This is a story about dealing with an abusive authority figure. Bear with me.
When I was a teen, my parents offered to buy me a computer. This was a one-time deal, so I waited until the last few months before college, so I’d have the most advanced computer possible for college. Continue reading “The Parable of My Dad and My Computer”
There’s a fine line between “Oh, fun, if I make a tailored playlist for a project, it helps me write!” and “Sigh, guess I’d better play the same album for the umpteenth time, cause last time I wrote it was playing, so if I listen to anything else, I won’t be able to write.”
Somehow it never occurred to me before today that I can just search “Star Trek” on Twitter, scroll through the results, and find totally random people to talk to about Star Trek.
Twelve-year-old me — who was heartbroken when my parents quit AOL (which charged by the minute) because I’d racked up $300 in one weekend on hanging out in a Star Trek chat room before they’d realized — would be THRILLED. Continue reading “AOL’s Star Trek Chat Room”
My dad, in addition to being a scary person, is a scary driver. I remember a time in college when I was old enough to be able to understand how scary his driving was, but I wasn’t old enough to be out from under his power… Continue reading “Sleeping Through Fear”
I’m up to season 7 of Girlfriends, and while it’s sad to lose Toni as a character, it’s really nice to see a show actually deal with a long term friendship ending in a sudden and permanent way.
Originally published in All Worlds Wayfarer, March 2020
“I didn’t want the mammals to know about me, so I kept my bodies huddled close, balled up together, wings held still, no buzzing.”
One of my scouts flies through the space station’s ductwork. Another flies out among the aliens who are crowding through the dock and maneuvers above them, looking down, seeing where I am, what this space station is like. Most of me clusters in a high corner out of sight, near the airlock I’ve painstakingly flown through, one body at a time, unnoticed, tiny, unimportant. The spaceship I arrived on doesn’t know it had a stowaway, let alone a thousand, bound together telepathically. A thousand tiny bodies, each many-legged with shimmering pairs of wings. One mind. I am Mazillion, and I am the first of my species in space. Continue reading “I Am Mazillion”