The Permanent Record of Jude Wells

It's not like Jude Wells, electrical engineer and upstanding citizen of Carbondale, Illinois, hadn't been forewarned.  Like everyone in the United States, he'd been told by his teachers that everything he did would follow him for the rest of his life.

Jude was stopped on a dark Monday evening by the Carbondale police for running a red light.  Jude firmly believed that the light had been yellow when the tail of his Ford Taurus cleared the intersection, but Officer Warren Faulkner disagreed.  Jude received a ticket.

At traffic court three weeks later, Jude pleaded not guilty, but Judge Clyde Muggers threw the book at him after the bailiff handed His Honor a file while whispering in his ear.

"You can't evade the consequences of your actions any longer, Mr. Wells," declared the judge.  "I'm looking at your permanent record, and I don't think we can risk any further missteps on your part, Mr. Wells."

"Missteps?"

"It says here," continued the judge, "that you were punished in third grade for talking in class.  You also failed a math test in sixth grade, a test on fractions.  You being an engineer, I don't have to impress upon you the importance of fractions.  And then there was your suspension from the varsity track team in high school, as well as your first set of ACT scores."

"How do you know all this?" Jude asked, perplexed.

The judge merely held up Jude's file, his permanent record, which had been housed in an underground warehouse in Wyoming for thirty-eight years.  It's right next to the warehouse where everyone's IQ scores are kept.

Jude Wells was sentenced to twenty years of intense personal reflection at the state penitentiary.  His permanent record had finally caught up with him.

~William Hammett

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The Laundromat at the Center of the Universe

The outpatient clinic knows him only by the name of SK45, which is the moniker he puts on intake forms when police occasionally try to get him off the street.  He wears tattered clothes and believes that his mission is to keep the washing machines and dryers at the Washington Avenue Laundromat in continual operation.  He feeds them quarters he gets from panhandling, believing that electromagnetic energy given off by the machines keeps the earth spinning and the cosmic gears turning so that galaxies, moons, and planets will continue their orderly, sidereal procession through the cosmos.

The mental health clinic has diagnosed him as schizophrenic and pumps him full of anti-psychotic drugs.  When he's released, he resumes his supremely important task at the Washington Avenue Laundromat.

Some say that SK45 is crazy, a lunatic who should be locked up for good at the state mental hospital.  An astute observer, however, would notice that when he's at the clinic or one of the dryers stops spinning for too long, earthquakes and tsunamis occur.  Huge blocks of ice break away from the western shelf of Antarctica.  Typhoons churn through the warm waters of the Pacific like scorned lovers.  The clocks at the Naval Observatory show that the earth's rotation has lost a full second of time, although they are unaware of the existence of SK45.  Stars in distant galaxies explode into supernovas.  Planets move in retrograde.

Let us hope that SK45 receives an unending supply of quarters, for the center of the clockwork universe is at the Washington Avenue Laundromat.

~William Hammett

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The Lords of Harlem

They are the wisest people in the world.  Five men of color, all in their sixties, sit on the sidewalk from nine to five in wooden chairs outside of their apartment building in Harlem.  Dressed in tuxedos, they sit in a line, straight and erect, while holding walking canes with almost military precision.

People come to them for answers.  "Should my child wear braces?  Should I marry my fiancé?  What's the weather going to be like on the Fourth of July?"

World leaders sometimes stop by to ask the really big questions.  "Is a trade agreement in the best interest of my country?  How can we stop famine and disease?  Will the dollar be devalued in the global economic market?"

They articulate their answers quietly and with confidence.  They accept no money for their services since they claim to be vessels for that which needs to be expressed.  They live with humility, disdaining interviews and medical exams attempting to pinpoint the source of their knowledge.

They are servants of a higher power.  They are the Lords of Harlem.

~William Hammett

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The Hitchhiker

He tells no one his name.  Throughout the land, he is known only as "The Hitchhiker."  Wearing blue jeans and a T shirt, he travels the backroads of America, scattering wildflower seeds in vacant lots and abandoned fields.  He tells people that his profession is "painter of the land."  From packets he carries in his backpack, he tosses into the air seeds for sunflowers, red poppies, oxeye daisies, creek plum, golden tickseed, corn marigolds, and many more.  Reds, blues, yellows, and violets sprout by the roadside, and it has been said that not even Solomon in all his regalia was robed like one of these.

