As usual, the month is getting away from me.  Last month, I missed the Dated Essay.  I remembered this time, but only because of Stephen King.  

I’m reading his latest collection of short stories (some will appear in next month’s recommended reading), and it got me thinking about the books (and stories) of his that I’ve enjoyed in the past.  I wrote an entire editorial about one of them for F&SF 12 years ago.  (12 years!  Wow!)

Here’s the editorial.  What’s dated?  Not a lot.  In fact, the last line is prescient.  I still think King is one of our very best writers.  But let’s see…it’s no longer possible to buy the book in pieces.  (Unless you go to a used bookstore.)  And of course, I’m not editing. But other than that….

Editorial

By the time you read this, the frenzy will be over.  The excitement has already died down as I write this editorial in September of 1996.  But since I have just written a series that discusses the problems with publishing, I feel I should discuss one of its successes.

Stephen King’s The Green Mile.

I’ve always had great admiration for King.  He is arguably our best storyteller, one of our best stylists (when he choses to be), and  in some ways, the man who can tap into our national subconscious.  Given his tremendous success at such a young age, he could have stopped writing altogether, or continued writing tried and true horror novels in the vein of Carrie or The Shining.  Instead, each book has taken risks.  Sometimes the risks work.  Sometimes they don’t.

The Green Mile works.

As I write this, King has six books on the bestseller list, and an article in yesterday’s newspaper claims he will have eight on the list by week’s end, a record that, as the newspaper says, “no one is disputing.”

Those six books are all sections of The Green Mile.

For those of you who managed to avoid bookstores, airports, and grocery checkout lines since April, The Green Mile is a novel published in six parts.  It is a well-plotted meditation on death, dying, and survival set in part in two prisons: Cold Mountain Penitentiary during the thirties, and a nursing home in 1996.  The narrator, one Paul Edgecombe, is witness to magical happenings on Death Row in Cold Mountain, the place where men wait before they walk “the green mile” to the electric chair.  Edgecombe, who writes of the events of the past as memoir from his room in the nursing home, has a reason for writing now.  And that reason King wisely refuses to reveal until Part Six.

I suspect The Green Mile will work well as a single volume novel, but I feel sad for those of you who waited to read the book all at once.  You’ve missed something.  As King says in his introduction to the whole series:

…in a story which is published in installments, the writer gains an ascendancy over the reader which he or she cannot otherwise enjoy: simply put, Constant Reader, you cannot flip ahead and see how matters turn out.

You also cannot stay up all night to finish the book.  That was my frustration.  I picked up The Two Dead Girls, the first installment of The Green Mile, on the day it came out partly because I was intrigued, and partly because I am a big King fan.  I liked the idea of the experiment, and I expected a Perils of Pauline cliff-hanger novel that would leave Our Hero on the brink of some disaster at the end of part one.

Instead I read a subtle cliff-hanger, one based on characterization and the promise of suspense to come.  I found that I couldn’t shake the story during that month (which is just amazing considering how much I read), and I felt deep frustration at my inability to finish the book on my schedule.  At the end of April, I was in our local bookstore on the day Part Two, The Mouse on the Mile, arrived.  I read that section within two hours, and was alternately frustrated and pleased that I was enjoying the series so much.

I’ve spoken to other readers who’ve had the same experience, and we all agree that part of the joy of the series was the loss of control, the forced savoring of the novel, the willingness to read at someone else’s pace.  Had The Green Mile been bad or even mediocre, the experiment would have failed.  Because it was so good, it worked beyond all expectations.

The publisher, Signet, expected this series to be a gimmick, a loss leader for King’s future books.  The novel sold (and continues to sell) beyond expectation.  I know other novels in installments will follow: John Saul has just signed up to do one.  But a serialized novel is, as King says, a precarious balancing act, a chance for critics to beat you up (or praise you) six times for the same work.  It is, in my opinion, something only our best storytellers, our best stylists, can pull off with any degree of success.

My hat’s off to Stephen King.  He walked the wire with flare and panache.

And gave me a most marvelous reading experience, one that I will savour for years to come.

Recently, I read Dave Eggers’ essay on the future of reading in Esquire. It’s an excellent essay, using statistics to show us that the future of reading is extremely positive.

