The car housed a hysterical bumper sticker: Save the Planet, and I permitted a moment of contemplation to truly bask in this thought. Save the planet? What a joke. Save the planet from what? From ourselves? And save it for what? For ourselves? It was...
A second red-orange spearhead leaps straight at O'Shaughnessy. The whole world seems to stand still. Then the gun behind it crashes, and there's a cataclysm of pain all over him, and a shock goes through him as if he ran head-on into a stone wall. A ...
That little guy, said Boris in the car on the way to Antwerp. You know the painter saw him-he wasn't painting that bird from his mind, you know? That's a real little guy, chained up on the wall, there. If I saw him mixed up with dozen other birds all...
First machine kicked man’s ass physically, then machine started taking over the left-brain when Deep Blue bested Kasparov in chess, and then finally the machine fully took over the left-brain when Watson beat the great Ken Jennings on Jeopardy. And...
I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, t...
...once I realized that Australia’s top highway speed of 110 kilometers per hour was the same as going 65 in the U.S., all my hardened American enthusiasm for speed went limp until it felt like the car was hardly moving at all. Even worse, most str...
Since the Leeburg Pike [at Tyson's Corner] carries six to eight lanes of fast-moving traffic and the mall lacks an obvious pedestrian entrance, I decided to negotiate the street in my car rather than on foot. This is a problem planners call the 'driv...
When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't...
I nearly ran him over after he ran out in front of my car. So I slammed on the brakes, rolled down my window, and said, “Do you realize I could have killed you?” “It was stupid of me to run out in front of you,” he said. “Yeah, it was,” I...
Do you know where Jason is?” she asked Dmitri when they exited the morgue. Dmitri pressed the car remote to unlock the flame red Ferrari parked in the employees-only lot. “Tired of your Bluebell already?” A tendril of champagne circled around h...
Here's why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own. People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one ...
Most Muggles lived in a world defined by the limits of what you could do with cars and telephones. Even though Muggle physics explicitly permitted possibilities like molecular nanotechnology or the Penrose process for extracting energy from black hol...
Look, Laszlo. I'll have the dentist with me, and I don't want to alarm her any more than necessary. So take Vanna out of the backseat and stick her in the trunk." Shanna halted. Her mouth dropped open. Her throat seized up, making it hard to breathe....
He reached the ground floor and flung the door open, fleeing into the street. He glanced back and saw that she wasn't following, so he slowed to a halt. His pulse raced. The entranceway was dark, the door swinging slowly closed. Movement to his left ...
Then the musical instruments appeared. Dad’s snare drum from the house, Henry’s guitar from his car, Adam’s spare guitar from my room. Everyone was jamming together, singing songs: Dad’s songs, Adam’s songs, old Clash songs, old Wipers song...
An eerie aspect of social media is the way the dead’s account lingers in digital space as a floating memorial. Friends post emotional farewells as if the departed will read them. But we all know that those words are for the rest of the world as if ...
How I treat a brother or sister from day to day, how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street, how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike, how I deal with normal people in their normal confusion on a normal day may be a better indicati...
Uri was turned, looking at him, shouting something, but at that point, Gabe couldn’t hear him. A moment later, Gabe felt like the car was spinning uncontrollably. The nausea overcame him and he seriously thought he might be sick. He looked down at ...
I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time, we were parked a few yards beyo...
I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even mor...
In our youth, we may have ridiculed the cost-of-living-index family, with their house, two cars, and two kids, but today we are pro-family. We have seen the damage done by the previous generation and have doubled our efforts when it comes to caring f...