To earn food, The Hitchhiker sits in town squares at night and recites poetry since he has a photographic memory.  For a few dollar bills or a handful of coins, he recites Shakespeare's plays, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, A Tale of Two Cities, The Iliad, and just about anything people request.  He loves telling stories, and people watch his bearded face, spellbound by tales of adventure and love.

He rises early in the morning, rolling up his sleeping bag and resuming his travels.  It's a big country, a country in need of color and flowers and stories.  May God bless The Hitchhiker.

~William Hammett

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Park Lufkin, Country Singer

Park Lufkin was one of the most famous country singers ever to emerge from Nashville.  He sang about cheating spouses, lost loves, American heroes, and cheap whiskey.  People loved him, and he won several Grammy awards.

Because of his fame and his rugged good looks, he had a lot of female fans and was known to step out on his wife, Lily Lufkin, every now and then when he was on tour.  Lily found out about his filly philandering--"Filly Philandering" was one of Park's number one Billboard hits--and walked onto the stage one night and hit him in the head with a Gibson guitar, killing him.

Park Lufkin was buried on his ten-acre ranch, his body having been placed in a coffin fashioned in the shape of a Gibson Hummingbird.  Thousands of mourners walked by the giant guitar to pay their respects.  People forgave Park for his wandering eye, preferring to remember him for the gift of music he gave to people of the heartland and beyond.

Lily was found not guilty of her crime by reason of temporary insanity, the Gibson guitar company having provided her with the best lawyer money could buy.  After her acquittal, she opened a theme park in memory of her cheating husband.  As everybody knows, it's called Lufkin Land.  Every hour at the main auditorium, actors re-enact the murder of Park Lufkin, country music legend.  There's never a dry eye in the house.

~William Hammett   

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Picasso Graffiti

A Picasso mural was discovered on the side of a bridge crossing the interstate near Dallas, Texas.  The art depicts several women with arms coming out of the heads.  They are getting undressed after a music recital.

"We don't know how Picasso pulled it off," an art expert said.  "The guy's dead, but the brushstrokes are definitely his."

The mural is estimated to be worth half a billion dollars.

Crews with jackhammers worked for three months alongside art historians to carefully remove the thirty-foot-long slab of concrete.  The art historians still aren't sure if the nearby black letters reading "go class of 14" are part of the mural.  Some think it's Picasso's name for the piece.

Traffic in Dallas has been mean and snarled.  Some drivers just don't like great art.

~William Hammett

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Fall Lineup

A big TV network announced its fall lineup today.  There will be more cop shows.  People in the world apparently do a lot of bad things.  The detectives often find murder weapons in refrigerators and aquariums.

As always, there will be sitcoms about twenty-somethings hooking up, the audience laughing at all the sex and broken hearts.  There always seems to be a geeky loner in the cast, someone who can't get any dates at all, but the audience still laughs.

There will also be a reality show about people living in trees for an entire year.

"It's probably going to be our best season ever," a network executive said.  "Everybody likes sex and trees."

~William Hammett

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Midwest Carnival

The carnival came to Kansas in late spring, its sawdust fairway extending half a mile along the prairie.  Weathered tents popped up like blisters on the hardpan.  At night, gaudy neon lights illuminated the Ferris wheel and whirl-a-gigs and rocket cars.  Barkers coughed out hoarse invitations to see freaks from the four corners of the world.  In the funhouse, wavy mirrors distorted the images of carnival patrons into grotesque figures.  A few of the patrons entered the funhouse, but never exited.

An old woman with gray hair, bent over and frightened, hurried back to the dirt parking lot on the perimeter of the fairway, mumbling "This is an evil place.  It's the devil's playground."  Ride operators, many of whom had been released from prisons throughout the Midwest, stared blankly at the woman as they pulled the creaky levers that made the world tilt on its ear, the glowing rides throwing passengers high into the dark night sky.  Inside a tent, a magician pronounced incantations that made babies cry and widows weep.

In a tent at the end of the fairway, a young boy peered at a globe, the kind one usually sees at Christmas time, little flakes of snow falling on a house in the woods.  But this globe was different.  The boy saw a tiny figure inside the glass, an old woman with gray hair.  Though frozen in time, she was headed for a parking lot next to the Ferris wheel.

