I tag-lined this blog (for twelve months, at least) with the claim that my ever-growing blog, this what you are reading now, bradgarten is “where 2008 is the year of the short story.” And while many of you have been keenly keeping up with the more non-fiction content posted, I’m never certain whether anyone is in fact reading the other crap. It’s not required. In fact, I’m fairly certain (with a few exceptions) the type of folks who claim they have been reading the fiction are the same people who would claim to read Playboy for the articles — bored, female, or liars. Still, standing at the glowing edge of a micro-media empire, with a recorded readership that tops a three digit daily average, one [...]

Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… “There is Grass here!” She is surprised. “But…” “It is contained. It has been here a very long time. One might almost say it has been tamed.” His hands are clasped, hung gently at about the height of his navel. “How?” She squats to examine it more closely. “Why?” “The Garden was once a powerful collective. We did what we pleased.” He is humble. “Those days have passed, but our arts have been preserved here in our grounds.” “But the Grass? He allows it?” “He,” the monk spreads his hands wide, but does not say the name, “does not know.”

Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… I’d like to steal a boat and float down that river someday. I’d like to drift on out to the coast, passing direct from the city, nodding by the rolling grasslands, skirting under the boughs of trees grown too close along water, and wending a leisurely pace to somewhere new. Likely, if I was not stopped by the guards at the wall, or lugged alongside a trawler further downstream, I would not make it beyond the Morokin Ports a half-day’s travel away. I’d be stopped and put to work in a mine and this river would be lost to me.

Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… The apprentice puzzles. “What do you see when you look into the night sky?” “I see nothing. I see perpetual darkness. I see a black void.” Thoughtful pause. “If there is nothing to see, why look?” “The first to arrive wrote of the absence of lights in our night sky. They yearned for something more than the nothingness we now know. Thus, they built the great lens.” “Yet we observe nothing?” “The question is not of seeing the void. The question you should ask,” he replies, “is if there should be something more than nothingness. And why there is not.”

Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… Flapps Bridge stands ancient and is half-sheeted in panels of colourfully oxidizing iron alloys that give it a pre-Tempest era aesthetic. The North Congress spans the breach between the low industrial lands surrounding the Dokyards and what is now the military regimental complex on the cliffs overlooking the city. Hoddall Pedway is a narrow rail in the shape of a grand arch, strung of modern alloys and built for foot traffic between populous Southbend and the mass employers clustered in the ports. And nearby, Keys Draw links the shouldering business of the Promenade with the shippers south across the river.

Fragments of something larger? Whatever. If it was supposed to make sense to you, you’d understand it… A squat block of quarried stone (one of thirty-eight) serves today as a table for a seller of (precisely) eight knobs of polished tin, four empty essence primers, eleven neatly tied bundles of steel blades, three cartons of powdered cinnamon, the dented left arm of a tinkerbot, sixteen hastily transplanted evergreen saplings in earthenware pots, a variety of used drinking vessels, a single brass fork, eleven draw-string bags filled with assorted gears and springs, and one single high quality lens (wider than a man’s hand) securely in the care of a portable safe box anchored to the stone.