Last Bender

As Felix unlocked his silver bike in a pool of blue street light filled with billows of mosquitoes and gnats he thought that he might as well go straight to Les Jardeen and call home from there. If Veronica wanted to join him for dinner (which he doubted) she could ride into town. Normally (whatever [...]

Sonny ‘Bop’ Molloy and Deb Shannon, of the Hudson County security forces, assigned to the town of Hartland, serving in the Rockland Precinct, landed their armored, four person hovercraft on the street outside of Felix and Veronica’s home and got out. Their faces were nearly invisible behind the thick globe of CellPack that encased their [...]

Veronica was much closer to death than the Medivac team had led on. They had gotten to her in time however and there was no permanent damage done to her brain or liver. The wounds to her arms were superficial and would heal, but without cosmetic surgery there’d be scars.
That first night Felix sat in [...]

Something, growing suspicion perhaps, propelled Dr. Ruth Bryson from Owen Bradlee’s apartment, down the elevator and into a Personal Commuter Pod station a block away. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth.
The morning air was chilly and dry. It blew down on the concrete platform, two stories above the street. She leaned against the dark blue [...]

The morning of the day his wife, Dr. Ruth Bryson, was to arrive Leonard Bryson awoke with an almost adolescent shudder of anticipation. He had not been a reflective man, more a sensation seeker bent on satisfying his own curiosity, a doer, but he had, since retirement, surveyed his personal conduct with a shock. It [...]

Loopy with booze, Bryson sat back into the black foam seat and toyed with the radio. Clouds, enormous hunks of coal with little lightning forks leaping between them, approached from the north. The rest of the sky was achingly blue, in every direction. She passed over Seneca Lake. The land about was parched, the meadows [...]

Once Veronica began taking Paregane their lives returned to normal very quickly. It was almost as if nothing had happened. But something, of course, had happened. The world didn’t fit the explanations. It marked Felix in ways he was trying to understand and understanding eluded him.
Veronica recovered both physically and mentally. She spent her days [...]

At the first sign of light, a pink and yellow lightening of the ceiling, Felix’s eyes snapped open like rubber gloves. Sleep done before it had even started. He felt like he had been thrown suddenly out of a painless place and into a harsh, discordant one and lay there in disbelief that it was [...]

“Perfection,” the corpuscular, oscillating alias of Chairman Aung said, “is the ideal we may never attain but must constantly strive towards. Excellence is the means to that end, the path we choose to take, ever mindful of the destination.
“A ruthless honesty, dedication to fact, respect for process, a relentless pursuit of that which we know [...]

The way was familiar. The flat stones beneath his feet were warm and smooth. Myrtle and ivy drifted over the path. As he walked along he thought, stone, myrtle, ivy. To the right was a low wall of cracked and water stained stucco and beyond the wall stood an orchard of apple, pear and peach. [...]