~William Hammett

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The Five-Dollar Apocalypse

Meriwether Stout entered the fortuneteller's small studio on a lark, for he didn't believe in crystal balls, astrology, or tarot.  He was a bookkeeper, a clerk who juggled numbers the way a circus clown juggled balls.  He had never dropped a six or a nine--not any number--for he was a model of circumspection and rationality.  But when Madame Zoya touched his arm, he felt a jolt of electricity jump through his veins and then burrow into the very marrow of his sixty-two-year-old bachelor bones.  For a brief moment, he felt as if his skull was a photographic negative.

"The years will be unkind," Madame Zoya told him.  "That'll be five bucks, mister."

On the street again, Meriwether was flustered and checked his pocket watch to find an anchor in the temporal, green-ledger universe.  The timepiece had mysteriously gained three hours.  The five-billion-year-old sun was lower in the sky, and the shadow of pedestrians looked elongated and ominous.  Nearly everyone was suddenly long in the tooth.

He walked on and glanced at his pocket watch again.  The minute hand was spinning wildly, like a third-base coach's arm waving a runner home.  Building facades cracked , and ivy tore great fissures in the sidewalk like tendrils of sentient, malevolent rope.  Cars grew rusty, resting on reddish-brown axles that had not spun into gear for eons.

Meriwether was nonplussed, which is to say that his brain was experiencing a minus for the first time in his Newtonian world of rational, balanced numbers.  He glanced up to see the glacier, a mile high, scraping its way down Broadway.

As Madame Zoya had predicted, the years had indeed been unkind.

~William Hammett

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Penance at Wrigley Field

Slammin' Hank McCloskey could have been the greatest baseball player of all time, but he smoked and drank and gambled.  Het let down children and diehard Chicago Cubs fans.  His home runs were metaphysically whittled down to singles, and singles were whittled down to strikeouts and gloomy, dispirited walks back to the dugout.  Without the booze and fast women, he could have delivered a National League pennant to the Cubs.

He died of emphysema forty years later, but a groundskeeper at Wrigley Field sometimes sees the ghost of Hank McCloskey standing on first base late at night.  He's not standing on a field of dreams, however.  Instead, he haunts a field of penance.  As McCloskey explained it to the groundskeeper one lonely night, he has to stand on first base until the Cubs win the pennant.  Only then will he be allowed to round the bases, touch home plate, and be welcomed into a much bigger ballpark that no one on earth has ever seen.

The Cubs have fallen on hard times.  They haven't won a pennant or been to the Series since 1945, and it's all because of Slammin' Hank McCloskey.  When you don't honor children and baseball, bad things can happen.

~William Hammett 

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The Flying Carpet Underground

As you might expect, the grandmother's name is Nana.  She lives in an old Victorian home in need of repair, a ramshackle house with wings and porches and chimneys jutting this way and that like an uneven deck of cards.  In the basement, Nana weaves throw rugs on her antiquated loom.  She makes them with prayer and humility.

Across the meadow from her home is a modern town, on the edge of which sits a factory filled with dirty orphans working oily machines from dawn to dusk.  The factory produces metal gizmos, although no one in town knows what they're used for.  They're shipped by rail to parts unknown. 

The orphans live in a large brick building near Nana's home.  It's dreary and looks like a prison, and in some ways it is.  Sometimes Nana sneaks into the orphans' dormitory and gives them extra food and a rug to place next to their beds so that their feet will be warm on cold winter mornings.  But the rugs are imbued with Nana's boundless love of all creatures.  She doesn't know it, but the rugs are magic carpets.  One by one, the orphans are escaping, floating away in the night to families who welcome them with open arms.

The factory manager thinks the missing children are just runaways.  With each passing month, the factory produces fewer and fewer gizmos.  Nana's flying carpet underground is slowly shutting down the factory with a little prayer and humility.  Not bad work when you can get it.

~William Hammett 

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Schrodinger's Cat

I say he's alive.

~William Hammett

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Garrieson Keillor's "Ten Stories for Mr. Brautigan and Other Stories"

Garrison Keillor, humorist, author, and host of A Prairie Home Companion, published ten vignettes in the style of Richard Brautigan in the New Yorker, March 18, 1972.  The stories may be accessed at Ten Stories for Mr. Brautigan and Other Stories or at the original New Yorker weekly edition at The New Yorker, March 18, 1972.

