It Happened To Me: My Doppelganger Stole My Credit Card Info, and then My Life
Author: Nino Cipri
My mother: “The Nono thing started when you were a toddler. Nono was your favorite word, and your father and I liked to say that it wasn’t you who’d pulled all of the dishtowels out of the drawer. It was Nono.”
My father: “I guess you caught on, because then you started saying Nono had done this or that. Don’t blame me, I didn’t flood the bathroom, Nono did. It stopped being cute really fast.”
Nono went away around the time that I started kindergarten. My mother told me that she had been sent to the Other Country, and there was no way she’d painted the kitchen wall with dog food and ketchup.
The Skull
Author: Phillip K. Dick
It was in the twentieth century that the Movement began—during one of the periodic wars. The Movement developed rapidly, feeding on the general sense of futility, the realization that each war was breeding greater war, with no end in sight. The Movement posed a simple answer to the problem: Without military preparations—weapons—there could be no war. And without machinery and complex scientific technocracy there could be no weapons.
The Movement preached that you couldn’t stop war by planning for it. They preached that man was losing to his machinery and science, that it was getting away from him, pushing him into greater and greater wars. Down with society, they shouted. Down with factories and science! A few more wars and there wouldn’t be much left of the world.
The Red Piano
Author: Delia Sherman
My discipline was archaeology, my area of concentration the burial customs of long-dead societies, my obsession the notion of a corporeal afterlife, rich with exotic foods and elaborate furniture, jewels and art and books and servants to wait upon the deceased as they had in life. Wherever they began, all conversations circled back to the same ever-fascinating questions: whether such preparations reflected some post-mortem reality, or whether all the elaborated pomp of preservation and entombment were nothing but a glorified whistling in the dark of eternity.