Fiction

If we don’t stop these maniacs it won’t be long before they start using the Javitts Scale of Natural Selection and Normal Adaptation to render people like you and me into genetic dead-ends. Just remember: once Congress passes the bill requiring sterilization for all adults not scoring within the so-called normal parameters of the Javitts Scale, the Supreme Court will be our last hope. We’ve got to get on this, man...

I'd never imagined Elizabeth Bennet pregnant, but I found doing so now far easier than accepting her as a plump woman pushing forty, at war with her husband, the Divine Darcy. The idea of it was so ordinarily ugly,  so humdrum, that it offended me...

Though it was the most important event in my life (I was nineteen when it happened), I can't remember any of her words. I was too young and naive at the time to hold onto newspapers and the ad hoc ephemera figures like Margaret A. invariably generate. And like most people I never dreamed a person's words could become illegal.

Crazy, Ms. Peach whispered as she pushed herself west. We're all crazy in this city. But always, whatever the situation, one did what one must. And in this case, that meant making a run for coffee.

Anne could still remember how frightened she had been when her sixth-grade teacher had told the girls what they would be facing on their thirteenth birthdays...

She didn’t belong in the world. Alice knew this as a fact by the time she reached middle age, but she had always felt it for as long as she could remember. Her being lacked some vital element, as though she were a shadow enjoying physical extension that could be touched and weighed and measured and yet did not add up to a solid body boasting independent existence.