Roughly eight months before I was born, my parents-to-be bought their first house, right here in Blast City. He was originally from Coaltown, and she from Adamantingham, so they figured they would live right in the middle, and be could be equally close to their respective families. To commemorate this big step in their relationship, she surprised him with a dog. Henry was a cairn terrier, and won the family lottery that day. They were fully prepared to take care of that furball just as they would a human child baby. That very day, they discovered her to be pregnant. As they tell it, I wasn’t a mistake, but I think we all realize this cute story doesn’t work if I wasn’t. It’s okay, I’ve come to terms with it, but I couldn’t have done it without my best friend, Henry. We grew up together like siblings, exploring the world, and learning from our mistakes. He was never as smart as any human, of course, and I quickly surpassed him in intelligence, but I think having me around gave him that little bit higher IQ. We would get into all sorts of trouble, and since we were doing it together, we suffered the same consequences, so our brains ended up being linked in a way no normal dog would. I know how silly that sounds, and again, I don’t think he could have done my algebra homework, but he did sit on the toilet once. No one believes me, just as you don’t, I’m sure, but it happened. Anyway, I’m eighteen years old, and dogs don’t live forever, so we lost him last year. He was actually pretty old for his breed, everyone was really impressed, but I was just heartbroken. My father buried him in the woods behind our house, but we it was a while before we held a service. I holed up in my room, trying to come up with the perfect eulogy for him, but I couldn’t figure it out. My parents told me I could give it whenever I needed, even if that wasn’t for another fifty years. Whenever I was ready, they would drop everything, and come out to the woods, so we could finally put him to rest. Two weeks go by, and I still haven’t finished my speech. I’m just staring out my window, as the baseball-sized hail crashes to the earth. Feeling particularly depressed about it, I sneak downstairs in the middle of the night, and step outside. I’m not trying to kill myself, but if some hail happens to hit me in the head while I’m on a walk, then I’m not going to fight it either. But they don’t. They’re falling all around me, but not one of them hits me as I walk all the way out to Henry’s grave. As I approach, I hear something that sounds only slightly different than the hail. I climb up the ridge, and see Viola Woods at the site. She’s stacking one of those stone monuments over his grave, and the hail isn’t hitting her either. Oh, and she’s not wearing any clothes at all. She turns around and smiles reverently at me. “Don’t write it down first. Just say it,” she advises. The next morning, I call my parents outside. We hold the service, and I start to heal. I’m almost nearly a fraction of the way to being about a half percent past it. Wherever Henry is now, I hope it’s not too far away from wherever Viola is.
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Current Schedule
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Sundays (macrofiction)
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The Advancement of Mateo Matic
Now that the lineup has been irreversibly established, and their reliance upon the direction of any external force removed from the equation, Team Matic must decide for themselves what missions to take. As they approach the year that changes everything, they may find themselves on a long detour.
Click here for the complete list of volumes thus far
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Weekdays (microfiction)
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Saturdays (mezzofiction)
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Extremus vol. 2
Now over 17,000 light years into the journey, the Extremus inducts a new Captain, and continues on towards their hypothetical new home. This is second of nine volumes in the Extremus multiseries.
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- Multiseries
- Single Series
- Darning Wars
- Recursiverse
- Miscellaneous
- CONTACT
- 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.
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