Paul A. Merkley
Bio
Mental traveller. Idealist. Try to be low-key but sometimes hothead. Curious George. "Ardent desire is the squire of the heart." Love Tolkien, Cinephile. Awards ASCAP, Royal Society. Music as Brain Fitness: www.musicandmemoryjunction.com
Achievements (1)
Stories (103)
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Aliens Reverse the Activity Series
"There was only one rule: don’t open the door.” Alien bastards turned our activity series upside down. Must be what fits their life forms. In 48 hours all the gold, lead, steel, and just about every other metal alloy disintegrated. Hydrogen too. So much for water. Lithium is stable. Only safe place is this battery factory. More than twenty thousand of us packed in like sardines. Lots of pure oxygen because the hydrogen fizzes away. Safe if the door stays shut. Open it and everything evaporates. Every element on earth turns against us. They beat us without firing a shot.
By Paul A. Merkleyabout a year ago in Fiction
Watching Megalopolis
I have fallen out of the habit of going to the movies. Part of the reason is that I always enjoyed going with others. Last summer my granddaughter took me to Barbie. She says I laughed louder than anyone in the theater. Apparently there were moments when you could have heard a pin drop, but I was snorting and guffawing.
By Paul A. Merkleyabout a year ago in Art
Washing her hair
My eyes lose themselves in unruly cascades of raspberry brunette seduction just two shades lighter than the luminous orbs that are her eyes, setting off a jaw and cheekbone that make me weak at the knees, and my heart skips a beat, but she calls me to task
By Paul A. Merkleyabout a year ago in Poets
Villa Schifanoia, Graduate School of Fine Arts
Mark Twain had two false starts in writing his autobiography. Both times he tried to set the events of his life out in chronological order, and both times he found the results false, and could not bear them. Then he took another tack. He allowed the events of the day to trigger memories, and he wrote about those memories, not ordering his work by the chronology of his life, but by the happenstance of what came up for him on that day, whether he read it in a newspaper, or came across it otherwise.
By Paul A. Merkleyabout a year ago in Art
Thalassaphobia
Things weren't going exactly to plan, but then they never do. I ought to know. I hear people's stories. I'm a clinical psychologist, actually a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Washington. Practically speaking I have to do my clinical research during the four months of the summer. I had a good idea but I was running late. To make a long story short, I issued the call for volunteer subjects before getting the grant approved. The committee rejected my proposal, so now I had test subjects but no funding.
By Paul A. Merkleyabout a year ago in Fiction
Dark Energy, Dark Vengeance
Do you know what it is to feel and think with no ambivalence, with purity of emotion and determination? I do. I hate you utterly. I despise you all completely, no exceptions, no reservations. Why? My wife and daughter were brutally tortured and killed and you denied them justice. Yes you, with your generous, wooly-minded liberality. You. Don't bother trying to deny this; I've had months to re-live it. At least my counselor was honest. There is no closure, she said, because they're not coming back. My case was so horrific she left her profession.
By Paul A. Merkleyabout a year ago in Fiction
How I beat back the ghosts of the Moor
Do you know your own mind? I've been living with mine for decades, and I'd like to think I have some sense of it, although I'm probably not objective. Let's try a more specific question: does your mind stick to the subject at hand, or does it "doff about"? In the film Shakespeare in Love, Lord Wessex says to Juliet, "How your mind doffs about!" I wanted to retort "And what's wrong with that?"
By Paul A. Merkley2 years ago in FYI
