Charlie Jones attended a party of friends and acquaintances in one of the trendy studio apartments near Washington Square on the lower east side of Manhattan. Charlie brought some beer, one of the girls brought wine. Someone brought some hash and someone else brought some acid to get high on the music. One of the guys rolled a mixture of Cherry Blend pipe tobacco and hashish into a clumsy fat cigarette held together by sp...

I stand in my tiny kitchen to get a cool glass of apple juice. I grip the bottle tightly as I pour. I stop pouring, not because the glass is full, but because my hand shakes so violently. The shaking is worse now. I can barely hold anything without shaking anymore. I know something is wrong, but no one listens to me. I finally fill my glass after three attempts, I do not spill any this time. I slide the glass across the c...

Mr. Hal Bender was always told he had a wire loose somewhere in that mathematically gifted, bad comb-over head of his. His fellow bean counters at the accounting firm of Gort, Kitt, and Servo voted Hal most likely to mate with a computer. And if Mr. Bender ever did get married, he’d somehow manage to meet the national household population average of two-point five-four. One spring morning in late April, the middle-aged ge...

A trail of fire was seen from afar in the blackness of the night. Each torch showed brightly the path of Wolfsbane pass. The forest silent in anticipation awaited the fate of the halo sisters. Four sorceresses of very strange and powerful magic’s. Deep within the woods at the end of Wolfsbane pass, Halo manor stood in a fairly large clearing. A grand log cabin that not even Bill Gates could afford. One side was tinted gla...

Doc. Dempsey coiled the ends of his braids and stuffed them in the hip pockets of his dockers. He grabbed his newspaper and go-cup and walked to his jeep. He took a slurp from his go-cup and a glanced at the road before going back to his newspaper. He read a feature about one of the teachers at Two-Eagle-River school. The speedometer was sitting at about 25 mph. The jeep rolled down the Round Butte road, which was used to...

Youth was not being served, at least not on the chessboard. It took a call from the hospital to halt the onslaught by the forces of Dr. Robert Miles against those of his grandson. There’d been a bar fight. The loser was waiting in the emergency room. Having just finished his first year of medical school, Eli Stuart went along to watch, learn, and maybe help, the man who’d gotten him interested in medicine. After the crise...

The Emergency Department: people don’t like being here. It usually means your sick, or injured, or someone you know is sick or injured. The only other reason to be here is because you attend to the sick and injured. As well as the insane, the inebriated, and the incensed. I’m here because I’m rostered to work. My first year as a doctor.Apparently being a doctor is supposed to be glamorous. Or at least vaguely noble. In bo...

A weight-lifting phlebotomist Russell,had a humongous bicep muscle.A vein he would graband then give a hard stab.Often he and the patient would tussle.A young gastro doctor named Nate,could never get a second dinner date.He just could not stoprattling on about shop.The ladies hardly ever ate.An anesthesiologist named Fred,had a fetish about loving the dead.He’d bring home a datewhen the evening was lateand put her to slee...