Dr. Malhari takes a moment to relax

Dr Malhari sits on his parlor chair, admiring a whiff of pipesmoke emanating from his mouth. The stuffed animal heads adoring the wall are somehow not enough. There is a blunderbuss mounted their too, and a silver sword. Soon, the cells under his microscope will have finished dividing, and he will rebuild the dinosaur, but with superhuman intelligence. This creation will of course be powered by silica crystals and an obscure form of gravity wave distortion. His bare feet feel good against the zebra skin rug, and he thinks of all the wonderful memories he has. So many grand adventures. So much danger. So much risk. So much reward. Martian slave girls in a silk market. The beast he fought under the dungeons of Angband. The black mermaid, with rivulets of ebony cascading as tresses, each one capped by a venomous snake. The devil. The blue robots, and their desire to eat perfection. Dr. Malhari had seen the destruction of three rocket ships. It was time for a glass of Madera, a smoke, and a look at the old trophies.

The White Hot Sun Recursive Triumphant

It is as simple as an Iron Robot wearing eyeliner. Truly. It is Bergman's rule combined with Bayse's law. The present. We were born into it and never leave. Present after present after present time, they jumble and stack, falling over themselves in a cluttered pile ten million heart attacks and lost keys tall. Beneath me, a type A0 sun has blown itself to bits, volcanoes have erupted, atmospheres have changed and changed again in their isotopic composition, birthdays have been ruined and enjoyed, pianos have been played and under the shade of a million million trees carbon has been exhaled and inhaled again. Life goes on and I am here, now, like every future instance of me reading this passage and every potential reader ingesting it for the first time or afterward. The pleasant moments, like this one, age well. The conflicted and sad ones age a little better. It is in the stacking of them that we create a narrative of who we are and where we have been, so that each present might search these fourth and fifth dimensions for meaning after meaning locked in the illusion of three dimensions. I wonder about the iron in my bloodstream and try to imagine the strange instant of present time that gave rise to them. How did all this carbon get here? Why am I so reluctant to part with books? When will I meet that elephant?

Triassica

My heart will not leave it, though it begins and ends with catastrophe. So many skeletons, frozen and mineralized. So many secrets. So many creatures doomed to extinction. For one narrow moment, each and every one shone brilliantly-a sapphire in a bath of cosmic light-a sonnet in a burned library. Now, only fossils, shifting sand, weathered rock. One world gives birth to the next.

Eggs

There is a monster out the window, a red one, and we need to fight it with swords. We do not exactly live in fear of monsters-they are a fact of life-like hurricanes in the Bahamas. I will miss life without monsters, especially the red ones, that creep about parking lots and menace plastic babies from out hurricane-proof windows. We feed them cookies. Ginger cookies, apparently, will not do, because nobody likes them. The Fiend Folio and the Monster Manual are pulled out regularly, to calibrate imagination with cold, hard statistics, and a new bestiary writes itself. Somewhere beneath the sands of a lonely beach-eggs.

To the Lords of Chaos

Great ones. Horned goddesses of Chaos. I summon you. Lay your hands upon our great cities and reverse our train schedules. Corrupt our monetary system, so that land has no intrinsic value and cardboard boxes hold no truth anymore, just plastic parts. Bring lightning and hail. Bring dungflies and scarabs. Bring rot. Most of all, great ones, bring entropy. Scramble coded messages. Corrupt languages. Spread confusion.

Lords of Chaos, accept my sacrifice of dried leaves and unanswered math problems, forged pottery and unpaid parking tickets. I give them to thee, willingly, and with a fuzzy mind. I summon thee.

Abeyance

Knucklebones. An asteroid missing its target. The very same bolide hitting the face of Jupiter. The spine of a great beast, sand drifting about its extinguished carcass. Inland seas on the retreat. Weathered cliffs spared the final onslaught. Great beds of mussels dry in the sun. An ancient seafloor settles. This is not a mass extinction. It is an abeyance. This is a time for alligators to prosper in long river courses. This is a time for freshwater fish. I lament every lost mosasaur though, every crinoid without a home. Seas come and go. It is the Earth's way.

math problem

there is a circle. and at the center of it, a sun. at the center of another circle sits an oak tree covered with caterpillars. Cockroaches breed in another circle, and another is packed with freshly picked pears.
Now, rotate each one in a third dimension, so that they form a sphere. Stack the spheres on top of each other in yet another dimension, so that they are all simultaneous, but there is an order to them. The pears intersect the sun. The sun intersects the caterpillars. The caterpillars intersect the cockroaches. Iterate. As you can clearly see, the result varies from one state of the system to another. A single under-ripe pear can drive the cockroaches into the paleozoic, or far into the future.