sympathy), yet he was one, both in his own as well as o...

Professor God stepped a little closer, then bent forward and gazed over his student's shoulder and down on the trial universe soon to form under the transparent reality dome in front of them. Then he frowned, straightened, and said "No. No. No. That's too many."Student God, a creative and eager-to-learn lad of about eight or so billion years turned away from the dome under which he was constructing the first molecule, and looked up at the professor, then turned back to the shiny, s...

Arthur Thelonious Sherry of 46 Rexford Circle, Birchdale, Maine, was doing tax battle again. That is to say, not he personally but by way of Waynemore Bland, his accountant of many years: a 43-year-old man who still lived at home with his mother, and who had lost none of his hair and made a point of wearing it long to prove it.Arthur Sherry, who was losing his (no doubt about that) and wore it cropped to hide, or at best obscure, that fact, now sat in Bland's deep visitor's armchai...

On April 13, 1996, going on 2:30 in the afternoon, in a sunny clearing by a marsh not half a mile from the small red house (with white corners) where he lived with, and took care of, his aging mother, Ezra Wildmark, precisely fifty-one years and fourteen days old that day, met God—and God, as it happened, turned out to be Eskimo.That is, God was shortish, maybe an inch or two over five feet. He was slim, fit, and relaxed. His face was red leathery skin where dark eyes sat deeply am...

A sailboat with a crew of three goes down in a fierce storm somewhere between South Georgia and Gough Islands in the Southern Seas. All three drown.Though one of them not entirely.====The ocean spread in all directions like a blue-green sheet of undulating glass; in long, slow swells here where he hovered, vanishing into finer and finer motions toward the horizon where the surrounding water finally dropped away to form a perfect circle. The sun not so much glittered...

"You don't really exist, do you?""Well," he said, pulling at his long beard with a gnarled little hand, his booted little feet barely reaching the edge of the seat and showing dark leather soles scratched and patterned by years and miles, "that depends on who's looking."He didn't exist, of course. Couldn't.Still, as if to humor the hallucination, I asked, "Can I touch you?"He hesitated, but after a heartbeat or two answered as if he had not, "Of course."...

July 6, 1961What I dislike the most about electric shock is the smell. That, and the little sound it makes which I didn't hear at first. What with the humming of the machine, the doctors talking, and the patient moaning and even screaming sometimes, it was hard to hear, but once I did, once I did hear this sound, distinct from all the other sounds in the room, now I hear it all the time, I can't stop hearing it.What this sound is, is a tiny sizzle—as if you were frying a ve...