Tanner, or The Desert Island Question (Short Story)

My name is Tanner, and as far as I know, I am one of the last six people living on the planet.

The rest of the world, the part with contiguous land and registered travel and regular shipping routes, experienced an event. I do not know exactly what the event was, because of the spotty signals and static in my part of the world. I'm sure the slipshod reporting and government censorship in the rest of the world played a part, too. The rest of the world called it "the event," for guinessakes!

In my part of the world, though, they call it "the second event." The first event was the rapid capsizing of a luxury vessel.  To my knowledge, only thirteen people on board survived. Adrift, six of us reached this little island. I feel it must be the most isolated bit of land on the whole planet. It was once a volcanic hotspot, but it cooled long ago.

The stories I've read say that this island was once much larger, and that that it was only the last in a chain of many. The stories make it sound like it was a nice place at that time. I guess it's a nice place now, too. Especially when you compare it to the alternatives. Our coming here and the things that led to it are known here as "the event," because we need no other name.

Whatever happened to the rest of the world is called "the second event" because we know no other name for it. Most of what we do know about it is no more useful than the name. We know that it seemed frightening at first, and then it seemed like nothing, and then it was rapidly destructive. This is from the spotty signals Jaysin managed to pick up on the radio. We know that scientists in our area concluded that it was the will of Jahweh. This is from the last leaflet that somehow blew its way out the window of a superluxury cruiser and onto our little island. And we know that it destroyed the nearest branches of the civilization we left. This we know from the fact that the spotty transmissions and the leaflets don't come anymore.

I guess that there are other people in some other isolated part of the world who survived the second event. I know we all hope so. None of us are willing to admit any hope that we will meet those people, not anymore. But we hope they live anyway.

To be honest, I never did hope to meet them.

That isn't because life here is perfect. For one thing, this island is not all that big. Surely it's far more space than the six of us need by civilized standards, but it's surprising how quickly I became acclimated to the elbow room and started to feel crowded. Plus, everyone works three jobs, although the hours are surprisingly reasonable. Jaysin and Lee are hunters, carpenters and shoemakers, though Jaysin is just learning shoemaking now that his electronics business is obsolete. Morgin, Alex and Emma all spend most of their time gathering things, but Alex is our elected president, and Morgin and Emma are both clothiers.  Alex and Emma are responsible for our rainwater system, and Morgin is the closest thing we have to a chef. As for me, I am our toolmaker, our fire-keeper, and our veterinarian.

That last career choice was pretty unpopular with the rest of the people here. I guess that's not surprising. We don't have a herdsman or a dairy farmer. And when they found that I was pilfering food to feed a small flock of magpies and the feral cats on the island, I thought they were going to kill me. They probably would have, but Alex stepped in.

That surprised me a little bit. I thought Alex was pretty disappointed with me. I'm non-reproductive. There haven't been any children yet, but the two couples are trying. I've been intentionally avoiding any attempt. I was offered Alex, the president, as a mate. Though not quite attractive enough to be a screen star, Alex is the best-looking of us. I did notice that. At first, they assumed I am a homosexual. I let them assume. Eventually, someone asked. I am not.

It's just that out of all the species on this island, I don't have much interest in seeing humanity survive.

Jason Wood Comes to His Senses (Short Story)

Jason Wood never did figure out how he lost his sense of smell. Every so often, his family and some of his close friends would admonish him to see a doctor about it, but Jason was a man long accustomed to dismissing all physical ailments as being an “old football injury” or merely “something I ate.” It had begun so long ago that it couldn't be blamed on the food, which left “old football injury.”

There might not have been enough clues left for the doctor to piece together anyway. The truth was that Jason remembered virtually nothing about his early childhood (old football injury), and nothing at all about smells. At best, Jason could vaguely recall that at the age of nine, there were eight things he could smell. Four of them he found pleasant enough: garlic, tasty food other than garlic (all of this smelled exactly the same to Jason, even at age nine), gasoline and his own flatulence. The four remaining smells Jason could perceive were coffee, cigarette smoke, rain showers and food he didn't like (which all smelled the same to him, and more or less like onions). Those, Jason absolutely detested.

