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The Ransom Of Red Chief

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It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down South, in Alabama—Bill Driscoll and myself—when this kidnapping idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, “during a moment of temporary mental apparition”; but we didn’t find that out till later. There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole. Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot scheme in Western Illinois with. We talked it over on the front steps of the hotel. Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural communities; therefore and for other reasons, a kidnapping project ought to do better there than in the radius of newspapers that send reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such things. We knew that Summit couldn’t get a
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Roast Pig

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Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following: The swineherd, Ho-ti, having gone out in the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect masts for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part o
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The Pedestrian

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To enter out into that silence that was the city at eight o’clock of a misty evening in November, to put your feet upon that buckling concrete walk, to step over grassy seams and make your way, hands in pockets, through the silences, that was what Mr. Leonard Mead most dearly loved to do. He would stand upon the corner of an intersection and peer down long moonlit avenues of sidewalk in four directions, deciding which way to go, but it really made no difference; he was alone in this world of A.D. 2053, or as good as alone, and with a final decision made, a path selected, he would stride off, sending patterns of frosty air before him like the smoke of a cigar. Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles and return only at midnight to his house. And on his way he would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind the windows. Sudden gray phantoms seem
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The Mechanical Hound

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 They know they can hold their audience only so long. The show's got to have a snap ending, quick! If they started searching the whole damn river it might take all night. So they're sniffing for a scape-goat to end things with a bang. Watch. They'll catch Montag in the next five minutes! " "But how--" "Watch." The camera, hovering in the belly of a helicopter, now swung down at an empty street. "See that?" whispered Granger. "It'll be you; right up at the end of that street is our victim. See how our camera is coming in? Building the scene. Suspense. Long shot. Right now, some poor fellow is out for a walk. A rarity. An odd one. Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia. Anyway, the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy. And today, it turns out, it's very u
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Sunshine ThroughThe Rain

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 The Fox's Wedding. Akira Kurosawa, Dreams .  1990. https://youtu.be/KPO0WaPFKPk In Japan, when the sun shines through rain, the foxes (the shape-shifting tricksters of Japanese folklore) hold their weddings. In Japanese, it is known as 「kitsune no yomeiri・狐の嫁入り」, and when translated means the "fox's bride taking." As pretty as these may be to watch, they are bad luck as the viewer will be entangled by the fox's magic powers and bad things will follow. Thus, when this weather happens, parents often tell their children to play indoors to avoid seeing these weddings (perhaps just a way to keep kids inside so they don't catch a cold).   https://www.plantagbiosciences.org/people/daniel-burke/2019/05/29/drizzling-tuesday-morning/    ああ、何か問題が起きた Uh, oh.  Something went wrong. A fox came here and left this knife.  You are supposed to kill yourself.   Sasuké, the fox demon queller, Usagi Yojimbo.  Stan Sakai.    Sayonara.
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The Boy Who Drew Cats

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A LONG,  long time ago, in a small country-village in Japan, there lived a poor farmer and his wife, who were very good people. They had a number of children, and found it very hard to feed them all. The elder son was strong enough when only fourteen years old to help his father; and the little girls learned to help their; mother almost as soon as they could walk. But the youngest child, a little boy, did not seem to be fit for hard work. He was very clever,-cleverer than all his brothers and sisters; but he was quite weak and small, and people said he could never grow very big. So his parents thought it would be better for him to become a priest than to become a farmer. They took him with them to the village-temple one day, and asked the good old priest who lived there, if he would have their little boy for his acolyte, and teach him all that a priest ought to know. The old man spoke kindly to the lad, and asked him some hard questions. S
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Death's My Destination

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(Gulliver Foyle, common sailor, has been living in an airtight tool locker for six months.  He has no memory of how he got there.  He frequently has to pump a patched spacesuit with air and comb the wreckage of the ship to find oxygen, water and food.  The SS Nomad has been destroyed by some act of war.  Gully is at the end of his rope.  He has left the tool locker to search for food, the suit will hold 5 minutes of air and no more. Then he sees a ship).  He gave the approaching spaceship one pleading look, then shot down to the tool locker and pumped his suit full.  He mounted to the control bridge. Through the starboard observation port he saw the spaceship, stern rockets still flaring, evidently making a major alteration in course, for it was bearing down on him very slowly.  On the panel marked FLARES, Foyle pressed the DISTRESS button. There was a three-second pause during which he suffered. Then white radiance blinded him as the distress signal went off in three triple bursts, n
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