The Self-Healing Sky
Howard V. Hendrix

“SOME OF THEM ARE KILLERS.” That’s what it originally meant, the word from which the name of this valley was taken. From the name of the people who lived here. Not that they called themselves that. That’s what their neighbors called them.

Their own word for the valley meant “gaping jaw.” They traded with a people across the mountains, who lived beside a small lake far too salty to drink, one punctuated by barren islands and crusty towers. Black oak acorns and woven grass baskets went over the mountains. Brine fly larvae and knives of black volcanic glass -- sharper than scalpels of finest surgical steel -- came back.

Both the people of the valley and the people over the mountains are gone now. Maybe their knives weren’t sharp enough, or maybe not enough of them were killers. Or maybe they weren’t as good at killing as those who came after them.

By the time you visit, the newcomers don’t so much live in the valley as visit it in great numbers. From all over the world people of many languages come to the newcomer’s country to see this valley. They believe they can better appreciate its beauty -- its meadows and waterfalls, its granite domes and hanging-garden canyons -- than the people who once lived here ever could.

Vocabulary Items
Bruce Holland Rogers

John Gardner referred to the writing of non-traditional narratives as “jazzing around.” I like that label much better than “experimental fiction.” An experiment can be something that the writer does for his own sake, with little thought for whether or not the reader will have any fun. Jazzing around, on the other hand, swings. Jazzing around is about improvisation, surprise, and having fun for the benefit of both the writer and the reader. One kind of jazzing around that I especially enjoy is taking some of non-literary language — a math problem, a recipe, a guide for expectant mothers — and writing a story in that form. So here’s a series of narratives that tests your reading comprehension and vocabulary. Use only a number two pencil to mark your answers. Begin.

CHOOSE THE APPROPRIATE WORD to complete the following sentences.

1. As citizens we would be ____________ if we did not make these facts public.

A. derelict, B. dirigible, C. discreet, D. detritus

In the city council chamber, the floor was opened for public comment. Two citizens came to the microphone.

Ms. Patricia Wilson, who was represented by Mr. Kyle in the Sixth Ward said: “My friend Amy, who is a nurse at the VA hospital, she can get me as much Percodan as I want. And I want a lot.”

A Voice for the Goddess of Mercy
Patricia MacEwen

A STORM IS COMING. Yes - the storm we have been waiting for, though you did not know it. There. Do you hear it? The chimes in the tree? Do you know what that soft clatter means?

To you, I suppose, it means nothing at all when the wind stirs those few bits of bone - not enough to build even the smallest of drums and yet all I have left in the world, all they ever returned to me. I shaped them as well as I could, even so, and I hung them as high up as possible.

He has always been drawn to high places, my grandson. When he was but so high, he’d climb any rising slope. Then came the trees, and the hills and then every one of the Chungyang Shanmo, the mountains that have always been our people’s homeland. Inevitably, when he reached New York, he climbed the two skyscrapers. High places spoke to him, pulling him upward as if, in a former life, he were an eagle.

His dream? The Space Station, higher than even the sky itself, and it was this more than anything else that led him to leave the First People, to leave Taiwan.

“I’ll come back,” he promised me. “Four years for my engineering degree, and then two more in graduate school. By then, I’ll have the chops to go anywhere.”

Eyes the Color of Earth as Seen From Above
P.R.A. Stillman

GOD SCRUBBED THE CORPSES OF INSECTS off his windscreen with crumpled newspaper and white vinegar, blessing each broken wing and powdered bit of exoskeleton as it fell to the icy tarmac. The North-westerlies were coming in hard and cold, billowing the silk wind-sock on the edge of the airstrip into a great orange condom. God thought about His wife, Edna; her hair pinned in a thick brown bun, filmy wisps escaping to form a fringe around her fine unlined forehead, corn flour dusting her gingham apron and the toes of her extra-wide shoes. If He could get Peaches off the ground, get the mail up to Gold Creek, and get back to Anchorage before the storm came in, He could be home in time for fresh grits.

