Don’t Shoot Me in the Head

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“Just don’t shoot me in the head,” I told the agent.

She pulled her gun away from my forehead, about an inch away. The right side of her mouth was smirking beyond the gun’s thick black handle.

I’d been a parapsychologist researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences for ten years. It’s an exciting place that was co-founded by the late astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, and now puts out some of the world’s best peer-reviewed “paranormal” science, over a thousand papers and counting. “Paranormal” will become normal, it’s only a matter of time.

My niche is the prospective study of near-death experiences. When someone is dying of natural causes and wants to become part of scientific history, we bring a level of objectivity that only prospective studies can capture. The weirder your findings, the more you need to document them. We’ve reported some incredibly strange things.

I looked into the cylinder of darkness that extended up the gun barrel and realized for the first time that I’m not afraid of death the way I was ten years ago. By now I’d seen enough to know that this life isn’t the end of consciousness.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to die and have to stop my research, or worse yet, die knowing that Brodsky would take over my work. The little troll is about as objective and rational as a two-year-old.

Despite having him breathing down my neck, I’ve been making observations that even the cult of reductive physicalists will be forced to accept someday. In light of my work and a hand full of others at the Institute, science will soon have to do a 180 and put intelligent consciousness back where it belongs, at the center of nature, not in the peripheral, illusory realm of an epiphenomenon.

I had another reason, though, for not wanting this agent to shoot me in the head. I wasn’t sure, but there seemed to be a chance that if my central nervous system was splattered across the mirrors behind me, I might miss out on my own near-death experience. My research subjects always tell me that their NDE was the most euphoric, meaningful and transformative event of their lives. I wanted to taste that richness myself, even if I didn’t live to document it for science.

“I’ve never heard that one before,” the agent said. “Think about it, though. Being shot in the head is probably the least painful way to go. Through the frontal lobes and down through the brainstem?” She angled her pistol to indicate the trajectory of her first bullet.

“Pain doesn’t concern me,” I said, realizing my words were a lie only after I’d said them.

“You’re a masochist?”

“I suppose so. That’s a good explanation.” I looked down.

She put the gun back to my forehead. “You’ve got me curious.”

When parents attach curiosity to dead cats in an effort to protect their wandering toddlers, it’s for good reason. Curiosity is the Super Glue of the mind. I now knew that this agent wouldn’t shoot me until I’d explained myself, so I asked if I could sit on the floor, and without waiting for consent, I took the liberty of squatting and then sitting on the cold, immaculate tile floor in front of her. Although she’d confronted me alone in a men’s bathroom, this particular one sparkled and had a floor that looked cleaner than the dinner plates downstairs in the establishment’s five-star restaurant.

I pulled my fake cigarette out of a coat pocket, put it in my lips and drew in a mouthful of staleness, inhaled and blew a nearly invisible puff of water vapor out the side of my mouth, politely away from her. I’ve never smoked real cigarettes, but this electronic device is often invaluable during interviews with NDE subjects. It seems to relax the atmosphere in the lab, showing the nervous hanger-on that I’m not judgmental or particularly binary. Whatever the mechanism, I’ve learned that if you want an NDE subject to give you the full details of a near-death experience without the editing and polish that we tend to see on the internet, you need to let these people see you for who and what you are, weaknesses and strengths alike. And you can’t just tell them or assure them that you’re OK, you need to show them that the person listening to them considers their concerns of sanity to be utterly irrelevant.

In the tradition of Scheherazade and the thousand tales that kept her alive, I decided to forgo the buildup I had planned, and instead opened with Mr. Santiago’s records.

“A couple of months ago, Jesus Santiago, a 72-year-old Hispanic male, came to me with less than three months to live. It was stage IV lung cancer, small cell, the worst. He’d lost his right lung. The hilar and mediastinal nodes were positive, bilateral adrenal mets, and we’d found a small brain metastasis in his cerebellum on our control MRI. Chemo hadn’t touched his disease, so he looked like a skeleton sitting there talking in drooping skin.”

The agent gave me a disgusted look. 

“All the greats who walk into my lab are like him. Just wanting to contribute something to science before they pass on.”

“So you sucked him in with a newspaper ad?”

“It was a Facebook ad, actually. They’re remarkably selective, despite this recent privacy thing.”

