The Sparrow's Nest

I was supposed to take my sister to get tested for autism. It was difficult to find a place that tested adults for it. My mom called everywhere, and finally, one place said they did it. She made the appointment and we drove two hours, using a GPS to find this prestigious facility. The GPS took us through winding streets and past a broken down building claiming to be the high school. The roads started breaking up and cracking. Nobody was around. We crossed rail road tracks I didn't even know existed in that town. We ended up in a tiny community crawling with cops. It was like, is there a prison here? Is there a killer running around? The place reminded me of a nightmare I had several months ago. The road sloped up just like in the dream, too. Killing the car's alignment on some bumpy, broken road, we passed a narrow, bushy footpath. It had a name like it was an actual street. We reached a group of isolated buildings and squeezed down a dirt road only a...

I've always enjoyed abandoned areas as settings. They give me a kind of creepy joy. This is partly why "Headlights" is one of my favorite short stories. For "Embers," I wasn't sure what the setting would be, because I thought of moving Zhin's band elsewhere. I didn't like the settings of these places, though. Finally, I alighted on the one idea that made sense: the ruined Sirix city. Everybody's jacked up from the first book, and this abandoned city is perfect to recover in. Note: Ilings are tougher in make-up than Earthlings. I had written this in during the first drafts and the beta readers had no problem not reading it in the final, but it seems some people are confused. So here it is. I say this, because some people will definitely ask how they could recover without a hospital, or in the Visserian tongue, a vozhrith. These pictures are the closest I could come to what the place looks like. First, the abandoned library, which is i...

Back when I worked as a substitute teacher, I often subbed at a school lurking in the bushes 45 minutes from home. There was a river nearby, where teachers took their students on spur-of-the-moment field trips. One day, I was subbing for a class I particularly liked. They didn't have psychotic issues. After I sent them off to the computer lab, I returned to the class room alone to look over the day's schedule. The class room was set up so that the teacher could view all areas of the room from her desk. The one hidden spot was a corner where two bookshelves faced each other. While I reviewed the schedule, I heard a sound in front of the desk, like somebody letting out air after holding their breath for a long time. Immediately, I looked over the desk's edge, but saw nobody. The books in the shelves began to shift, so I took a look. Nobody there, either. I returned to the desk, wondering what to do. The teacher had a stuffed green dragon sitting on a ...

I'd heard about fried bananas. They sounded pretty good. My mom thought so, too. We'd never had them. The recipe seemed easy. What could possibly go wrong? We bought regular yellow bananas at the store, chopped them up real nice like the recipe said and dropped them in the pan. We waited for them to fry. And then we tried to turn them over. Have you ever walked down the road after it rains, and all the inconsiderate people have just stepped on the worms that suddenly couldn't tell the difference between dirt and concrete? Well that's what bubbled in the pan: a mass of squished worms and sticky banana guts. I felt like Willie Wonka trying to eat the mashed caterpillars in the wooden bowl the oomp loompa gave him. We almost had to throw the pan away. Who knew underripe bananas could melt so thoroughly? I don't know what went wrong. We must have done some kind of transmutation. Those bananas turned into worms. What did I get out of this experience? A ...