One cold winter’s day, I was driving over Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Memorial Bridge on my way to work when I saw an amazing thing. The Patapsco River, the estuary of the Chesapeake Bay on which the city is built, was covered in ice. That’s rare for a locale with…

Sometimes a story is more than it seems. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes began life as a short story, turned into a screenplay, and finally grew to be a novel. While I can’t put myself on a par with Bradbury, I’ve had similar experiences. …

“That’s so cute!” Carly squealed. She tugged Baxter’s sleeve and indicated the lime-green alien offering shopping baskets inside the MegaMart entrance.

Baxter snorted. “That balloon probably costs a hundred dollars.” …

A blemished grapefruit of a moon hung in the orange sky beyond lines of mountains surging like ocean swells frozen in time. The orange was everywhere. It dripped from the clouds, tinting grass and trees, houses and cars, children’s faces. Everything.

It had been that way two years running, almost…

Okay, look. While it’s true the experiment was my idea, what happened is not my fault. I merely suggested throwing a pot of boiling water into the air. The rest was Orson’s doing.

Partly, anyway. Mother Nature provided the inspiration, slapping us with that cold snap. The temperature hit minus…

To increase my name recognition, I’ll be launching one hundred seventy three distinctive new publications in the coming two weeks. Maybe one hundred seventy four if I can think up a topic better than wombat husbandry. …

“Join me in the hot tub.”

Other new arrivals laughed at the greeting, but she and I had a history. The words were a jab, not a tickle. It had been eight years, seven months, and sixteen days since we parted in the Florida sun. Another time, another world, almost…

The sound woke Jordan Hall near four-thirty in the morning when a few errant rays of sunlight stealing over the horizon grayed the sky. It whirred and whined as though a great metal wheel were spinning, spinning, yet neither slowing nor approaching.

Jordan’s wife Maggie slept at his side, oblivious…