God ducked under the patched canvas shroud that hung down from the cowling and poured heated engine oil from the blow-pot into Peaches’ engine. He brushed a thin layer of snow off of her skis, then cranked her over, letting her warm up long and slow. No warped valves for this gal. Parts were too hard to come by on the frontier to risk a rebuild on. He folded the tarp and rolled the blow-pot back to the tin nose hanger then hefted Himself into the cockpit. He nibbled on a sweet roll while Peaches’ engine sputtered into a final, steady thrum.

By sunrise, she was ready to go, easily lifting into the slowly brightening sky.

The Buddha Lectures on Cosmology
Dana William Paxson

I TOOK MY SEAT in the advanced physics lecture hall, trying to get the morning’s extra caffeine working. Cosmic inflation had been the subject the day before: time and space coming into existence all as one, such that time itself did not exist outside of this creation. Hard to squeeze into a human brain so early in the day.

There’s no set of tenses in human language to describe a situation where time is no more than a measure like space, and getting from the point of the singularity to the expanse of our time and times beyond is a journey in a languages of tenses other than past, present, and future. Physics alone possesses the language. So I believed, and I was struggling badly with its formidable mathematical thickets. Had I wasted all these years of study to find that I couldn’t do it?

The professor came into the hall, not carrying her usual sheaf of notes and transparencies. She looked up at the seventy-five of us and grinned.

“We have a guest lecturer today. The Buddha has decided to visit us and give today’s lecture.” She inclined her head toward the door, and reached out a hand of welcome.

There was a rustle in the seats as students shifted uneasily. I wondered what this was all about. Some guy dressed up in costume, no doubt, to jar us awake for a change. Early-September fun. Too bad there was so much material to cover – this was a detour from needed lecture time. I fiddled with the bookmarks in my copy of Dodelson.

Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go
Lorelei Shannon

WELL, BILLY JAMES, the whole thing started about four months ago. Earl and me had just read in the paper how — are you sittin’ comfortably, Billy James? That’s good, we take pride in our hospitality. Anyhow, we was sittin’ at the breakfast table, and Earl had just finished his salt pork and eggs, when he spits coffee all over the newspaper. I says, “Earl, what on earth has possessed you to do such a disgustin’ thing. And on a Sunday, too!” And he just looks at me with these grim eyes, and holds up the newspaper.

There it was, just as big as life and twice as ugly. Jerry Sparkle, our most favorite Elvis imitator in the whole wide world, had got hisself murdered. Oh, it was a shockin’ thing. They found him split open like a spring lamb. His insides was out, and his outsides was in none too pretty shape neither. It was purely horrible.

Needless to say, we was both heartbroken. We barely had the get-up to drive ourselves here, but somehow we managed. Billy James, you know the Elvis Is Our King Boutique is our very lives. But we barely managed to open up this place of beauty on that terrible mornin’. We was both slumped behind the counter, limp as chickens on a hot day. We put on the King’s Moody Blue record, on account of us bein’ so blue ourselves. Also, we thought it was kinda respectful.

Dali, at Age 26, Believing Himself to be Heavyweight Champion of the World
Gary W. Shockley

THE MUSTACHE STRUCK THE CANVAS FIRST, soon followed by the attached Catalan dandy. If not for the bell, the fight might then have ended. Now sure and muscular hands dragged him into the claustrophobic obscenity of a corner. Two vague ovals hovered over him.

“Salv, keep your guard up,” said Miró, waving a tin of sulfur yellow beneath his nostrils. “And jab. Jab, jab, jab.”

“You’d do well to keep circling,” added Picasso, sealing his brow with retouch varnish.

Dali gazed across the abyss of countless rounds at what had first manifested as the barest figment of his imagination -- a smudge of intrigue, of isometric eccentricity with cannibalistic impulses, a pebble of perverse contours threatening sodomistic intent. He had maneuvered about it for a time, more intrigued than threatened, wanting a fuller declaration of its being before troubling his shoe to stomp it out of existence. By then it had grown in a misfit of mischief to truly horrific proportions, acquiring a distinctive limp, stirring up a terrifying swarm of grasshoppers, at every stage resisting the analytical faculties of his paranoiac-critical method -- such that even now he had no idea what it was.