She sat down on the floor across from me, her head framed in one the Beverly Wilshire’s lavish urinals, and her gun arm dangling across her right knee with the pistol pointing casually at my testes.

Have you ever closed your eyes and had someone dangle a heavy knife over the bridge of your nose? You can literally feel it. This was much worse than that, but the same sort of thing.

She thrust her chin out, which meant, keep talking.

“We put Mr. Santiago in as much gentle cryo as he could tolerate and started draining his blood into a sterile plastic receptacle. You wouldn’t believe how stingy the Red Cross is with those things. I had to petition the manufacturer… But anyway, that’s essentially how we induce a near-death experience… through neuronal hypoxia, or perhaps it’s a shift from glucose to ketone bodies, we can’t rule that out yet.”

She pursed her lips in a deliberately bored expression.

“It usually works the first time,” I went on. “Every detail of the procedure is timed and controlled to make things reproducible in any lab around the world, should another researcher ever develop giant gonads like the ones you’re targeting with your pistol there. I don’t suppose you could point that thing at my chest?”

She sat like a marble statue with black lipstick.

“Anyway, Mr. Santiago slipped into the twilight zone while we recorded his flattening brainwaves and watched images of blood flow vanish from his brain via real-time fMRI. Bless the geeks who invented that machine, it’s a miracle of technology, really.”

There was a thump on the bathroom door. I looked over hoping no one would walk in and rescue me before I was done with the story.

The agent didn’t so much as glance at the door.

“Make it fast,” she said. “Looks like we’re passionate lovers this time. I’ll do the talking.”

I abbreviated things a bit, but pointed out that when Mr. Santiago’s EEG went flat, his heart had stopped and there was no discernible evidence of blood flow or glucose uptake in his brain, we cooled him further and set the timer to let us know when to bring him back. Four minutes is my routine to avoid permanent brain damage.

A half-hour later, Jesus was fully with us again, eyes wide, telling us of his dead relatives, the brightness of the scenery, the loving euphoria he’d felt in that realm, and an odd message he’d been sent back to this life to tell me.

The agent rolled her eyes.

I put on my game face and said that Mr. Santiago had gone on about how the work I was doing could transform the world if it ever penetrated the minds of the religious zealots in charge of science. He said that universal and personal consciousness need to be brought into the fold of real things worth studying. In this way, and in no other, he said, would humanity someday learn to overcome fear, aggression, and hatred, eventually to replace these destructive things with normal compassion, affection, and some degree of genuine love. He looked iffy on the love projection.

“How sweet,” the agent said, her eyes still stone.

Then I told her that the NDE client had warned me that there would be three attempts on my life by the CIA. He was apologetic as he described all three in detail and told me that the third one would come from a woman who went by the name, Angie.

“I assume that’s you?” I asked.

She didn’t respond.

“He told me to tell you that a being whom he referred to as God said that everyone who’s ever lived must experience life in a brain like yours, a brain without the capacity for empathy. He said to tell you that you won’t be trapped in this condition forever, so don’t lose hope.”

“You have inside connections,” the agent said. “It’s funny that the CIA would want to kill you.”

“I have no connections. Mr. Santiago told me to let you know that your mother is sorry for burning your fingers… when she caught you with matches? You were five, staying overnight in the Stardust Motel. He said you’d pretend not to remember. Is that what you’re doing?”

The agent drew in a breath and held it.

“Your mother was like you,” I told her, “stuck in a brain with little capacity for empathy or compassion.”

“I’ve never told anyone about the matches,” the agent said with a fresh hint of perplexity in her flawless young face.

“He also said you have a small mass the size of a garden pea in your left breast. Your nodes are still negative so you’ll need to have it removed as soon as possible. It’s malignant, high-grade with a high mitotic rate. My advice would be to have it removed at a large center where the surgeons and pathologists know how to handle margins properly. Many places don’t.”

She transferred the gun to her left hand, put her gun hand up her blouse and examined her right breast.

“I don’t feel anything,” she said.

“It’s on the left,” I reminded her.

Her hand moved to the other breast and in less than a second her eyes became fearful.

“It’s still pretty small,” I said. “Completely resectable for a cure, I was told.”

Tears suddenly fell from the outer corners of her eyes. She put her gun away, reached over and loosened my necktie, untucked my shirt and kissed my lips, deliberately smearing some of her black lipstick on my chin with her fingers after the kiss.