But the theory in here–getting kids excited about reading–encourages them to read in the future. That remains true.

Editorial (August, 1995)

Last week, I was scouting the aisles at the local Barnes and Noble when I heard a young boy’s voice speaking loudly.

“…and I wanna get the first one and the second one and the third one because I liked all of them that I got so far. Have you read any? They’re really good. And I’m going to collect all of them, every one of them, and I won’t lend them out because I did that once and the kid didn’t give them back….”

I crept around the Bargain Books until I reached the cash registers. There, a harried looking woman wrote a check while her young son clutched three R.L. Stine books to his chest. A stack of five R.L. Stine’s sat on the counter, and the boy kept touching them as he spoke. No one was really listening to him except me. He was clearly very excited, but his mother and the sales clerk were busy with the purchase.

“I bet R.L. Stine can afford to send his children to college,” the mother said as she handed the check to the sales clerk.

The sales clerk nodded. The boy asked again if he could have the remaining five books, and his mother explained the concept of lay away to him in a tone that showed she had explained this before. Then they left, the boy still nattering happily about all the R.L. Stine books he was going to collect.

I started toward the counter when a black, blue and white streak nearly knocked me over. Another little boy, about the same age as the first, stood on his tiptoes and slapped an R.L. Stine book on the counter. He handed the clerk a crumpled five dollar bill. As she gave him the change, she tried to engage him in conversation. But he said nothing; he was already reading as he ran out the door.

As I walked toward the counter, I remembered the last time I had seen a young boy and R.L. Stine books. A month before, I had been in Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon (a city block of books!) and the boy ahead of me in line was balancing about fifty very thin books between his chin and his hands. His mother had her credit card out and was grinning as she said to the clerk, “I told him he could buy as many as he could carry.”

With that memory in mind, I decided to start an investigation into R.L. Stine. I don’t have children. I am often oblivious to the latest hot thing. I asked the sales clerk if I had just witnessed a fluke or a fad. She looked at me as if I had just climbed out of an isolation chamber.

“We ordered 76 copies of the latest in the Goosebumps Series,” she said, “and sold out in a week. We just got our reorder of 50 and those will be gone by tomorrow.”

Her statistics are not a fluke. According to Publisher’s Weekly, the Goosebumps series (which is aimed at the 9-12 year old age group) accounted for 13 of the 15 paperback front list spots on the children’s bestseller lists in 1994. (It also accounted for 13 of the 15 paperback backlist spots.) Since the series debuted in 1993, it has sold 13,880,000 copies (or over 500,000 copies per novel).

Children are reading. Goosebumps appeals to both boys and girls in the target age group, and for older children, Stine has another series called Fear Street. It’s not quite the same phenomenon — only 4 million copies sold to date — but the numbers are impressive enough to make R.L. Stine the hottest writer in America today. He’s hotter than John Grisham, Stephen King, and Danielle Steele.

But the important point is that R.L. Stine writes genre fiction. His genre happens to be the same as ours. His novels range from horror to dark fantasy to suspense.

The informative sales clerk also told me that “it’s too bad kids are reading Stine. They don’t learn anything from the books.”

I was intrigued enough by the children’s enthusiasm and by the clerk’s comments to buy a pile of R.L. Stine books myself. Last Saturday — a blustery rainy day — I had a cold (the annoying version that saps energy and makes me long for chicken soup). I figured I couldn’t get any closer to feeling like a kid (except, of course, when I do something exceedingly fun like cannon balls off a high dive), so I stretched out on the couch, pulled up a blanket, and read R.L. Stine.

I had several shocks. First, I enjoyed myself. The books read quickly and scared me in a number of places. Second, I found myself wanting to read more. And third, Stine did things I didn’t expect — he kidnapped parents (the kids rescued them, of course); he killed a dog (but it became a zombie so it was still mobile); he menaced kids at a deserted house (and let one teenager die!). The blood and violence were off-stage, however. The ghosts, zombies, phantoms and witches I encountered were tough and scary — and all defeated by the ingenuity of the protagonists. (Stine writes most of the novels in comfy first person to provide a subconscious reassurance that the narrator will live.)

