Useless Fragment #57

"It's a perfectly nice house."

"Those...things on the roof..."

"The architect was a little hard of hearing."

"So they actually are cupholders?"

Useless Fragment #56

Blackness impenetrable...
I looked into the abyss, and it looked into me.

I added three sugars and two caps of creamer. They didn't help.

Useless Fragment #55

It didn't take the House of Representatives long to realize that they shouldn't have jumped out of the plane without a parachute -- twelve one-hundredths of a second seems about right.

They immediately took up a resolution of condemnation, but the rushing wind made exercise of proper procedure difficult to impossible, and the whole business might have collapsed save for the realization by one of the subcommittee members that a quorum's worth of members were carrying cellphones with noise cancelling circuitry, and so proceedings continued in that venue by means of conference call -- briefly.

Useless Fragment #54

"As you know, Towson, Mr duPlace wrote this note in a disturbed state of mind -- or rather, being Canadian, province. Inspector lePlod correctly dismissed as insignificant the fact that duPlace was listening to Abba's 'Dancing Queen' on infinite repeat; I myself indulge in the same pastime. What he overlooked, however was that duPlace's headphones had been tampered with in such a fashion as to induce a variable-cycle phase differential between the channels -- such that could induce a hypnotic trance over time!"

"But Moules -- what about all the ducks?"

"Perhaps he just liked ducks, Towson."

"But Moules, there were over seven million of them..."

"Why must I account for every niggling detail?!"

(Useless?) Fragment #53

"In a suitably curved universe, everything we leave behind lies ahead of us for rediscovery."

Useless Fragment #52

We strode across shattered blocks, whiter than sugar, under a sky the color of wine. "Here the Temple of Zyzyphs once stood," said Ki Liet, "upon its thin and elegant pillars that seemed surely too thin and elegant to support the roof."

We paused atop the pile of rubble.

"The architect won an award for futility," said Ki Liet. "--Now we are coming to the Brick Bridge of Ku. Crossing will be difficult.  Some of the bricks only appear to exist."

Useless Fragment #51

G&S ART SUPPLIES AND KINESTHETIC THERAPY SALON read the sign on the window; inside we found -- among other things -- a large pad of sketching paper with a man behind it, sketching. He was wearing an expression of bemused resignation, and glasses. Also a white tie with a black shirt, possibly as a lesson in negative space.

"Be with you in a minute," he said. "Or not, if you walked into the wrong store. Most people seem to."

"We were curious about the kinesthetic therapy," I said.

"It's five dollars an hour plus supplies," he said, setting down his charcoal pencil to contemplate his sketch with a sort of what-is-this-missing look on his face. He had drawn a duck. It seemed fine to me, at least if drawing a duck had been his intention.

"Okay, but what is it?"

"A social license to act like a nincompoop. If you run around yelling 'woohoo' and throwing paint at people you'll be considered insane -- unless you pay for the privilege. That ennobles the whole business and none dare criticize." He picked up his pencil again and drew a bow tie on the duck. "--Perfect!"

Useless Fragment #50

"Here, my finger's come off!"

"Oh, shut up."

"But it was my favorite finger!"

There was an icy pause.

"In your own time, gentlemen," said Death, who was sitting in a chair in the corner, patiently working through a stack of crossword puzzle magazines.

Useless Fragment #49

Initially D. T. Schmidt had been employed by the law firm of Bellicose, Bellicose and Otter, but -- after an unfortunate incident while making a Careers Day presentation to students of the Philadelphia Public School System that involved dressing up as Abraham Lincoln -- had been obliged to take up the obsolescent profession of door-to-door salesman of shoes in the days when people bought shoes primarily over the internet and just couldn't seem to wrap their minds around the concept of a man coming to the door selling them.  Frequently he would have to get their email addresses and send them some spam before they would even let him in the door. Today he was standing on the coast of the Cape of Good Hope, and his wife Jane had just run off with a man who bore a strong resemblance to George Washington, which meant that his worst fear had been realized: he was living in a Tom Holt novel.

"Don't drag me into this," said Tom

Useless Fragment #48

Noblesse oblique, I think, expresses the character of my employer, Mr Melvin Tomes.  When I took on the position of butler I assumed my duties would include the normal variety of activities -- maintenance of the master's wardrobe, administration of his social schedule and so on -- and never dreamed that I would be required to don a costume and fight crime.  And indeed I have not, but the prospect is never far from my mind. What I am attempting to say is that Mr Tomes is an enigma wrapped in a mystery dressed in a Botany 500 suit and a jester's cap with bells. No, I don't think it odd that he mails bananas to persons selected at random from the Mensa telephone book; why do you ask?

Useless Fragment #47

My road to riches began the day Microsoft terminated the Psychokinetic Pointing Device research project merely because of a lack of results after thirty years and my entire division found ourselves unemployed.

We were clearing the basement of potatoes (high Rhine-score potatoes; part of our research -- see THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS) when I found myself digging at a little popcorn hull of memory stuck between the teeth of my mind.

"Biff," I said, "isn't there another use for potatoes?"

"There are many uses for potatoes. You can play hot-potato with them, or make glass out of them, or french fries--"

"That's it!" I cried -- and so began the Psychic Potato Company. You may believe you've eaten some of our products today.

Useless Fragment #46

The sun came up bluish-black and illustrated the house in oily shades.

It was a dead house, slowly crumbling, drying up and blowing away in an almost visible process. Shingles and broken window panes lay in shattered patterns across dead black grass that rose from white earth. Bits of trash slowly blew over them, moving constantly but never actually leaving the yard.

From a tree whose leaves glowed red against a bile-yellow sky a mourning dove descended to hobble down the driveway. The plain greyness of the bird would have brought a moment of relief to an observer, until it blinked up at him with eyes of glistening white.

At the end of the driveway there was a sign:

FOR SALE

TOO LATE

Useless Fragment #45

The ringing in my ears wasn't a hallucination, but while I was figuring that out the machine beeped and took my call for me. It was Aiello from the 12th Precinct.

"Gordon, get over here now.  Alabaster Danny just got booked for homicide."

I stared at the clock next to the bed. 2:45 AM.

Why would they call me at 2:45 to tell me that?

Sure, Alabaster Danny was the least likely person to commit murder I knew -- the undead don't commit murder, unless it's someone they like; after all, they're the ones who have to put up with them afterward -- but even if he had, it was no more than a decease-and-exist order, and they've got retroactive permits for a reason.

Useless Fragment #44

Sarah Sollew, columnist for the Lifestyles section of the Morrisberg Daily Wreckage and heroine of her own personal life, clutched more tightly at the grillwork of the Runaway Shuttle as it roared toward the airport at 65 miles per hour, and idly converted her current speed into metric.

Useless Fragment #43

"We must never underestimate the power of interpretation," said Professor Jones. "For example, here is the emptiest paragraph in the entire corpus of Comstock Mooble--"

Seven times the cock crowed and seven times the pesky toad belched out a cry of injustice as the farmer's axe descended; seven times the backer hoed and seven times the secret code failed to disguise the plans of the evil men. The dos of evil men oft live behind them, but don't quote me on that.

"It consists of mere nouns, verbs and adjectives. It is a literary futility. And yet if we read it carefully, with thoughtful poetic reinterpretation of the words, it can make us weep -- or roar with anger. We need not settle for the author's conceptions.

"Yours is the power. I invite you to savor it."