Pepper

I put too much pepper in my soup today, but don't worry. I did it on purpose. It's getting cold outside, so I put extra pepper in the broth to force that lingering warm feeling in my chest. I wanted my body to know that as

Is anyone else a little dizzy...?

The cultural landscape of modern America is characterized by uncertainty. In my deepest analytical conversations exploring politics, faith, technology, and the future, someone always ends up crying. Someone always says “I don’t know,” with an air of finality. I don’t know either. Nobody seems to know, and the

nondefragmentation

As a child, I adored disk defragmentation. This was a part of a larger sense that computers were magic, a sense that even computer utilities were a kind of inspired play, the conversation between metal and sand and electricity. I watched defrag run for long minutes, tiny colored blocks shifting

Left Behind

Audra was used to getting left behind. On her fifteenth birthday, when she was supposed to be enjoying cake and playing party games with her friends, she was watching out the porch window and thinking about how her dad would burst in, driving his broad shoulder into the wood to

The Fountain of Inspiration

One of the most common questions fiction writers face (after “you’re not quitting your day job, are you?”) is the question of where we get our ideas. It’s a question that has always frustrated me because the answer is complicated, and also because the question is somewhat broken.