Keillor wrote the stories as brief vignettes, demonstrating both the compression of Brautigan's short stories as well as their depiction of everyday people, scenes, and events.  The stories are about Keillor, Brautigan, and random observations.

Keillor is the author of many novels, including Lake Wobegon Days, Leaving Home, We Are Still Married, Wobegon Boy, and Happy to Be Here.  Most of his fiction centers on the imaginary town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.

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Richard Brautigan: Stories in His Style

Richard Brautigan: Stories in His Style is a site devoted to short stories written by William Hammett in the style of Richard Brautigan, poet, novelist, and short story writer.  Brautigan lived from 1935 to 1984.  His fiction, both novels and short stories,  were written in a surrealistic style that was sometimes playful and humorous, sometimes darkly satirical.

The original stories by William Hammett on this site are extremely short and exhibit the elusive, surrealistic quality of Brautigan's short story collection titled Revenge of the Lawn.  They range in length from one sentence to a few paragraphs.  Taken together, they represent brief slices of life and random details that hint at much larger themes.  The plots of the stories are drawn from average people going about their daily business, the idea being that the more important truths about life are found in everyday situations.

The surrealistic quality of some, though not all, of the stories, reflects the author's belief that the ordinary situations of life are doorways to deeper, mystical aspects of human existence.  They also reflect the author's abiding interest in quantum physics and the idea that perception, to a large extent, governs the outcome of events.  This relationship between perception and reality was also an ongoing theme in the work of Brautigan, although the relationship was usually expressed a polarizing tension in his novels.

Such extremely short fiction is now generally referred to as flash fiction, although the term was not in general use at the time Richard Brautigan wrote his many short stories that were eventually collected in Revenge of the Lawn.  They were simply called short stories, which was part of the attraction to readers in the 1970s.  Garrison Keillor, author and host of A Prairie Home Companion, wrote a piece in the New Yorker in 1972 called "Ten Stories for Mr. Brautigan and Other Stories."  The ten short stories were eventually published in Keillor's 1981 collection of stories called Happy To Be Here.

Hammett's short stories, of course, are first and foremost, intended to entertain.  A list of these stories may be found in the sitemap below or by clicking on Index of Stories by William Hammett.

William Hammett is the author of several novels, including The Ghost of Richard Brautigan, a satirical novel using the short chapter format of Richard Brautigan's novels.  A link to the novel at Amazon can be found in the right sidebar of this site.  Hammett is also the author of numerous poems and short stories published in respected hard copy literary journals around the country.

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Shakespeare's Lost Play

The Bard of Stratford wrote a play that was never performed at the Globe, nor was it included in the First Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays way back when.  It slipped through the theatrical cracks of the early seventeenth century.

The play is called Bartimello.  The plot goes like this.  Duke Sforza of Milan is mad as a hatter and must be replaced by one of his two sons, one of whom is illegitimate.  Both sons are in love with the beautiful Aura, although neither son knows of the other's affection for the beautiful young maid.  It's a situation that happens in a lot of Shakespeare's plays.  It is the job of Bartimello, a private detective, to find out who the legitimate son is so that the rightful heir may replace his crazy father as ruler of Milan.  Bartimello eventually learns who's legitimate and who's not.  The legitimate son, named Rudolfo, marries Aura in a ceremony performed by Friar Benedict, the only priest listed in the dramatis personae.  Bartimello is handsomely rewarded by Rudolfo and marries the duke's illegitimate daughter before exiting stage left.  Being mad, the duke had fathered a lot of children out of wedlock without knowing it.

The play has not yet been discovered except by this short story.  It is housed in the Third Eye School of Private Detection in Urbana, Illinois.  It's inevitable that one of the school's students will one day put two and two together and discover Bartimello.  He's going to be a very wealthy detective.

~William Hammett

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The Buddha's Tour Dates

The Buddha's tour dates were cancelled, and ticket-holders have been refunded their money.  Sometimes the Buddha doesn't have much to say.  Often, he plays life close to the vest, sitting serenely like a potato trying to figure out its tuberous karma.  The Katmandu Gazette reports that he hasn't opened his eyes in several days.

