On "At the Edge of the Earth" by Brandon Patterson (3896 words) ***

Patterson's tale is one of exploration, not unlike those of the 1400s and 1500s, when Europeans realized (again) that there was land beyond the sea. During that time, writers like Jonathan Swift could write fantastic tales like Gulliver's Travels and have some people believe them halfway seriously. Patterson wanders into that world through the life of John Cabot, or Giovanni Caboto, as he prefers to call him. But in the realm of fantasy, the world turns out not to be a sphere but rather flat--or, to be more precise, perhaps like a cylinder, with the top flat but the rest round. The meaning of this is what makes for a tale not unlike a Twilight Zone episode. Read the story here at Prime Number.

On "Grandeur" by John Carr Walker (3929 words) ***

Paul Bowles has a story wherein a man and a snake change consciousness. Walker's "Grandeur" reminds me a tiny bit of that story, not because two creatures exchange consciousnesses but because it is a story about transformation, about man becoming animal--in this case, bird. In the narrator's singularity of vision, it is hard to think in any other way. Read the story here at Prime Number.

On "Minutes of the Last Meeting" by Daniel B. Meltzer (2456 words) ***

Verisimilitude is an object of many a writer's pen. But realism, as we think of it, is rarely realistic. Fiction has its own tone, its own level of reality, different from history writing or letters--except in those instances when fiction takes on the tone of history or of letters. Enter Meltzer's "Minutes," which is a sendup of just that: minutes from a meeting. The tale documents why I so rarely care much for attending meetings. Read the story here at Prime Number.