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Dear Lord Bezoath, I know it is a busy time for everyone with the ongoing global pandemic and the collapse of two major democracies, but I have come down ill and need to take off this weekend. I have entered the hours into the system, but it is saying I need approval from a senior manager or above.

There are people in the desert who will give you answers if you ask for them. If you drive the highway that runs wide and long between the last town to the east and the first town to the west, and only stop once, you will find them. Mind that you only stop once.

It was said that in the ancient days, heroes walked the earth, as common on the ground as worms after the rain. Of course, the last bit about worms was said only by Jinye’s grandmother, a weathered crag of a woman who considered herself the authority on ages past.

The maps aren’t always right anymore. After the ocean took little nibbles out of the coastlines and then big gobbling bites, mapmakers were still trying, storms or no storms. But then there were bombs too, and any new maps stayed in the hands of their makers.

The clank of a metal-shod staff heralded the arrival of Melnock the wizard to the library of Babyl-no-Ktan.

Otherwise, this whole being a bird thing? Not bad. Not bad at all.

It was Needle who first suggested robbing the Orangutan’s treasury. We were huddled under the tin-sheet roof of a roadside dhaba, stained china cups of chaisteaming between cupped palms, safe from the falling hail. It clattered noisily above us, bouncing off the roof and peppering the ground around our feet. We had nothing to fear from the hail, though, other than a few bruises. Snow was a different matter. But it hadn’t snowed in Karachi for a decade.

Shame. I knew its taste. Tar and salt, the last drag of Marlboro Lights, straight through the filter, on a balmy afternoon by the beach. The Hindi word for shame sounds like its English counterpart but its form was floating in the vicinity of my brain, waiting to drop at a moment’s notice.

This class will look at both the scientific uses of time travel as well as their fictional uses. Students will learn the importance of distinguishing Personal (Proper) Time from Co-ordinate (Calendar) Time, how that distinction can be used to overcome the common objections to time travel in the history of literature, and how to use closed time-like curves to visit the past.

Like most accidents, this one happened in slow motion: Sharra could only watch as her cat, Pumpkin, tightening his haunches and wiggling his rear, fixed his gaze on the usually-empty cart. That cart was now full of the glass bottles she’d moved carefully from the shelves for her weekly dusting. Large and small, frosty white and brightly colored, sturdy and delicate as spun sugar, all of them swirled with inner light. Her cries of “Pumpkin, no!” accompanied too-slow movements as he launched himself.