Late-breaking story

After the newspaper has been put to bed, I go home to a child not yet asleep. Or perhaps she woke up when she heard me come in.
I'm starving. I want a couple of cheese sticks and a glass of cheap wine.
"Read to me," she says. The kid is almost old enough to start going to community college.
"Ok," I say. I bring the wine, the cheese sticks and she hands me a self-help book for women, a 200-page pep talk on how to be smart and happy. The BBC's fast chatter on blood-soaked coups and soccer scores bubbles nonstop from her radio.
"Get in my bed and read to me."
The kid is as tall as I am.
I'll read to her until the world ends and we fall asleep.

The news editor apologizes

It’s late, you know, and I can’t tell any more what they think. The readers.

 Because I’ve been staring all night at the horror-pitch of the tornado’s sweep.
 All that is left implying what is gone.

I look, tweak, present the flesh of the page and the raw of it to the readers with their breakfast.
Here is your news. A terrible thing has happened.

The truth of it is: the twisted metal in the tree and the child in the woman’s arms – they were all I could see all night. The weight of that big child and the simple pleasure: this one is alive.

Wind bent the metal around the giant branches of the only tree standing — the way an artist would — duplicating the massive curve of the trunk; the tree’s inertia meeting and matching the wind’s blind force.
I love the tree for this defiance.

The truth of it is: we never know the whole story; we should always try.
And, I am sorry – for wanting them to see it all,
because I truly think that if we are human, we must at least witness this life.

The rabbit and the Arduino

The man returned to the city to make robots tonight, and I’m left with the rabbit and the Arduino. The rabbit is a live rabbit and unpredictable. The electronics do exactly what you tell them to do. The best education encourages invention, in every discipline. My own education follows this impulse and this thirst.  Language is key; now I want to learn to talk to machines. It is likely, however, that I will never be able to communicate with the rabbit. I know he likes to be scratched gently and chased from room to room, but he will never do what I tell him to do, and I am grateful for that.

Rabbits are good for being rabbits, and nothing less.

Pepper in the suit

Daughter grabbed my hand when Pepper had the suit on. It mattered. Like Bubblegum Crisis. It's why she wants to be a biomechanical engineer. It's why she goes to her geometry teacher for extra time after school.