5 storylets

Apr 10, 2008 - 12:23 PM PST

Two lovers in a nighttime room, blue and whispering curtains, and moonlight scintillating like silvery mercury on the glowing sea below. She's lying on his chest, rising and falling. She smiles and says, "Hey...I can hear your heartbeast."

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I'll never forget the moment we first saw the Nazis' summer uniforms. That's when we truly knew that spring was finally here. The Nazis just knew. They had some mysterious facility for knowing these things -- like a flock of swifts in the field at sunset, or the wise boll weevil.

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The dispersal of early man out of Africa on improvised gliders and membranes and airfoils. None of which survive today, being far too fragile...but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!

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The launch of the blondes (or "blaunch", as it became known in the press) was a signal event in human history.

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Or what about Anton Chekhov's black-eyed hindu maiden? Elided from his published letters, a description of making moonlit love to a "black-eyed Hindu girl" under swaying coconut-palms. This girl conceived and had a bastard son who ran lickety-split through the Ceylon forests and became a writer on tree bark, a writer on the water, a writer in the sky. He would sit there and write in nonsense characters in the clouds. He would arrange the things around him into "stories", as he called them, link them as syllables words and phrases -- that cloud, this curled vine, this rock, that tiger...t-t-t-TIGER?? And so that was the end of Chekhov's bastard son, who never reached his majority, much less becoming literate enough to share his genetic inclination with the rest of his island's illustrious inhabitants.