The Impossible Fortress

by Jason Rekulak

I didn’t say anything. One thing I’d learned is that no answer will ever satisfy an angry adult. Anything you say is bound to make them angrier, so the best response was always no response.

‘You can teach an elephant to tap-dance,

dance, but you won’t enjoy the show and neither will the elephant.’

“Actions have consequences!” Hibble said. “If you don’t beat the cream, Mrs. Marvin, how do you expect it to froth?”

Idiot cliche

This was 1987 and I was fourteen years old, and there was no such thing as a wrong book.

alley

There are plenty of things that a teenage boy doesn’t tell his mother. As we get older, there are more and more things we hold back, things too hard to say or too embarrassing to explain. We do this to protect our mothers as much as ourselves, because let’s face it—most of our thoughts are truly unthinkable.

He thanked everyone for coming. He spoke at length about the importance of computer programmers in the near future. He predicted that one day soon, everyone would have computers in their homes. He promised that people would carry computers in their pockets and even wear computers on their bodies. “Imagine a computer no bigger than a candy bar!” he exclaimed, and we laughed at the absurdity of his predictions; they were all straight out of The Jetsons.