The Vigorish

Sal lurked in the hallways of the gambling den, all greasy hair and cigarette stench. No one acknowledged his presence, not even the proprietor who employed him. He was considered a necessary evil by some, the angel of reckoning by others.

They called him the Vigorish. His job was to calculate and collect the interest. He wasn't the muscle--he was too much of a worm to behave violently. He was just the one doing the math.

If he came to your table, you knew you'd been cut off. If he came to your home, you knew you were dead.

The Diapason

Before the stroke, Malcolm was obsessed with football.

Afterwards, Malcolm found a part of his brain that had never been used before was now actively engaged. In grade school, he had failed to learn even a rudimentary song on the piano. Now music was everywhere.

When it came to natural phenomenon, the wind, breathing, the setting of the sun, he heard their rhythms as a harmonious symphony. Machines and furniture emitted a cacophony of unholy clamor that caused waves of nausea.

Malcolm held the keys to the universe inside his injured brain. His new obsession was the destruction of God.

Time Crystal

Dr. Henrich had been working on the prototype for decades. His entire career had been devoted to transferring the three dimensional periodic arrangement of a crystal onto a four dimensional construct.

He had finally succeeded.

His time crystal would allow him to travel to any time he wished. He could walk through the past the same way we normally walk down a busy street.

Unfortunately at his age, he was hobbled by his recent hip replacement and the crystal wasn't large enough to fit his Segway. It would take him hours just to make it back to breakfast this morning.

Banishment

Ralph saw the boat waiting for him and wanted to cry. He was walking away from the only home he had ever known in his life.

The town of Kellenah occupied a small island off the coast of South Carolina. It was the only place in America that practiced democracy in the same style that the ancient Greeks had. That included banishment.

The townspeople had just voted Ralph off the island. He expected that his family at least would have come with him, but they decided to stay. They were unwilling to give up their membership at the country club.

Founding Father

The first documented invasion of Earth occurred prior to the Revolutionary War in the mid-eighteenth century. The aliens had achieved interstellar flight through a complicated series of hydraulics powered by steam. They were an industrious species but their eagerness to rule Earth was not matched by their technology.

The invasion began in less populated parts of North America and mainly affected the natives. The first major settlement they entered was Adamsville, which was completely burned to the ground.

The new world might have been destroyed then and there had it not been for Benjamin Franklin and his invention of electricity.

The Allergy

Last Saturday, I woke up to discover I was allergic to the color green.

I experienced a burning sensation and debilitating pain as I watered my plants, ate a salad for lunch, and finally mowed the lawn in the afternoon. That last one led to a trip to the emergency room.

The allergist was the first to diagnose me. She said it wasn't as unusual as I might think to be allergic to color. She mentioned a friend who had been allergic to yellow his whole life.

The thing is, as Superman, it was bad enough with the kryptonite thing.

The Clock

I was walking down Canal Street when a man threw a clock from the roof of a twenty-story building. It smashed into the car next to me and I was startled from my chocolate-induced haze. I really like chocolate when I can get it.

I caught just a glimpse of the man and he looked like an angel, all blond hair and white clothes. I examined the clock, with its hands pointed to 4:44. I wondered if it indicated the start of the rapture.

Later, I realized the angel had escaped from the asylum at the same time I had.

Gothic Punishments

The idea was to keep piling bricks until you'd walled yourself into a tomb of your own making. It was all very Gothic, something straight out of Poe.

For Walter Rochester, however, the laying of bricks was not strictly a punishment. He found the monotonous labor helped to relieve his mind of thoughts of his unfulfilled existence and he embraced the endeavor. Where others resigned themselves with morbid indifference, Walter used the opportunity to indulge all of his latent fantasies.

His father had forbid him to attend architecture school, so his tomb would be a monument to those abandoned ambitions.

The Science Of Engineering

No one knew what was causing the rumble in subway line Q6, but it had people scared. City council called in the engineers and scientists to determine the source before they had an accident.

The engineers took a survey to measure what environmental factors might be affecting the tunnel and quickly reached a conclusion. Groundwater was leaking into the structure and had compromised the integrity of the entire network. They ordered an immediate closure to the line and made plans for repairs.

The scientists meanwhile blamed the whole thing on climate change. No wonder the Republicans hate science so much.

Ataraxia

He was plagued by a disturbed mental state, in that his mind was almost always perfectly relaxed. There were brief episodes of interruption over the course of the day, when he might eat a bit of sustenance or move an inch here or there. But even in these moments of excitement, his mind was preternaturally tranquil.

We would watch him for hours at a time, recording the slightest movements. On the one hand, we envied his peacefulness, and became more contemplative ourselves, but we still looked at him as something of a freak.

This was the life of a sloth.