An Adventure of Sorts

What counts as an adventure these days: The other day I walked to the supermarket to get a flu shot at their pharmacy. Understand that the supermarket is only three blocks from my home and that I haven't been inside the place since March, as deliveries from local businesses have kept us supplied. An employee was at the door with wipes, hand sanitizer and masks, there was hardly anybody inside the store, and all shoppers and employees were masked and meticulous about keeping their distance, as was I. Got my shot of vaccine and was able to print out my permission form at home before heading over so didn't have to fill it out there. The checkout stations all had plastic shields between cashiers and customers and there was no physical contact at all among us. This is reassuring but didn't prevent my experiencing ripples of anxiety. Clearly it's going to take time to get used to this. In the meantime, hope all of you are wearing your masks when you're out and about.

A Story in Estonian

My novelette "Dream of Venus," first published in 2000, is now out in Estonian (the first translation of any of my work in that language) in a special Venus issue of Täheaeg Magazine. Some good news for a change!

Soap Strata

My mother, a child of the Great Depression, was thrifty in a way I often found absurd. She wasn’t stingy and could be extremely generous, but she hated waste. She could make a meal out of scraps of food that we more careless people would have tossed before ordering take-out. Whenever a bar of bath soap had been worn down to a sliver, it ended up in a soap dish. Sometimes these pieces were pressed together and shaped into a ball, but more often they accumulated in a pile that soon looked like a miniature model of geologic strata.

When my mother died in 2018, I found myself collecting my own slivers of soap in what now seems like an unconscious ritual of mourning. “You never know when you might need this,” my mom used to say about some battered old pot or other worn out artifact. Now that I’m almost constantly washing my hands with a thin stratum of soap, I know how right she was.

In case anyone is curious....

.... I am well and staying at home, living as hermetically as possible, as is my partner, George Zebrowski. As it was a pleasant spring day yesterday, I took a short walk then, the first for some time, of a couple of blocks to my bank and then to the grocery store for a bunch of bananas, but made sure to keep the requisite six feet away from my pals, the bank manager and produce guy, putting up my hands palms out to show them I had my protective gloves on while they nodded at me and feeling as though we were all simulacra, or zombies, going through our usual greetings. Don't plan to go out for a while now and don't really have to---there's nowhere to go anyway with just about everything shut down--unless the weather is good enough to take a walk around the neighborhood while keeping well away from anybody else who's out. To everyone out there, stay safe and healthy.

"His Two Wars"

A new story of mine, "His Two Wars," is available in Short Things, an anthology of stories based on John W. Campbell's classic novella "Who Goes There?", the basis for both the 1951 and 1982 movies entitled The Thing. My story brings two of that story's characters, MacReady and Norris, to Hawaii on December 6, 1941. A Kindle edition of Short Things is out from Amazon and the trade paperback edition can be ordered from Wildside Press here (in the U.S.) and here (for international orders).