One by one, Jason lost his ability to smell those things as well. Rain showers were the first to go, which made sense. He could barely smell those when he was nine. Cigarette smoke was next, and that didn't surprise him, either. He couldn't smell any other kind of smoke at all. Coffee and gasoline held out the longest. People told Jason that he was lucky he couldn't smell things, and he more or less believed them.

There was no discernible pattern to Jason's smelling loss. He didn't lose a steady one smell per year, and it didn't happen exponentially. He didn't wipe them all out at once when he took up drinking, either. Yet the fact remained that by the time Jason went off to college, he could not smell anything at all. Far from being surprised, Jason had been anticipating that the day when he could no longer smell coffee would come sooner or later.

Jason Wood never did figure out why, after more than ten years without one, he suddenly regained his full sense of smell while boarding an overbooked 747 two days before Christmas, but he wasn't surprised to find that he regretted it.

Those Who Can't Teach Become Critics (Short Story from In-Class Writing)

Those who can't do teach.  Those who can't teach become critics.

Hagrid had to keep reminding himself – Those who can't do teach, and those who can't teach become critics.  It had become his mantra.  He had repeated it to himself over and over, each day of the past week, as he sat down in front of his parchment and quill.  Yet the parchment remained blank.

Ponderously, hesitantly, Hagrid reached for the quill and balanced it gently in his massive paw of a right hand.

It was a dark and stormy night, he wrote.

"No, that's a cliché," he said.  Hagrid placed his quill back in the inkwell.  Picking up his pink umbrella instead, he cast a spell to draw his ink back from the parchment.

Four score and seven years ago, he wrote.

"No, that's plagiarism," he said, and spelled his parchment plank again.

Life is a single dragon doing the locomotion, he wrote.

"No, no, that just doesn't make sense," he said, but this time, as he cast his spell onto the parchment, it burst into great green flames, which consumed most of the paper, and burned his quill to half its original length, as well.

"Oh well," Hagrid said in obvious relief.  "I can always start tomorrow."

Send Out the Fast Bowler (Short Story from In-Class Writing)

"What is the purpose of this?"

"What?"

"What is the purpose of this?"  Holmes asked, waving a large, flat bat in the air in a manner that some would consider dangerous.

"That's the bat, Holmes," Watson said, exasperated.

"I know it's the bat, Watson," Holmes said, equally exasperated, but with a touch of haughty contempt.  "I mean this.  This field.  This game.  What is the purpose of it?"

"It's a game.  It's fun.  It's good exercise.  Just do it for your health."

"I'm perfectly healthy.  In fact, I'd wager I'm healthier than you are, Watson."

"Fine, Holmes.  Then the purpose of this is to humor me.  Now, you stand in front of the wicket, and try to hit this ball when I bowl it by you."

Holmes struck the very first ball Watson threw him.  It finally landed at least a hundred yards away.

"I feel I have mastered cricket," Holmes said, sauntering off the pitch.

"I really need to teach you to fence, Watson."

The Weasel, the Dog, and the Fox: A Fable in the Classical Greek Style (short story)

A weasel and a dog went to a bar.  Both the dog and the weasel exchanged phone numbers with a fox.  The weasel called the fox the next day to set up a date that night.  The day after that, the dog called the fox, and they went out on a date.  After three days, the fox didn't call the dog, so the dog went back to the bar again to find another date.

When the fox didn't call the weasel back after a week, the weasel called the fox to set up another date, but this time, he brought the fox a gift.  The day after the second date, the weasel called the fox to set up a third date.  The weasel and the fox went on a date a week for a year, and the weasel bought many gifts for the fox.  Finally, the two were wedded, over parental objections.  Their years of married misery ended in a murder-suicide, while the dog enjoyed a long life of serial monogamy.