I would give R.L. Stine novels to my children. True, the books are horror, but they contain fears I remember from my childhood. Welcome to Dead House, the first book in Goosebumps, deals with the terrors of moving to a new place. Missing, a Fear Street novel, focusses on parents who mysteriously disappear. The events in Phantom of the Auditorium, a recent Goosebumps novel, would never have happened if the grown-ups had listened to the kids. Stine is in touch and in tune with that child part of himself, and he explores it with gusto.

The endings are all upbeat: the kids get to move back to their old home; the parents get rescued by their children; and the poor phantom gets laid to rest. The books make kids examine the boogeymen hidden in the closet and then turn on the light as reassurance.

I spoke with a few parents and some children’s book writers about Stine. The parents complained about the cost of the books ($3.50 per month takes a bite out of the allowance), and the book writers complained that Stine’s novels make no sense. (In Welcome to Dead House, the zombies go around in the daytime in the front half of the book and at the end are killed because they cannot go out into the sunlight.) The parents are dealing with the money situation: lay away, making the children pay from their allowances, or having the child buy as many books as he can carry. The fact that parts of the novels make no sense should bother me on an editorial basis, but it doesn’t. The stories are rollicking good fun, scary in a non-threatening way, and different enough so that I didn’t feel as if I were reading the same book over and over again.

My concern comes from two places. First, the assumption of the sales clerk angered me. When she mentioned that children “don’t learn anything” from these books, I snapped at her (in a voice loud enough to turn the heads of nearby customers), “I think children learn a lot from Stine. They learn to enjoy reading.” She tried to argue with me that children should learn more than that until I reminded her that much of the population in this country is functionally illiterate. What children are reading matters less than the fact that they are reading and enjoying what they read. They will continue to read in adulthood, if they can continue to find books they like.

That’s where I come in. I have to find a way to lure these readers to F&SF. Not gear the contents toward children, but to have stories here that these Stine fans will like when they are ready to move on. My colleagues at the publishing houses and the other fiction magazines need to do the same.

Does that mean we should buy horror exclusively? Of course not. It means we have to remember that a rollicking good story is twice as important as learning something from the text. Fiction is about adventure, excitement, and exploring ourselves. R.L. Stine has captured those elements. It’s time we — the editors and writers — follow his lead.

Today someone asked me the last time I got excited about a series of books. I would have had trouble answering the question a week ago. I had no trouble now. As I answered the question, I found myself gushing like the little boy in Barnes and Noble — about R.L. Stine.

Another essay on inspirations, this one from 1993. How is this dated? Only in personal ways. I no longer go to Rockaway Beach with other writers. The writer house changed management and it’s not possible to do. Not that I went the last few years anyway. I moved from the mountains to the coast in 1995, so no longer needed to vacation there. But the ocean still inspires me. Actually, the area I live makes me think of a New England fishing village, unless the sun hits it just right. Then it seems like an English village. The fog makes a local motel look like a castle. It’s quite pretty, and very inspiring. Just like it used to be.

Oh. And the power goes out here too. Regularly.

Editorial

Every winter, I travel with ten other writers to Rockaway Beach on the Oregon Coast. We each write a short story in a weekend, which sounds like a lot of work — and it is — but it also gives us time to walk on the beach, bake cookies, and have great conversations around the fire.

Rockaway Beach in January is difficult to get to, and not very populated. The tourists go to other beachfront cities, like Seaside or Canon Beach. In the mornings, I would wander to the beach alone, and as I jogged in the sand, the only footprints in front of me would be the tiny three-pronged stick footprints that belonged to gulls. If I turned my back on the beach-front houses, all I saw was the ocean, frothing and moving with its own life. Each morning was sunny, and the ocean was blue and white, unusual this far north. The constant rumble of the waves was a soothing counterpoint to the silence of the town.

I felt as if I had reached the edge of the world.

And yet —

If I turned around, houses faced me. Some were closed against the morning, abandoned by the summer people who come for only one season. In another, a woman sat in a rocking chair, doing a crossword puzzle. In yet another, an elderly man held a steaming coffee mug and stared at the sea.
I was not alone, and I really didn’t want to be.