The bathroom door clicked open a moment later, and a red-haired man with keys on a ring and a Hotel logo on his lapel stepped in and looked at us with humble surprise.

The agent looked up at him and must have changed her ruse to take advantage of her tears. “We just found out that our little boy has a brain tumor. He’s only five years old!” She burst into heaving sobs, only to regain composure in a moment and say to the man, “I’m sorry. This was the only place I could find to break the news to my husband in private.” She leaned forward, put her arms around me and buried her face against me. Her crying sounded genuine.

I closed my eyes and kept my mouth shut the way she’d told me.

The man fumbled with his keys, apologized for the intrusion and said he’d leave the out-of-order sign up for as long as we needed it. He said he totally understood and would pray for our son. Then he closed the door and locked it.

“Thank you, sir,” the agent sputtered to the locked door.

I kept my eyes shut as we held each other for what seemed several minutes. Then she stopped crying and looked at me again, staring into my eyes at close range. I wasn’t sure if she might kiss me again or pull her gun out and shoot me.

“I don’t know how any of this is possible,” she said. “I’m trained and talented at spotting lies. You’re telling the truth if I’m any judge at all.” She sat up and put her right hand over her left breast on the outside of her blouse this time. “And here’s the physical evidence.”

Her face looked pale now.

“On the practical side,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, “you’ll always know exactly where to find me if you need to shoot me.” I intended to chuckle but couldn’t. “But please,” and this part I said soberly, “whatever you do, don’t shoot me in the head.” I looked around at the urinals, over at a triad of privately enclosed stalls with marble walls to the ceiling, and managed a chuckle.

“Shoot you?” she said. “God, no. I’m going to protect you, Doctor Salinger. For the rest of your life and probably mine.”

That makes three agents protecting me now. Two men and one unusually attractive woman. Physically attractive, at least. Perhaps my research would survive the CIA’s strange opposition to it.

We helped each other up off the floor and hugged, this time without her tears. When I broke the hug, she asked, “Did Mr. Santiago’s God mean that my brain could change in this lifetime?”

I looked at the floor.

“Or do I have to wait for the next?”

 

…

 

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

Toxic Self-talk Cloaked in Objectivity

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When I was 13 years old, Jack, the brother of my band’s bass player, told me about a book, “How To Be Your Own Best Friend.” Since then, I’ve known the importance of avoiding negative self-talk.

But knowing and doing are vastly different. I went ahead and indulged in “analytical” negative self-talk without realizing what I was doing. Now it’s an ingrained habit, and here’s how it all happened to me.

I pride myself in being objective and value it beyond almost everything else. This ingrained mindset came from my blessed atheist Dad and his constant intellectual influence. He was a medical doctor with Boards in 3 specialties, including pathology, the field I wound up in and finally quit, thank God.

Of course, objectivity is the only way to overcome your blind spots as you search for truth.

And while it may be humanly impossible to be truly objective, it’s a worthy goal, sort of like getting the perfect truth onto a patient’s surgical pathology report despite the fact that human error in the laboratory is known to be beyond eradication.

So with Dad’s influence on top of the influence of the fundamentalist Christian religion I joined at age 14, with all its “infallible” messages that I zealously devoured, learning how despicable and abhorrent it is to take any credit for the talents that God has given me, I did two things that, in retrospect, were psychologically, socially and professionally stupid.

  1. I developed a blind spot to my own negative self-talk by accidentally hiding my self-criticism behind a veil of false objectivity.
  2. I swallowed the evil notion that it’s uniquely displeasing to God if I should ever credit myself for anything good I’ve done or will ever do. Along with this came the concept that it’s pleasing to God if, at the end of each day, I searched for my “sins” and felt maximally guilty while begging in a pathetic inner voice for forgiveness for anything negative I had done that day. The perverted logic was: “the closer you get to God, the worse you’ll look in your own eyes.” Which meant that the guiltier I felt, the more God liked me. Sort of like the publican and the Pharisee in the temple? (Luke 18:10)

I swallowed the Guilt Cool Aid almost every night of my life for years, probably decades before I was able to see the absurdity of an intelligent, loving God wanting this kind of self-destructive prayer.

To be fair, it’s pretty obvious to me that the Christian fundamentalists I’ve known over the years have done a million times more good in the world than harm. Unfortunately, that’s the “baby” and most of the sacred doctrine that seems to produce the good deeds is the “bathwater,” at least as far as I can tell now.

