Everyday around 8:30, I look in the windows and make sure that no one was in the house that I didn’t know about. Sometimes the homeowner doesn’t leave at all, and I’m stuck outside; but if she does leave, she always returns at exactly 6:30 in the evening. The first time I discovered this house, she had accidentally left it unlocked, but then I found a spare key in her desk. I had an extra one made and have been using it every day since. I don’t ever steal anything valuable. The first thing I do is take a nice warm shower. That way, the water heater has time to compensate by the time she gets back home. She keeps a lot of fruit in her kitchen, so I pick and choose what won’t be noticed. I also like to have a piece of toast, careful to clean up the crumbs. Since she doesn’t own a television, I spend the rest of the day reading the books she has in her library. After a couple years of this, I had all of the narrative fiction read; some of them twice. I moved on to the more technical material that would have been far beyond me before. She was apparently some kind of astrophysicist. I was this close to finishing high school, but I’ve learned more in the last few years of reading on my own than I ever did as a kid. I found her educational literature to be fascinating, and wished that I had had an opportunity to go to college. After exhausting her resources, I started to check books out of the public library, but I would always read them in her house. It felt more like home to me, even though I could never sleep there. One day, I was in the middle of a book about exoplanets, when the door opened. The homeowner walked in and dropped a stack of papers on the coffee table. I’m stunned. “Applications for your GED, college admittance, and financial aid,” she said. “I think it’s time we move you on to a formal education.” How long has she known?
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Current Schedule
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Sundays (macrofiction)
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Weekdays (microfiction)
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Botner
This is a highly experimental series wherein I write a story prompt, let an AI text generator continue the narrative, and then I write the conclusion.
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Saturdays (mezzofiction)
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Big Papa
Two new friends, Ellie and Lowell fight to wrest control of an afterlife simulation from the megalomaniac who stole it from Ellie and her team.
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- About Me
My name is Nick Fisherman III. It's not my real name, but that's not because I'm trying to hide from my former agency, or something. I named myself after someone I've known for most of my life, and he chose it in honor of his late best friend. I took up writing when I found myself failing 8th grade science, and realized I might never reach my dream of becoming a biochemist, a meteorologist, and a quantum physicist. I started developing my canon after a scouting trip to an island inspired what I thought would be my first novel. I founded this website upon the advice of many people, who told me I needed to get my work out there, and not wait for an agent to accept my manuscript. You can expect one new story every day. Weekdays are for microstories, which are one or two paragraphs long. They're usually only thematically linked, so you won't have to read one to understand another, but they do sometimes tell a combined story. Sundays are for my continuous longer story, The Advancement of Mateo Matic, which I started in the beginning, and won't end until 2066. Saturdays are for long series, most of which take place in the same universe as Mateo, and add to the larger mythology.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Microstory 97: Homeless Tenant
Labels:
astrophysics
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college
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education
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library
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literature
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microfiction
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microstory
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reading
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science
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Great story!
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