His roadies have dismantled the Bodhi tree and the pagoda.  The tour hasn't been rescheduled, and some say that the cancellation is because the Buddha is consulting a gastroenterologist in Buffalo.  This is only speculation, and sources close to the Buddha have emphatically denied that his chakras are blocked.  Rolling Stone has written that the Buddha recently suffered a nervous breakdown after learning he'd fathered a love child.  The truth remains elusive, which is what you'd expect in such a situation.

Personally, I don't have a dog in the fight.  If truth is subjective, the tour was over a long time ago.  We can stare at kumquats.

~William Hammett

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Tombstone-Speak

Tombstones are short stories.  They say a little, they say a lot.  A person was born in a certain year and died in a certain year, a person that had a name.  But between birth and death, life happened.  There were baseball games and marriages and children.  Fortunes were made or lost, and some people went insane. 

Tragedy and illness are always part of the plot, but usually there's dancing and ice cream to offset the blues and keep the story going.  Clowns and comedians ride in funny little cars or talk about what happens when a priest, a minister, and a rabbi go into a bar.

Some tombstones sit above an epic, like the last moments on the Titanic.  Others whisper of lives spent toiling in factories, with a gold retirement watch closing out the plot.  Many guard secrets that no one ever knew and never will.  As some people say, "I'll carry it to my grave."  Being made of stone, these markers have an ethical obligation to honor the wish for silence.

Once in a blue moon, tombstones grow into monuments, and then you've got a novel on your hands.  But most people are remembered in short stories because the literary market is saturated.  Sooner or later, however, everyone gets published.

~William Hammett 

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William Hammett
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A Sad but Poetic Cliche

There's a train whistle about a mile away, maybe two.  It's six o'clock in the evening, and twilight is rapidly rolling into night.  It's a lonesome sound, a sound falling in pitch thanks to the Doppler effect.  The train is flying through a pine forest on the edge of town, and soon it will be miles away, leaving silence to hover over homes with kitchen windows glowing yellow.  Soon, families will sit down to dinner, talking of work and school and the lumber mill, which might be closing.  A lot of jobs hang in the balance.

If you pay attention, you'll hear the lonesome sound of the train whistle in a hundred movies in which the moment calls for melancholy and reflection.  It's a funny thing: clichés are frowned upon because they're used over and over again, but then that's why they end up as clichés.  The sound of the disappearing train is a very important cliché, one that shouldn't be frowned upon, since someday that whistle is going to carry us all away.

~William Hammett

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Writers in Tibet

The writers in Tibet breathe the rarefied air of the Himalayas.  They do not write their stories on paper, nor do they use ink or pencils or computers.  They write on the sky and clouds and lakes and mountains.  One must inhale their stories or dream them.

Their stories are fluid.  The sky is ever-changing but is always the sky.  Last night I dreamt of a violet lotus blossom.  Today it is white.

~William Hammett

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The Story Has Already Arrived

Two lovers are walking down the street, holding hands.  The met, fell in love, and are together.  Their story has already arrived.  Being in love is all that they are concentrating on, so we should step back and leave them alone for now since this is a short story.  How they met and what they shall do with the rest of their lives is for a novel, the one they will write in the years to come if they are given the grace to do so.  For now, we can only wish them well.

~William Hammett

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The Soldier Who Forgot to Die

A Japanese Soldier was found last year on a small Pacific island, still protecting a cave of emergency provisions for the Japanese army.  He looked through binoculars daily to spot enemy ships, not realizing that World War II ended in 1945.  Newspaper articles said that he was a disciplined man.

But here is something even more amazing.  He arrived on the island in 1944 when he was forty-five years old.  Today, he is one hundred and sixteen, but he hasn't aged a day.  His metabolism didn't have access to a calendar and so the cells of his body had no reason to grow old.  He wasn't a practitioner of Zen, but he was able to live in the moment for seventy-one years.

A lot of people are now looking for deserted islands in the Pacific.  As Wordsworth wrote, the world is too much with us.

~William Hammett

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A Memoir by 1957

I was given an advance to tell my story since I knew both 1956 and 1958.  I was just a link in a chain, but I had my moments, some of them worth writing about.

Here's how it went down.  Nine black students integrated a high school in Arkansas, and President Eisenhower called in the troops.  Every year has some turbulence, right?  The Russians launched Sputnik, mankind's first satellite.  That led to the space race and modern computers.  I'm proud of that, although the verdict isn't in yet on whether computers will save man or kill him.

