Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

"I know what that's like," Mimi said. "I hadn't spoken more than three words in the six months before I met Krishna. I worked at a direct-mail house, proofreading the mailing la...

He kneaded at her flesh, grinding hard at the knots and feeling them give way, briskly rubbing the spots where they'd been to get the blood going. Her wings flapped gently aroun...

"I'm every bit the monster my brother is," he hissed in Krishna's ear. "I *made* him the monster he is. *Don't squirm*," he said, punching Krishna hard in the ear with his free...

She caught him in the schoolyard on Monday and dragged him by one ear out to the marshy part. She pinned him down and straddled his chest and tickled him with one hand so that h...

He scooted back on the bed, trying to untangle the sheet, which was still secured at the foot of the bed and all along one side. He freed his good arm just as Davey slashed at h...

I picked my way out of the water again and I walked to the shore, and it was too dark to put on my clothes, so I carried them under one arm and felt my way back to the summer ca...

The pictures were stiff and mysterious. Faces loomed out of featureless black backgrounds: pop-eyed, jug-eared Russian farm boys, awkward farm girls with process waves in their...

He groped toward Davey and smelled the blood. Kneeling down, he found Davey's hand and followed it up to his shoulder, his neck. Slick with blood. Higher, to Davey's face, his f...

"He offered me a bottle of wine if I let him take me home," Bradley said. "Best offer I had all week. Wanna make it a threesome? An *'ow you say* 'mange ma twat?'"

The boys brought him roots and fruits they'd gathered, sweets and bread they'd stolen, small animals they'd caught. Ed-Fred-George were an unbeatable team when it came to catchi...

"Well," Alan said. He didn't know what to say. High school. Dancing. Invited to parties. No one had invited him to parties when he'd graduated from elementary school, and he'd b...

"Eat," he said. "Here." He reached for a clean napkin from the next table and handed it to her. She dried her eyes and wiped her nose and ate a spoonful of yogurt. "Drink," he s...

"It's better now," she said. "I've been bringing home two or three movies every night and watching them, just to get to know the stock, and I put on different things in the stor...

"But it's not going to be all or nothing. We want to make the community a part of the network. Getting people energized about participating in the network is as important as pro...

They left the diner in a sleepdep haze and squinted into the sunrise and grinned at each other and burped up eggs and sausages and bacon and coffee and headed toward Kurt's Buick.

Alan pulled up short, nearly colliding with a trio of cute university girls in wife-beaters pushing bundle-buggies full of newspaper-wrapped fish and bags of soft, steaming bage...

"Not just pedantic," the graybeard said. "If you have a *lot* of these boxes in known locations with known nominal throughput, you can use them as a kind of sensor array. When t...

"Billy," Alan said to the solemn little boy, who nodded. "Can you take care of Edward for a little while? I need to clean up." Billy nodded again and held out his pudgy arms. Al...

"That's enough," Alan said in his boss voice, his more-in-anger-than-in-sorrow voice. "Get him, Natalie. You don't need to be in the middle of this -- it's not right for him to...

First, one of the punks (who had a rusty "NO FUTURE" pin that Alan thought would probably go for real coin on the collectors' market) asked Natalie to pass her the cream. Then L...

Anders nodded. "I knew you were going to say that. But don't think of this as a computer thing, okay? Think of this as a free speech thing. We're putting in a system to allow pe...

The bookcases went into the house, along each wall, according to a system of numbers marked on their backs. Alan had used Tony's measurements and some CAD software to come up wi...

But a lot of time had gone by and the brothers weren't kids anymore. Alan was nineteen, ready to move to Toronto and start scouting for real estate. Only Doug still looked like...

"It doesn't fit with our priorities. We're here to make print materials about the movement available to the public. They can get Internet access somewhere else. Internet access...

1. "Collective Work" means a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety in unmodified form, along with a number of other cont...

This is my third novel, and as with my first, _Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom_ (http://craphound.com/down) and my second, _Eastern Standard Tribe_ (http://craphound.com/est),...

"Come on," she said. Kurt was already limping for the alley. Benny and David had already melted away. They were alone in the yard, and the sirens were so loud now, and there wer...