Heavenly Stone

When I can’t sleep, I listen to audiobooks read slowly. I tried this with Borges, but it didn’t work because his stories are too interesting. (My other insomnia bro, Victor Hugo, tends to go on hours-long descriptions of the sewers of Paris , so is a better choice for this purpose.) A line from The Zahir wormed it’s way into my brain the other night: “a coin symbolizes our free will.” Fitting, since a coin represents a fiction—money isn’t real—and free will is equally false (though like with Pascal's wager, you should believe in it anyway ). When you flip a coin or use some other random process to determine an action and committing to the random outcome, you are exercising your willpower in a way that you couldn’t if left to your own devices. I’ve recently introduced randomness into my life, and it has improved things everywhere I've applied it. It started, as so many things do, with ADHD. I’m on the umpteenth editing pass of my novel about a girl surviving her last few months

What do you think of when you think of hunger? Is it physical hunger from skipping meals or fasting? Or is it emotional hunger, the desire for something new, something different, something that feels more real than the daily treadmill of life that's only become more tedious since the rise of the novel coronavirus? To quote an Old El Paso commercial, why not both? I published my first flash fiction piece, Only Starlight , with Flash Fiction Magazine in November of last year. It's only 1000 words, and I'd love it if you'd take the time to read it and let me know what you think. Are there other types of hunger that interest you?