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road.  I think it's overrated, but it happened on my watch, so I'll take responsibility for it.  West Side Story debuted on Broadway, although it took people time to realize it was really about Romeo and Juliet.  I was playing things close to the vest.  Witness for the Prosecution hit the movie theaters with a lot of plot twists.  Like I said, I was playing things close to the vest.

Lew Hoad won Wimbledon, and the Milwaukee Braves beat the New York Yankees in the World Series, four games to three.  Not all calendar years produce a seven-game series, if I say so myself.

I guess the biggest thing I did was to ensure that John Lennon met Paul McCartney at a church fair in England.  The rest, as they say, is history.  The End.

~William Hammett

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It Doesn't Have to Rain at Funerals

The man stood among the mourners, looking somber and serious while dozens of black-clad figures huddled beneath dozens of black umbrellas as a steady downpour seemed to echo the sentiments of the occasion.  The deceased was being lowered into the ground.  People were sad.  Death had won again, and the sky was shedding copious tears.

Unable to hear the words of the presiding minister any longer, the man looked about, a mourner-turned-sociologist.  He felt like he was in a Hollywood movie, which almost always depicted funerals as events that occurred under glowering skies heavy with raindrops.  Movie funerals, he realized, were stereotypes, and he, for one, didn't intent to become a stereotype.  It was only raining, he reasoned, because people had expected it to rain.  Stereotypes can burrow into people's brains like worms into wood.

The man closed his umbrella and smiled.  The rain let up a bit, and a few more umbrellas were folded.  The rain slacked off even more, and that's when crowd mentality took over.  The umbrella mourners didn't want to look foolish, so they followed the non-umbrella mourners in closing up their bumbershoots as they stood reverently by the graveside.  The dark clouds and rain had all been a big misunderstanding. 

The sun came out, and everyone smiled as the minister finished ministering.  Rain and death and dark clouds, the man thought, were just a frame of mind.

"It doesn't have to rain at funerals," he proclaimed.

The mourners apparently agreed.  They all shook the man's hand after offering their condolences to the family members of the deceased.

~William Hammett 

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A Prescription from the Heavens

Norma Whitehead of Surrey, England was obsessive-compulsive.  She was compelled to touch every doorknob she passed.  She was equally compelled to wash her hands after touching each of the knobs.  She daily checked every picture in her home to make sure it was straight since passing trucks on the street had a tendency to shake the house a bit.  She couldn't pass a table without swiping her index finger along its edge to make sure that it was free of dust.  For Norma, life was comprised of an endless series of chores consisting of maintaining order, balance, and equilibrium in her universe.  Her husband Henry suggested that she take Prozac, but Norma didn't want chemicals sluicing through her veins.  Besides, she didn't mind the disorder.  She felt that more people needed to pay attention to the smaller things in life.

Norma and Henry were sitting and watching television on a Tuesday evening when her life changed forever.  The couple sat on their living room couch, which was exactly ten-feet-five-inches away from the TV screen since she'd read an article in the Guardian that claimed this was the perfect distance to avoid harmful radiation from the TV's cathode ray tube.  It was also the perfect distance to maintain proper eye health.  Sitting too close to the screen exposed the eye to far too much brightness.  Sitting too far away caused eye strain.

The event sounded like a small explosion.  There was smoke and debris, and Norma and Henry climbed from the floor to see a gaping hole above them.  A small meteorite had slammed through the roof and ceiling and knocked Norma unconscious for a full minute.  She seemed perfectly fine, however, when the neighbors showed up at the front door to see what all the fuss was about.

"It's nothing," Norma explained as she picked up broken objects from the living room floor.  "Just a meteorite."

Henry was perplexed.  Norma was handling the debris--there was a lot of powder and dirt on the floor--without worrying about getting her hands dirty.  From that night on, she lived a life free of OCD.  A doctor subsequently told her that the knock on her noggin had changed the electrical currents in her brain, which had, for all intents and purposes, been cosmically rewired.  The meteorite had been a prescription from heaven.

Norma also had a changed mindset.  If one couldn't guard against something as dramatic as being hit by a meteorite--what were the odds?--there wasn't much reason to worry about things a lot less important, like whether pictures are plumb or tables are free of dust.  "Life just has to happen," Norma told a local reporter.  "You've got to go with the flow.  As Hamlet said, there's providence in the fall of a sparrow.  Or a meteorite."

by William Hammett

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