The Cipher

by Kathe Koja

I’ve been avoiding so much for so long that the real trick becomes thinking straight.

Nakota’s notions had taken me places that I had never dreamed of going, but the places were rarely good ones.

“A shitty little pet-store rat is hardly a human being,” but there was something there I didn’t like at all, maybe the too obvious disgust at my words, the shifty overplay. Maybe she knew it too, heard a greed even she didn’t want to know she had.

I’m not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well.

a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.

God how I missed her, and not when you would think, no lonely nights spent snuffling into my bachelor pillow, yanking at my stiff bachelor dick. Instead it hurt most at the times she was there,