Mind Wanderings
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A Moral Budget: Choices Between Life and War
A packet of peanut paste costs a dollar. We bought the missile instead. By Joe Broadmeadow For twenty years I answered calls from people on the worst day of their lives. That is the job. Someone cannot help themselves, so…
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The Luck of Old Friends
By Joe Broadmeadow When to the session of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past…” William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30 Given the choice between smart and luck, pick lucky. I came to that conclusion slowly, the way…
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The Pile Was Never the Point
By Joe Broadmeadow My grandson Wyatt spent the better part of an hour on a project that would have baffled any efficiency expert. He gathered every toy he could carry, one armload at a time, and fed them through a…
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Nunc Aeternum: The Eternal Now
by Joe Broadmeadow ❧ There is a single moment that has never ended, and you are standing inside it. We speak of time as a river—Heraclitus dipping his hand into a current that has already moved on. But the river…
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The Wishing Stone
A Short Story Toby Greer found the stone the summer he turned eight, on the gray strip of beach below his grandmother’s house, where the bay went out so far at low tide it left the world looking emptied. It…
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The Lisbon Instrument
An alternate history: What if Germany developed the bomb first? I. Haigerloch, Württemberg — 3 May 1943 The pile sat in a cave cut into the rock beneath the castle church, and when Dr. Ernst Kolbe came down the stairs…
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The Emergency After the Emergency
The Self-Inflicted Wound When presidents invoke the Defense Production Act, it usually signals a country bracing for crisis. This time, it looks more like a belated attempt to cover one up. President Donald Trump has turned to the Cold War-era…
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I Was Told There Would Be Angels…and Secret Messages
Near Death Experiences…really? Nobody warns you, before you nearly die, that the whole affair will be such a colossal administrative letdown. You go in expecting Revelation—capital R, trumpets, the full Cecil B. DeMille production—and you come out with a bumper…
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The Ledger of Small Things
The first falling leaf of fall came down on a Tuesday, and Marta Szymanski noticed it because she noticed everything now that she had decided to die. She was sitting on the back steps of the house on Oleander Street…