“There is no coherent way to tell the necessary story.” – Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained On May 24th of this year, I received an email from my mother, telling me that my great-aunt would not be able to come to the celebration my fiancée and I were preparing to travel cross-country to attend. When my…

In 1823, Reverend Thomas Dick saw fortifications on the moon. + Before Copernicus, astronomers and philosophers saw the earth as the center of the universe. + In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli saw “canali” on Mars. Translated into English, “canali” can mean either channel or canal. Given that channels are natural and canals are artificial, Schiaperelli’s Italian…

I’ve been a fan of Gabriel Blackwell’s work since the first piece of his I read, “The Little Death” in Conjunctions. When his piece LATITUDE 33° 11’ NORTH, LONGITUDE 40° 28’ WEST came out in DIAGRAM 11.1, I was thrilled anew, as I wanted to see how Gabe’s personal aesthetic would intersect with that magazine’s…

In those first days of affliction we found them banked against buildings or curled onto bunks or tucked into beds. We found them swollen and green and sometimes rosy lipped. We found them with mouths burst open and clucking in tongues. We found them drawing pigeons and ducks on the walls with their feces, with…

The first bee she found was dead. It spilled out, riding a wave of cereal as she poured herself breakfast one morning. It lay, bright yellow, like a discarded curl of dusty velvet, amid the bland Cheerios she hadn’t wanted to eat to begin with. She had picked the box up out of habit, knowing…

As a science student, I was inept on a good day. It wasn’t always thus; as a kid I had subscriptions to OMNI and Science Digest and devoured science fiction by the stack. The culmination of my scientific career, the closest I’ll come to Swedish laurels, was in seventh and eighth grade. In grade 7,…

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide — it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese — the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in…

“No produce yet,” Bev hollered from the line. “Those guys are idiots.” “Yea, and good morning to you too.” Linda set her purse on the desk by the back door of the narrow kitchen. “Have they called?” “What do you think?” “I think it’s time to get a new purveyor. Okay, make a list of…

This was nothing new. In some ways the men had always been leaving. Leaving on fishing boats, leaving for logging camp, even the men who worked AoG at Boeing and were lucky enough to still have jobs were always leaving for some faraway place to recover an airplane gone down in a remote jungle or…

No one knew exactly where the Tom came from. He’d been prowling the neighborhood for weeks, maybe months and had killed Mrs. Gustafson’s pair of free-range Java finches that she blissfully allowed rule of here screened-in front porch. Everyone assumed that the cat came from the gully behind her house. After all, as the children…

“Liz, pick-up.” Susan’s voice sounds scratchy through the cheap, plastic speaker on the front of the phone. For just a moment Liz is disoriented, still recovering from the heart-stopping squawk that preceded the disembodied voice. “I’m terribly sorry but I have to answer this page,” Liz says to Mr. Weiss. She holds up her index…

Liz has seven items on her to-do list. Four of them are easily accomplished: check the ticker on her computer screen for the current weather in Los Angeles; buy a stamp, which she can do at any teller window; put stamp on envelope; place bill in mail box. The other three items are prohibitively difficult:…