So in a perfect world, we would look up to the glowing example of all the fundamentalist Christians that I’ve known, rather than despising them for their odd narrow-mindedness and essential hypocrisy that being human brings. And I think the often-mentioned crusades, used to put down Christianity historically, should instead remind us of the hundreds of millions more who were killed in the name of fundamentalist Marxism.

I guess rational thinking is required, no matter what belief system you choose.

And I’ll admit, there are arrogant people out there who have pathologically unrealistic self-confidence, a dogmatic, controlling attitude towards others, and an unshakable belief that they are always right about everything they think, say and do.

Such people would probably benefit from a dose of the fundamentalist Christian self-talk poison that I swallowed. It would be medicine to them and maybe bring some relief to the “little people” they steal from, abuse and kill.

But few of us (besides politicians and world bankers) are arrogant and dangerous to such a degree.

Most of us are more attuned to reality, more vulnerable to guilt, and could probably benefit by improving our self-talk or at least learning to recognize when it’s destroying us from the inside out.

If you’re half blind to this venom the way I am, the challenge is worth accepting. There’s much to be gained.

For instance, just this morning I heard my inner voice, the person I assume is me, saying that I’m lazy. It flew past me at first. I didn’t flinch or even notice it. But in a few moments, its echo caught my attention and I finally recognized it as negative rather than objective. I stopped my train of thought, backed up and ask myself if I would say such a thing to someone I loved and cared for, someone like my son or daughter.

Hell no, I wouldn’t! I love my suddenly adult kids unconditionally!

So I literally talked to my subconscious mind.

This is a little off the beaten path, but here’s an accurate and helpful glimpse of the human inner landscape as I see it…

The subconscious mind needs to be treated like a beloved dog or perhaps a domesticated dolphin. It needs simple logical explanations spoken in easy words with clear messages delivered with honest supportive emotion.

I apologized to my inner Labrador Retriever.

My subconscious mind is not an inner child, by the way. It’s been around the block with me, rejected by its peers at every job I’ve had, considered a failure by loved ones despite objective success, considered a weak pathologist by surgeons despite the fact that the opposite was objectively true, at least to the few pathologists who worked closely with me and could judge the quality of my work intelligently.

This morning I told my dog-like subconscious mind that it had done plenty of hard work all of its life.

I reviewed the evidence.

I pointed out several of the many people we’d helped together over the years when nobody else was willing to do the extra tedious work – the extra hours it takes to find one or two pre-malignant cells on a pap test where thousands of normal cells hide the rare villains and dozens of normal pap slides hide the few abnormal cases. The extra hours it takes to review other pathologists’ surgical slides for them, slowly and thoroughly, to search the literature to find better diagnostic accuracy, to search and find the missed positive lymph node or the focus of residual cancer that the faster pathologists tend to overlook again and again.

When you do this for pathologists who are also your bosses (as they’ve always been for me), they don’t necessarily appreciate your help or take a liking to you for saving their cookies. At an emotional level, they often seem to resent you. And they virtually never thank you for finding their mistakes.

It’s human. But diligence helps cancer patients survive, and it takes a non-lazy pathologist to stay at the scope and do this work when there’s no extra external compensation, only lonely hours away from home and a reputation for being slow.

After this unusual inner monologue, I felt better. A little stronger and more open to sharing the whole story with you.

I hope it helps you recognize the inappropriateness of “objective” inner criticism when it’s not really objective at all. And I hope that next time you catch yourself being cruel to your inner best friend, you’ll apologize in detail and really mean it.

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD

 

 

A Tall Blond Alien Girl

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I’d taken the afternoon off for a quick trip to the Oort Cloud. The wife wanted me to nudge a comet that was on a 98% for-sure collision course with Earth, destined to torment us in 371 years. No mad rush, of course, but when the Misses say jump, I’ve learned that you’re doing yourself a big favor if you jump. Immediately.

And don’t make any faces about it.

I took the King’s smallest Vemana and kept a leisurely pace humming towards the periphery of the solar system. Made it through several rounds of Jnana yoga before the AI sensors jarred me loose, yammering about how we’d passed all the usual potholes and planets, and reached the Cloud.