That end-of-the-world alone feeling intensified when the power went out on Saturday night. In an unfamiliar house, with no phone, and only thin walls protecting us from the frosty night air, the veneer of civilization seemed thin. Dean Wesley Smith and I went into a nearby town for candles and firewood, and I was relieved to see the lights of the Safeway casting a glow across the parking lot.

I am not a pioneer. I prefer to walk ancient roads worn by many feet. I like the convenience of electric power and the ability to buy meat prepackaged at a grocery store. Yet, living in the American West, I am faced with pioneer memories all the time. Stories told by friends who can remember when the only north-south road in Idaho would be closed during bad weather, friends whose grandparents snowshoed across country. Houses litter the Cascade Range near the roads, but just off the highway lies open country as far as the eye can see. Markers record the stops on the Oregon Trail. If I half close my eyes, I can imagine what that would have looked like to travelers — hills and valleys and treacherous climbs that seemed to go on forever.

Last year, traveling in a sudden snowstorm in Nevada’s high mountain desert, our headlights caught a sign marking that empty countryside as part of the short-lived Pony Express Route. There, just for a second, shimmering outside my car window, was the terror a Pony Express rider felt when a sudden snowstorm caught him alone in that wide open country.

Sometimes, too, when I sit in my house in Oregon’s Coastal Mountain Range, I wonder if a Native American stood in this spot, overlooking the valley, as the whites encroached. This house stands on an old logging road, played out so long ago that the gravel road exists beneath a two-inch layer of dirt. But below that is the dirt that supported Native American camps, and gave them protection from life in the marshy Willamette Valley, the place they called the Valley of Sickness.

Ancient roads. History layered with geology, stories written on top of stories. Yet when I stared at the ocean in Rockaway Beach, I felt as if the ocean had a life of its own, as if it were the end of roads and the beginning of a frontier. Stanislaw Lem wrote about the ocean as a sentient being in Solaris, a book I read long before I sat on an Oregon beachfront. I think of that novel each time I stand on the beach, each time I hear the shush-shush of the waves. I wonder what stories the ocean has, and what secrets it hides, and what its quiet voice is trying to tell us.

Sometimes I think it odd that science fiction stories come to mind when I stare at the ocean. But then I realize it is no more odd than the pieces of history I choose to see when I stand on a patch of ground. Each time, it is a way of affirming to myself that I am not alone. Others have stood before the ocean and wondered at its majesty. People have crossed snow-covered high mountain deserts and survived. Despite any sudden darkness I may find myself in, whether in Rockaway or in life, I find reassurance in stories — be they history or fiction — that somewhere down the road a store is open, a well-lit store with candles and firewood, where someone else has already gone to escape the gloom.

This Dated Essay of the Month isn’t dated at all. In fact, I have been thinking about the proper use of detail as I prepare for a workshop that we’re doing (for professionals) with Sheila Williams of Asimov’s in mid-September. Writers often forget about detail. They get lazy, they do it wrong, or they’ve never learned it in the first place.

I no longer attend a weekly workshop, and I no longer edit F&SF. Those are the only two things that date this essay. Otherwise, it’s something I could have written an hour ago—or next week—or five years from now.

Detail
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

For the last few weeks, I have been stressing the use of detail, although I don’t feel as if I have been explaining what I mean very well. This is a difficult point to get across in a verbal critique. So I thought a short article might be in order.

We often emphasize the difference between “real” detail and “fake” detail. Fake detail often uses phrases like “smelled of” or “felt like.” Real detail dispenses with those distancing techniques and puts us in the middle of the scene.

Rather than use abstract terms, I am going to use examples. The first will always be composed of fake details — adequate, but not good. The second will be made of real details. In some ways, I am cheating here: the fake details will be mine, and the real details will come from experts in scene setting. I will try to follow their style as much as possible. I will explain the first two and leave analyzing the third up to you. Here goes:

Example One:
It was night. The snow-covered fields looked white against the night’s darkness. A gust of wind swirled across the nearest field and he was there again, a gray shape in the darkness. He was drawing closer, much closer. Then she blinked, and he was gone. [KKR]

Night. The fields lay stark as a charcoal drawing — white drifts, the black clawed talons of the trees, the starlight piercingly bright. A gust of wind-driven snow swirled across the nearest field and he was there again. A shape in the twisting snow. A whisper of moccasins against white grains of ice. One step, another. He was drawing closer, much closer. Then she blinked, the snow swirled in a new flurry of wind, and he was gone. The field lay empty. [Charles de Lint, opening paragraph of his short story, "The Soft Whisper of Midnight Snow," The Best of Pulphouse, St. Martins Press, 1991, P. 314]

The details are okay in the paragraph I wrote. They are vague, but they do give a picture. The arrival of “she” as the viewpoint character is a bit of a shock, because the style of writing makes the mysterious man the focus. By the end of the paragraph, the reader has forgotten that the man is appearing to someone.

