John Wiswell's Page

I don't have one favorite writer, so I'm not going to name who this is. If I did a good job, you can guess it!

It's well known to those who know it that every six sentence story has seven sentences. How it got there, what it is about and if it made her point clear are matters entirely unknowable to the artist. Contemplating it is like contemplating God insofar as, as one micro-philosopher put it, "You can't do it." Not contemplating it is also ill-advised, though, as it leads to an exces… Continue

Werewolf threw his arm onto the table and yelled, “If you think you’re the toughest thing that goes bump in the night then prove it, pretty boy!”

“How about I arm wrestle you tomorrow night?” Vampire asked with a toothy smirk. The full moon would be gone then, and the whole bar knew it.

Werewolf tried to jump the table, but Boogeyman caught him around the waist and pulled him back.

“It’s not worth it, man!”

They kept squabbling, not realizing they’d all be helpless when the Martians landed t… Continue

Grandfather wanted him to be a Baptist, but the boy was one of experiences and emotions, not study, and certainly not pews. Grandfather threw the book at him, he ran from reading, and the two didn’t speak until the old man only had a few months left.

Their only conversation ran short, even though the boy said he’d recently started reading and liked Huck Finn. The dying old man barked that he needed a Bible, and Shakespeare, and Hemingway, and more and more until the boy simply walked out in tea… Continue

What punk it was that set the cross ablaze in their yard, none of them knew. There were guesses, with only so many people so low in Fleetwater, and fewer spotted fleeing neighborhood as the Cartwrights desperately tried to beat out the burning symbol of salvation. The old Cartwrights were studied Methodists, but the young were new to the game and didn’t quite grasp symbolism. The young Cartwrights went about with oil and wood, and that next morning every potential offender awoke to burning lette… Continue

Planets are square. Spaceships take photos of them with a round lens, so of course they look spherical, but if you notice there's black space around the edges of any picture, forming a square, or at least a rectangle. Even the round lens can't suppress angular planets. It's black there because that's where it's night on Mars. Even the sun is a cube. Our circular pupils can’t handle it, and deceive us to compensate.