After a look around and some measurements to make sure I was targeting the right rock, I opened a scalar gun and sent a feather-like puff into the comet’s starboard flank. The AI’s calculations said our gentle nudge should be enough to keep the mindless predator several million miles from Earth on its way through our neighborhood.

Good enough.

I’ll also remember to take out the trash tonight. Smart men do these things without being reminded, and I’m flat-out brilliant if I say so myself.

On the way back to Earth, I happened to spot one of those little pink orbs, the cute ones you see over Baga Beach in the mornings. The Blonds stay in some phase-shifted netherworld when they travel, so their orbs are all you’re apt to see of them.

Since there are always forty thousand people on the beach humming om to get the Blond’s attention, I’d never spoken to one. Now seemed like the perfect time to give it a go.

Dumb men do these things, it turns out.

I looked out at the pink sphere floating beneath one of the longer teeth hanging from Saturn’s rings and said, “Hi there,” on every frequency and with every code, including a reverse engineered E8 simulation code I’d been working on.

The orb came closer.

“I’d like to ask you a few things if I could.”

The screen glowed pink with the orb and distant stars behind, but somehow floating in front of me now was a blond-headed woman, visible from the chest up. She looked about 19, but Tall Blonds live quite a while we’re told, so she could have been twice my age.

“You got a pair,” she said and smiled. “Cruising out here all by yourself in that rickety little thing.”

I looked at my gauges. All flat, which meant she was in my head. We’ve all heard of such things, of course, but you can’t really believe it until it happens to you.

“How are you doing this?” I asked. “I mean, how can I see you when my instruments can’t?”

“You’re going to want to speak up, Indie. Saturn’s churning and I can barely hear you.”

I felt pleased that someone so advanced would recognize my nationality. I smiled politely and raised my voice. “Is this any better, Ma’am?”

“Yes, much.” Her eyes went from the top of my head down to my navel and back up again to rest on my forehead. She didn’t say it, but I could tell she thought I looked old. “What’s on your mind?”

I was feeling bold, so I didn’t speak the words, I slowed my breathing, crossed my legs and silently thought my words to her at high volume. “It’s my understanding that you people have brought several religions into existence on Earth. Can you…”

“Whoa, you’re going to do that?” Her face lit up with delight. “I’ve never heard an Earthling project his thoughts. I’ll concentrate.” She closed her eyes and knitted her brow. “OK, bring it, India.”

“Can you tell me why the Tall Blond people have brought these various religions into my world? They’re contradictory and seem to cause division.”

She opened her eyes. “Oh, my spleen, you’ve been messing with the Oort Cloud.” She shook her head at me. “Tell me what you did out there.”

“I nudged a comet, Ma’am. My wife said it was going to hit…”

“What comet? Give me some coordinates, I need to get there fast.” Her eyes were steaming but she hadn’t raised her voice.

“Why are you upset? I was only protecting the human race, and the other life down there as well.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m actually a brilliant man. I can understand anything you’re capable of telling me.”

“Really? Check this out, then.”

Her image faded behind a scrolling dark gray sheet that glowed with bright green numbers and symbols. The gist involved gravity and electricity, but it was moving too fast for me to keep up.

“OK, you’ve humbled me. I can’t keep pace with your gravity theory. But would it be possible to give me the broad concepts in my native tongue?”

She grinned smugly as the sheet with the green symbols faded and scrolled away.

“The Universe is both electric and sentient. We believe she makes the big decisions, such as when it’s time for a species to experience a genetic pinch or when its time to ratchet up their code for intelligence.”

“And no one’s allowed to protect themselves from the Universe, I suppose.”

“Don’t be flippant. You’ll have to find another way. None of us can move heavenly bodies without making matters worse. The balance is complex beyond anything imaginable, let alone calculable. The Mind has her reasons.”

“If I tell you how to find the comet, will you answer my question about religion?”

She put a flat rectangular piece of something pink into her mouth and chewed it several times, staring at me blankly. Then she looked down towards my feet. “Yeah. OK, Manish. I’ll come clean if you will.”

I felt myself blushing. She’d reached into my head and found my name. No telling what else.

I told my AI to send her the coordinates with the video records and the readouts from the scalars.

The Tall Blond Alien girl vanished from my cabin and her pink orb zipped off the right edge of my screen.

I’d been played. I felt much more let down than seemed reasonable. I didn’t know her, after all. She shouldn’t mean anything to me, really.