Charles reminds you of the narrator by his choice of detail. In the second paragraph, we learn that the woman is an artist — no surprise, given that she sees the world as a charcoal drawing and then he explains that drawing so that we can see it too. His syntax also creates character. She is panicked and not thinking in full sentences. The rhythm carries us.

My paragraph uses the senses of sight and touch. (We can feel the blink and the wind gusting.)

Charles’ paragraph uses sight, touch, and sound, all to greater advantage. Again, word choice is important. The wind doesn’t just gust: the wind carries snow with it. A gust of wind-driven snow which swirls and later twists. He reminds us of the chill and harshness of that by using the phrase “white grains of ice” to describe snow. In his paragraph, we are part of the scene — a frightened observer (the viewpoint character) and when the word “she” appears toward the end, we expect it.

The same events happen in both scenes. Only the use of detail makes the difference.

Example Two
The clouds had rolled in at sunset, black and heavy. The storm arrived as I drove to the edge of town, covering everything in light rain. I was about to stop at Del’s and pick up dinner when a car came out of a side street, hit a curb and swerved down the road. [KKR]

The sky had gone black at sunset, and the storm had churned inland from the Gulf and drenched New Iberia and littered East Main with leaves and tree branches from the long canopy of oaks that covered the street from the old brick post office to the drawbridge over Bayou Teche at the edge of town. The air was cool now, laced with light rain, heavy with the fecund smell of wet humus, night-blooming jasmine, roses and new bamboo. I was about to stop my truck at Del’s and pick up three crawfish dinners to go when a lavender Cadillac fishtailed out of a side street, caromed off a curb, bounced a hubcap up on a sidewalk, and left long serpentine lines of tire prints through the glazed pools of yellow light from the street lamps. [James Lee Burke, opening paragraph of his novel In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead, Hyperion, 1993, p. 1]

I see a thousand openings like the one I wrote above. Again, the events are the same as the events in Burke’s opening below, but my paragraph lacks punch even though it sets a scene. (We know we are in a storm, near a restaurant named Del’s, as a car comes off a side street.)

But notice the difference exact detail makes. Burke uses careening language to sweep us into the scene with the storm. The words “my truck” and “three crawfish dinners to go” make the stop at Del’s real. Burke is describing a real place, using place names, but not leaving out the reader who has never been to Louisiana. We know that the air was hot before the storm came. We know we are near the Gulf, on a road with canopied trees, where the air smells of humus, jasmine, roses and new bamboo. (Gee, Toto, guess we’re not in Oregon any more.) My paragraph could have happened anywhere, but Burke’s is unique to one place — a place I can imagine even though I have never been there.

Note too the way he uses verbs to add to the action. The lavender Cadillac fishtails. It caroms. The hubcap bounces on the curb. (Hear it? That’s a sound detail.)

My opening uses sight and touch (again, quite common actually), but Burke uses all five senses, including taste (or have you forgotten those crawfish dinners?) Yet never once does he use “sees,” “sounds like,” “feels like,” “smells of,” or “tastes of.” A master. An absolute master.

Okay. The third example comes from the middle of a novel and describes a place. I want you to examine how static description comes alive with no action to move it forward. This time the analysis is up to you.

Example Three
About twenty minutes away, between the airfield and the motor pool, stood Billy’s. Billy’s had once been a French command post, but it didn’t look anything like a French command post. It looked like a roadhouse. Some boys served drinks, but in all the time I went there, I never learned where those boys went when Billy’s closed.

The building needed paint. It had no electricity, no ice, and no bathroom. When you needed a toilet, you used a hole in the floor. [KKR]

About twenty minutes away, at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy’s. Billy had gone home long ago, but his club, supposedly an old French command post, had endured. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy’s was closed. Billy’s did not look anything like a French command post: it looked like a roadhouse.

A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. There was no electricity and no ice. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal bootprints on either side of a hole in the floor. [Peter Straub, from Part 2, section 2 of his novel, The Throat, published by Signet Books in 1994, p. 80]

Okay. I hope what I mean by the need for crisp detail is clearer now. If it isn’t, I suppose I can always go into more detail — later.

Copyright © 1994 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Well…this essay isn’t really dated. When I search for the Dated Essay of the Month and I’m in a hurry, like this month, I just go back to an F&SF editorial from the same month, only years (and years! Ack!) ago. I clicked on this one, and was a bit stunned at how fresh it is.

But that’s another essay. Here’s this month’s old essay, from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July, 1993.

Editorial

I keep looking for the hidden camera. Someday Allen Funt will jump out of the shadows and shout, “Candid Camera!” The rest of us will grin, reassuring ourselves that we knew it was a hoax after all.

It has to be. I mean, how can anyone say these things with a straight face. Did you know that we no longer exercise? We now participate in physical activity. The word “exercise” is pejorative, according to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. “Physical activity” makes us feel better about…well, exercising.

And at the time of this writing, in California, the Board of Education has decided to ban an Alice Walker story from a 1994 state-wide English test. The story, “Am I Blue,” is “anti-meat eating.” These are the same folks who pulled an excerpt from “An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard because a description of a snowball fight was too violent.

The test is given to 10th graders to assess their writing and reading comprehension skills. Marion McDowell, president of the Board, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the Walker story “could be rather disturbing to some students who would then be expected to write a good essay while they were upset.”

Huh? Excuse me? Many people write good essays when they are upset. It gives them something to write about.

But Ms. McDowell’s attitude upsets me for a more basic reason. Good fiction draws an emotional response from the reader. Devaluing a story because it upsets someone — in any circumstance — devalues literature.

Literature must run the gamut of human emotion from whimsy to terror. Cool intellectual thought should be represented alongside raw animal emotion. I have this fear that we will soon be reading only what I have termed “happy fic” — bland, emotionless fiction about superficial events — because happy fic upsets no one. And in this country, we suddenly have a phobia of upsetting anyone.

When I put an issue of this magazine together, I try to pick stories that will run through as many human emotions as possible. I try to balance humor with horror, upbeat science fiction with downbeat fantasy (or vice versa). I figure an issue is a success if it makes one person understand a new viewpoint or feel an emotion rarely felt. Sometimes I fail — an issue will be one-note (such as the issue I thought was light until someone pointed out that every story (even the funny one) was about death) — and sometimes I succeed. The successful issues get the most letters. For each angry letter, we receive one letter of praise.

But we aren’t careless. I believe that each word, each event, each character, in a short story should be essential to that short story. Writers have revised material as many as four and five times before the work has seen print. We strive for the best fiction we can publish — fiction that should make us laugh, cry, and think.

Some of the stories we publish disturb me. Sometimes I finish reading a manuscript and find that I am done reading for the evening because the experience in the story was so powerful that I cannot go to something different. I must think about the story or let the emotions it aroused in me fade before I move on. And contrary to what Ms. McDowell thinks, such a reaction is good. If I were required to write an essay at that point, the essay would be top-notch because I had an emotional response, not in spite of it.

We are so afraid of upsetting other people that we are afraid to think. We are afraid to express opinions. We are afraid to be ourselves. I don’t expect anyone but me to like every story in this magazine. But I do hope that our subscribers, and science fiction and fantasy readers in general approach literature with an open mind. We are, after all, the literature of the future, the literature of change. If we can’t accept stories that present a plethora of viewpoints, then how can we accept our funny-looking neighbors down the street? How can we march with confidence into the next century if we are afraid of every word we speak?

I am still searching for Allen Funt. I still want this fear and political correctness to be a joke. Because if it isn’t, then I can no longer exercise at the local rec center. I can’t publish powerful stories because they might upset someone.

Is that something glinting in the corner? Please excuse me while I go investigate. I am hoping to find a hidden camera.

Copyright 1993 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch