Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    I Am A Nucleus
    I Am A Nucleus
    I Am A Nucleus
    Ebook44 pages41 minutes

    I Am A Nucleus

    By Stephen Barr

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    No doubt whatever about it, I had the Indian sign on me ... my comfortably untidy world had suddenly turned into a monstrosity of order!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJovian Press
    Release dateOct 30, 2016
    ISBN9781537803876
    I Am A Nucleus

    Related to I Am A Nucleus

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Hollywood, Ending

      Feb 13, 2018

      Hollywood, Ending
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Leather Coat

      Apr 4, 2024

      The Leather Coat
      6 min read

    • Article

      Averted Vision

      Sep 1, 2022

      Averted Vision
      25 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Nick Moran

      Dec 13, 2020

      Milk piqued my interest because at the time my daughter was five months old. When people notice one blue car on the road, they see every blue car on the road. When I opened my fridge every few hours, I primed myself for distraction. The post A Year i

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Same Story

      Mar 29, 2021

      FROM ISSUE #53: MISTAKES SUZANNE ROBERTS is the author of Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Bronze Medal Winner from the North American Travel Journalists Association for Best Travel Book) and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Da

      13 min read

    • Article

      Cricket League

      Sep 1, 2022

      First prize 10 and under Tang Li, age 9 Palmetto Bay, FL My name is Anisa. I was in Hawaii on vacation. I enjoyed sipping refreshing drinks, overlooking the turquoise ocean, and dancing with others, before I overheard that the priceless Fire Ring wa

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Ceremony

      Sep 6, 2022

      It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing. I mean yeah, there’d been plenty of times where I didn’t give a shit about something. Oh that thing? Yeah, fuck that thing. I did it all the time. M

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Duplex

      Jun 9, 2020

      I moved to Los Angeles to sing. When was this? August? June? I was twenty-nine, and those were shapeless months, when the days blended together and I refused to pull them apart. My landlord was unusually close to her adult son. His name was Jeffrey,

      21 min read

    • Article

      Righteous

      Jan 22, 2019

      Righteous
      8 min read

    • Article

      Life In The past Lane

      Aug 27, 2021

      Life In The past Lane
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Hard Man To Forget

      Jan 8, 2024

      A Hard Man To Forget
      4 min read

    • Article

      Blonde BOMBSHELLS

      Feb 15, 2024

      Blonde BOMBSHELLS
      7 min read

    • Article

      The First Day: One man’s walk to his own cremation.

      Aug 7, 2014

      The fog was thick when I left my bedsit and ventured out alone into the barren and murky city. I was heading for what used to be called a crematorium and these days is known as a funeral parlor. I had received a notice instructing me to arrive by 9 a

      15 min read

    • Article

      It Happened to Me…

      Feb 24, 2022

      It Happened to Me…
      7 min read

    • Article

      It Happened to Me…

      Feb 24, 2022

      It Happened to Me…
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Family Plot

      May 7, 2020

      The Family Plot
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Turn

      Aug 14, 2019

      HERE’S a story. In college I entered the spring semester of my freshman year on academic probation. There wasn’t one reason this happened. There were many. I had signed up for a computer science class called Digital Security with no programming knowl

      5 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 4, 2024

      Security confiscated the bracelet I’d slipped into my wallet but not the thin black sweater I wore as I walked out of Macy’s. The sweater still had its price tag and was so soft it soothed whoever was whispering “more, more” in my ears adorned with s

      4 min read

    • Article

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • Article

      Prohibition

      Sep 10, 2021

      It had been ten days since my last fix. I knew what I was going to do was wrong, but unless you knew the yearning that your body exerts, the internal pull which strangles your very soul into submission, then you cannot judge me. Yes, it was wrong. Ye

      15 min read

    • Article

      It Happened To Me…

      Jan 26, 2023

      It Happened To Me…
      7 min read

    • Article

      Never Meet YOUR HEROES?

      Apr 2, 2020

      Never Meet YOUR HEROES?
      7 min read

    • Article

      It Happened to Me…

      Jan 5, 2022

      I too have experienced ‘The voice of authority’ [FT410:75]. When I was younger, I had a romance that lasted about six months. At first it was terrific, then it wasn’t, then it ended. Nothing drastic. Several months later, I had a day off work. I had

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Missing Limousine

      Sep 28, 2021

      The Missing Limousine
      21 min read

    • Article

      The Freshening

      Sep 15, 2018

      My cashier’s black hair was beautiful. Though not unlike mine, it was shinier and thicker, and hung glamorously down to her waist. It looked strong, too, like Christopher Reeve’s in the Superman movies. A strand of Superman’s silvery hair could hold

      21 min read

    • Article

      Tomorrows

      Mar 15, 2022

      The night, as most nights, was like a dream. At ten, once I’d fed the dog the last scraps off the stove. Once I’d cursed the cat for scratching up my mama’s antique furniture, then welcomed him back into my arms. Once I’d slicked my hair into a ponyt

      26 min read

    • Article

      Sigrid Nunez

      Sep 15, 2017

      During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khme

      23 min read

    • Article

      What The Magpie Says

      Oct 16, 2022

      What The Magpie Says
      8 min read

    • Article

      Haunted

      Sep 27, 2023

      Haunted
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for I Am A Nucleus

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      I Am A Nucleus - Stephen Barr

      I AM A NUCLEUS

      Stephen Barr

      JOVIAN PRESS

      Thank you for reading. If you enjoy this book, please leave a review or connect with the author.

      All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

      Copyright © 2016 by Stephen Barr

      Interior design by Pronoun

      Distribution by Pronoun

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      I am a Nucleus

      I AM A NUCLEUS

      WHEN I GOT HOME from the office, I was not so much tired as beaten down, but the effect is similar. I let myself into the apartment, which had an absentee-wife look, and took a cold shower. The present downtown temperature, according to the radio, was eighty-seven degrees, but according to my Greenwich Village thermometer, it was ninety-six. I got dressed and went into the living room, and wished ardently that my wife Molly were here to tell me why the whole place looked so woebegone.

      What do they do, I asked myself, that I have left undone? I’ve vacuumed the carpet, I’ve dusted and I’ve straightened the cushions.... Ah! The ashtrays. I emptied them, washed them and put them back, but still the place looked wife-deserted.

      It had been a bad day; I had forgotten to wind the alarm clock, so I’d had to hurry to make a story conference at one of the TV studios I write for. I didn’t notice the impending rain storm and had no umbrella when I reached the sidewalk, to find myself confronted with an almost tropical downpour. I would have turned back, but a taxi came up and a woman got out, so I dashed through the rain and got in.

      Madison and Fifty-fourth, I said.

      Right, said the driver, and I heard the starter grind, and then go on grinding. After some futile efforts, he turned to me. Sorry, Mac. You’ll have to find another cab. Good hunting.

      If possible, it was raining still harder. I opened my newspaper over my hat and ran for the subway: three blocks. Whizzing traffic held me up at each crossing and I was soaked when I reached the platform, just in time to miss the local. After an abnormal delay, I got one which exactly missed the express at Fourteenth Street. The same thing happened at both ends of the crosstown shuttle, but I found the rain had stopped when I got out at Fifty-first and Lexington.

      As I walked across to Madison Avenue, I passed a big excavation where they were getting ready to put up a new office building. There was the usual crowd of buffs watching the digging machines and, in particular, a man with a pneumatic drill who was breaking up some hard-packed clay. While I looked, a big lump of it fell away, and for an instant I was able to see something that looked like a chunk of dirty glass, the size of an old-fashioned hatbox. It glittered brilliantly in the sunlight, and then his chattering drill hit it.

      There was a faint bang and the thing disintegrated. It knocked him on his back, but he got right up and I realized he was not hurt. At the moment of

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1