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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
Although I could be fired for asking out loud, your city council have all been wondering if other towns are shrinking too, and if so, what’s being done to stop the trend or reverse it. They ask as if we’d already proclaimed our town is getting smaller, which we haven’t, but should. The change is almost imperceptible but measurable and as real as the sun setting earlier each day by a minute, or a lover going vividly gray, or taxes rising relative to lot size. Last spring, a surveyor sent to stake a home-site reported the first anomaly but blamed his instruments. Now we know that every property is verifiably smaller; we know the rate at which they’re shrinking, and how soon the first houses will stick their toes beyond the borders of the yards that should contain them and into the vegetable gardens of the lovely young neighbor who digs the beds in shorts and little else to nudge and shyly part her tender shoots. Let me be clear, our houses are no smaller. Still formed of six-inch bricks, of 2x4s, of lumber cut to lengths that match our rulers, they cover the same ground as ever. It’s the ground they cover that hasn’t stopped diminishing. And the trouble isn’t limited to home-sites. Parks and streets are shrinking as well— parking spaces! Our cars, already too big, drive with two tires on the sidewalk now or sideswipe one another. Of course as citizens, you’ll want the fairness question answered. If other towns are expanding, are they towns that somehow deserve our land? Or can we annex them to get it back? For now, let’s be happy we fit inside our houses, close as they may be to one another, and find ways to get comfortable with our neighbors.
Copyright © August 15, 2010
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Very Short Novels 
Thank you so much, anhinga, but I wouldn't want to try it without the other 199. —David
Why, thank you, brother. It's wonderful to see you here. :) —David
All you need is 100 words to make an emotional impact. Touching.
Brilliant, brother. Just simply brilliant.
This Very Short Novel has a strong resemblance to Simple Lessons of War from almost 20 years ago, but is…