On:

Irving (ID: G70133; Rank: 3,000) swiped his tablet and spooned his meal. He was in trouble because he turned on the lights during nap time. His punishment was to write Unpermitted light. Unpermitted light. Unpermitted light. Every day, Irving did something wrong, and every day, Irving had a new punishment.Continue Reading

On:

There was a legend that one hundred years ago our population was cut in half when a cloud of creatures descended from the sky, set down upon our village, and drove our people into madness. It was a story told to children. “The Night of the Swarmed Eclipse.” “The MillionsContinue Reading

On:

The Neighborhood Watch was four people. I was one of those four people. I, like you or your mom, get up every morning and pull on my pants. I sit on the toilet. I brush my teeth. They call me The Tamer, or Toni, the Tamer. The joke is notContinue Reading

On:

My father was a Shakespearean actor. He played Macbeth. My father is elderly and not allowed in New York. He was called on the phone by Maxine Doyle. We used an old telephone with a plastic receiver.—is this Pat Barba?My father held the phone and stood by the glass. WeContinue Reading

On:

In the event it became necessary to start the new origin of life, we observed the machine. To disguise the machine, we filled the aboveground area (the machine was of course built underground), an otherwise abandoned field, with three hundred sky-blue dumpsters. The dumpsters were not dumpsters of refuse, butContinue Reading

On:

It is not feasible after a battle to make soldiers count.  It is not feasible to make a scribe wander aimlessly through a battlefield. Soldiers cut hands off the bodies, one hand per body, and arrange them in a grid for scribes to tally.  Two hands; two dead. Five hands;Continue Reading

On:

On a fishing expedition, Sneferu gave a maiden a golden ring. She slid the ring onto her finger, then, thinking better of it, slid it off and dropped it in the Nile.  Stop the boat, she said. And retrieve my ring. This is Pharaoh Sneferu, the men said. He builtContinue Reading

On:

As my mother is equally afraid of small spaces as she is of large spaces, I will build my mother a geodesic dome, its outer wall comprised of two walls, essentially a dome over a dome, three feet of space between the two domes. The dome is then a veryContinue Reading