But when someone’s been in your head, it feels as if your souls have touched. And when they leave without saying goodbye, it hurts… as though they’ve judged you worthless after seeing you clearly.

How would I ever explain any of this to Jai?

I was about to put my tail between my legs and go home when the pink orb showed up on my screen again, and the Tall Blond girl reappeared before me.

My heart beat a little too happily.

“I think I saved us both a lot of grief,” she said.

“But not my great-grandchildren and their children.”

“Listen, you can be around to help them. This chunk of rock hits your planet in just 371 years. With some mesenchymal stem cells and astragalus, you can be alive and strong when it touches down. Get your people underwater, build a geopolymer dome at the bottom of a trench. A deep one. Or use the underground hideouts on the Moon. The ones on the lower levels where the crust blocks the solar winds. You people don’t need any more mutations. Hoard all the original DNA you can find, especially plants. Put as many seeds in stasis as you possibly can.”

That’s all easy for her to say. I’ll be lucky to avoid sleeping on the port with my dog, Giggles.

“I don’t suppose you could help me with any of this, could you?” I asked, trying not to whine.

Her eyebrows went up. “Oh my goodness.” She put a hand over her heart. “I was just putting things back the way they were. I didn’t expect to feel responsible for you.” Her eyes went wide in the distance above my head.

“Will you help me, then?” I whispered silently.

She filled her chest with air, and her eyes snapped into focus. “Yes, of course, I’ll help you.”

“That’s wonderful.” I felt a warm affection as if we were old friends. “The most important thing is simple, Ma’am… What’s your name, if I may ask?”

“Why do you ask my name? You couldn’t comprehend it if I told you.”

“Forgive me.”

“For what?” She seemed genuinely perplexed.

“Nothing, I guess. But I do really, really need you to talk to my wife, Jai. She knows how to get teams organized on big projects. And she’s influential with the King. But without you, she’ll never believe a word of my story.”

One of the Tall Blond’s eyebrows went up sharply. “We’ll have to check your testosterone.”

Whatever.

I’d almost forgotten my big question. It seemed small now, but I asked it anyway. “So why did your people–“

“Promote conflicting fundamentalist religions on Earth,” she said in an impatient monotone. “It’s because you people are limited in your ability to see into one another’s minds. You don’t communicate in the usual manner of intelligent beings… Without the possibility of lying. That’s why we brought the conflicting religions. Diversity and competition keep things alive. The whole point was to create honesty among you. It’s impossible to make humans honest without dogmatic religions promoting the idea.” She blew a pink bubble, took it from her mouth and popped it with her teeth.

“What’s so great about honesty?” I asked.

“Lies destroy trust. Trust is the foundation of every civilization that’s ever survived its technological advances. The stage of early artificial intelligence is a treacherous one. Worse than nukes.”

“AI’s are dangerous?” A fruit fly had stowed away in the cabin and chose this moment to dive-bomb my nose. I snatched it from the air and held it in the hollow of my hand.

The Tall Blond flinched. We’re told they’re pacifists. She stared at my fist and seemed to be speaking to it. “If AI’s can’t trust you, yes, they’re deadly. And that’s a minor consideration. Lies themselves are more destructive than dishonest AI’s and far worse than that comet you’re so worried about.”

“Not to argue, but I see lies in a less black-and-white light. Some prevarications are downright helpful, in fact, especially when it comes to self-defense and war.”

She crinkled her nose the way you’d react to a bad smell. “Your thinking is so bizarre.” She looked at my hand with the gnat inside. “If you could only experience a culture where everyone hears everyone’s thoughts. There is no distrust. No call for self-defense or war. It’s virtually impossible to hide the truth.”

“So what happens when you ask a guy if you look fat?”

“What?” She glanced down at herself. “I’m not fat.”

“No, but don’t you sometimes feel fat? And want reassurance that you’re not?”

“No. Don’t be ridiculous.”

The look on her face made me fear that she’d fly off and leave again. “Sorry,” I said and released the fruit fly in a gesture of goodwill. “I shouldn’t have used the word, fat. You’re actually incredibly beautiful… but don’t tell my wife I said that.”

She tilted her head to the side and stared intently as if I’d said something difficult to comprehend. Then she shook her head and smiled weakly. “Lies are the whole problem, Earthling.”

…

Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD