“Hey guys, watch this,” said Gorm of the Methane Breathers, as he rubbed two sticks together vigorously.

How like dime novels, the prizefighter is when beaten to a pulp; he tried to say that no one in the world could put him down.

Even the expected, smaller death recalled the other. I transplanted sedum from the garden to mark the place and obscure it.

But in late fall, the tree broke into bloom, perhaps having misunderstood the fire to be some brief, backward winter.

I hung it here in the front, dark hallway of this house you will never see, so that it might magnify the meager light, become a lesser, backward window. No one pauses long before it.

Some of your buddies might come around for a couple of beers and a game, but most evenings, you pitched horseshoes alone.

I was tired, but you insisted on one more, so I chalked the cue–the bored blue–broke, scratched.

That evening, Lindeman’s major scientific rival, who had done his best to discredit Lindeman’s entire body of work as pseudoscientific gobbledygook, was home alone reading when he heard Lindeman’s voice.

“It’s not a time machine,” it said. “It’s an invisibility inductor.”

I looked up at the new moon, the narrow rim as fragile as ice in the night sky. Inauspicious, it seemed to me. This was not a good time to be moving about; the air itself seemed to be holding out on us. I thought of those millennia past when the planet was lonely and the bulk of life was large, of the incredible saurians rumbling through this landscape, huddled against the emptiness and stars. It was an agony then, perfectly terrifying to be alive. Years ago, I used to tell my students:

“When you think of a Tyrannosaurus rex, gentlemen, nineteen feet tall and eight tons in weight. Think bluff, gentlemen! Think bluff!”

The Piazza San Marco opens directly onto the lagoon. During rains or high tide, hollows and dips in the stone fill with water, causing the tourists and pigeons to clog the area even more annoyingly than usual; the pigeons, at least, are kickable. If the puddles are deep enough and last long enough, the city builds wooden walkways over them. Fat Englishmen totter across these with umbrellas held high, like overstuffed acrobats.