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Only three directions matter: Above, Deeper, and the slightly curved Goodness that extends forever in two dimensions neither Above nor Deeper. Above is the direction of peril but also of food. Deeper is oblivion and loss. Some have been retrieved from the Deep, but only as food. Goodness is home, the warm thin blanket between two extremes. As you know, our situation is cyclical and currently critical. We’ve let you measure our food stock, heft it, smell it, thump it for edibility. You know how much the group requires, so you know there’s not enough, not nearly. Sacrifices inevitably follow. Most of us will not survive, you yourself may not survive except as food, not even if we fast, find more, swallow slowly, waste none, lose nothing. We delay reproducing in such seasons of course. How would we raise an infant now? On regurgitant, surely, but regurgitated what? You’re too young to understand the seasons, but between Famine and Plenty, this is the time that tests our community. Take heart. We will not all perish, and that’s all the love we need in the Goodness. When forays Above produce too little, our soldiers take their chances pressing against the frontiers of the perilous unfamiliar to skirmish with dangerous prey. They don’t expect to be welcomed back should they present a threat. As much as we prize soldiers, we can’t afford to coddle individuals returning wounded, trailing scent, leading others to our tunnels. You’ve been trained to seal the entrances against such volunteers. Naturally, your body will resonate with their pleas, just as it vibrates in the presence of food, or rain, or a passage toward Above, but they would shake off your vibrations if you were the threat, because sacrifice is love, and because it points toward the Good.
Original Copyright © January 27, 2007
Revised Copyright © January 30, 2026
His mother regretted him, never wanted him, even tried to terminate him, but, at his most sought-after, he was both the second and the eighth most wanted men in the jurisdiction where he practiced his trade. He will stand trial as just one activist, all his aliases merged, but, until his arrest, he performed as several. Two women died in the recent daytime blast he executed, both of them pregnant with babies who doctors tried in vain to deliver (a detail he calls ironic justice) but whose bodies he refuses to tally as hits. A nurse, surprised by shrapnel during her coffee break, lost one eye and the use of her right arm. Do I look scared to you? she will ask him from the witness stand, left hand raised. His ascent through the ranks of the wanted was ingenious. When he was only tenth most wanted, he earned a number eight spot for an alias by planting stolen ID at the scene of a clinic bombing. Since then, he’s conducted workbench surgeries on his cheekbones and jaw, unremarkable features even before he went into the abortion dissuasion business, now half swollen half erased to further frustrate mug book matching, like challenging parents to select their fetus’s image from a random batch of sonograms. Meanwhile, he’s promoted alternate identities in other towns, with unrecognizable faces and aspects, while agents in pursuit go chasing mustaches he’s since shaved or eyeglasses he stole only to be seen in them once. When he is ultimately apprehended, poking around the remnants of an explosion, then interrogated, identified, identified repeatedly, repeatedly convicted, and slapped around with the name his mother gave him, the law will conspire to keep him alive for life, for all of his sacred lives in fact, to be served concurrently.
Original Copyright © January 24, 2007
Revised Copyright © January 30, 2026
Very Short Novels 
This Novel is a close relative of The Question from more than 25 years ago. I've edited it substantially and…