tabitha

Tabitha Ruth smoothed her yellow skirt over her knees and looked down at the snake-patterns in the linoleum and tried to be calm.  She needed to figure out out.  A way out.  Soon the men in white would come for her with their sticky eyes and long fingers.  They would put her on a chair with wheels and push her to a room made of pillows and lock her in.  The pillows would be full of dust-mites which are microscopic crabs that crawl into your pores and clip your capillaries with their pincers until you bleed to death.  Your toes and fingertips turn red and swollen and the red rises up you like a thermometer in summertime. How strange, thought Tabitha, to bleed to death …

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why we are avatars

For years I had only a vague idea of what World of Warcraft was.  To the extent I thought of the people who were caught up in it (or other games like Grand Theft Auto or Halo), I pitied them.  I couldn’t fathom why people would choose to waste their time like that, how anyone could prefer staring at a screen and pushing buttons  to all life’s other options. But a couple years ago, all that changed …  and I’m still a little mystified about what happened to me.  I’m a grown man.  You might not know it from a distance, but it’s true.  How did I get caught up in an online fantasy game? It was winter in Chicago.  That was part of it. …

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