Eight Stories to Fill Downtime During Your Lockdown

When I built my first website in 1995 it included a section devoted to art by two crayon artists, Jeffrey Robert and Don Marco. I also used the web to share some of my fiction. The global internet--World Wide Web--was in its infancy then. Very early on three of my stories were translated into other languages. A couple years later I posted two short stories by my daughter. They ended up being published in California and New Zealand. 

Here are a few of the stories I shared at ennyman.com back then. No need to buy the books they appear in. I wrote them to be shared and enjoyed.

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The M Zone
The revelation came suddenly. Like an "Aha!"... only it was an "Oh no!."

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Two Acts That Changed the World
Of the dozen or so German physicists who had been assigned the task of building a super-bomb for Germany, Wilhelm Kurtweil more than any knew the consequences for humanity should the Nazis succeed in being the first to achieve this ultimate quest.

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The Unfinished Stories of Richard Allen Garston
How impossible to know what is real and what is not.

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The Nose
The crammed little bar sizzled with energy. So much was happening in the room that it began to unsettle him. He wondered why he ever said he would meet his friends here.

[Story inspired by an incident that happened to Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar]

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An Unremembered History of the World
This story begins slow, does not follow modern conventions of quick exciting hook etc. It is old fashioned. It exists because the author believed the story was worth the work and the reader who worked at it would be rewarded. I would not have it on this site if it were not important to me.

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A Poem About Truth
The opening lines are derivative. The story is original. The message is timeless.

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Terrorists Preying
Although I'd been an art major in college -- mostly painting and drawing -- I became discouraged with it shortly after graduation and gave it up. I was living with my family on Long Island at the time and for some while afterwards I still visited the New York art galleries, making regular tours of the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Modern.

What finally got me out of art was the whole directionlessness of it all....

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The Breaking Point
It was a Wednesday when the bill arrived. Cassie Hedberg's birthday was the following Monday, so it wasn't too difficult to put one and one together to make two.

Winner of the 1991 Arrowhead Regional Arts Fiction Competition

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Still looking for more good reads, here's a link to four more, stories by Anton Chekov, Jack London, Jospeh Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges.