Brian Kenneth Swain My Writing (Fiction, Essays, Poetry)

April 19, 1955 OBITUARY Dr. Albert Einstein Dies in Sleep at 76; World Mourns Loss of Great Scientist By THE NEW YORK TIMES Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, Wuerttemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. His boyhood was spent in Munich, where his father, who owned electro-technical works, had settled. The family migrated to Italy in 1894, and Albert was sent to a cantonal school at Aarau in Switzerland. He attended lectures while supporting himself by teaching mathematics and physics at the Polytechnic School at Zurich until 1900. Finally, after a year as tutor at Schaffthausen, he was appointed examiner of patents at the Patent Office at Bern where, having become a Swiss citizen, he remained until ...

I’m no horror writer, but I’ve lingered over their work enough to know that they deal primarily in the fear trade. I begin my story with this observation only because, in like vein, I have carried with me these many years, in the farthest recesses of my mind, a story that, if not generally horrific, at least qualifies as the most fearful period of my long and humble existence. Truth be told, it’s not so much a story as a series of recollections that begin with an article I came across in the local paper a few months after I moved into that second-floor apartment out on Mill Street. The article described an event that took place at the local paper mill, an ancient small-town icon, now long closed but in whose employ I served ...

I don’t recall ever being so afraid at any time in my life, and I hope to god I never am again.Still, stuck as I am now in this wheelchair, which they tell me I will almost certainly never get out of, it seems highly unlikely I could ever again manage to get myself into the sort of pickle that put me here in the first place. Which may turn out to be a mixed blessing, because having been like this for just a few weeks, it occurs to me that in a year or two I may so dread the rest of my life that I will sincerely wish for the ability to end it. Or maybe not—who’s to say? There’s plenty of folks who do this their whole lives and don’t seem any the worse for it, issues of mobility notwithstanding. Just not sure if I’m made of ...

“So what’s the big meeting all about?” Peter asked. The two men stood in the office’s small third-floor kitchenette, Gabe at the counter, pouring the last half-cup of decaf from a badly-stained pot into an only slightly less stained mug, its “Earth 2.0” logo emblazoned in navy blue on the side. He set the empty carafe back on the heater with a hiss, and reached up to one of the overhead cupboards, searching for sugar packets. He found, instead, nothing but an empty bowl where the packets should have been. Fuming, he poured the half-filled cup into the sink. “Who in the hell can drink this stuff without sugar?” he said, annoyed. “We made dozens of countries down on earth that can grow sugar, but can we get one goddam…one ...

“I shouldn’t have thought you’d be all that keen to visit a place like this, Buster, I mean what with your lofty new status and all. That was quite a piece on the news the other night.” Alvin Cressey stood adjacent the passenger door of his Mercury Marquis, right hand resting on the upper window frame, waiting patiently as Buster Cranston slowly, methodically thrust his legs to the ground and lifted his ancient frame from the seat and into a more or less vertical position. The Marquis, a nondescript burgundy 2004 model four-door, was Cressey’s “everyday” car, the one he used when meeting or chauffeuring members of his congregation who were less than comfortable with the notion of a Protestant minister owning any of the ...

Anna thrust her key into the apartment door lock, turning it with a crisp clicking sound that reverberated through the dark empty hallway. She was still breathing heavily from climbing the stairs to her fourth-floor Manhattan walk-up. It didn’t help that she had stopped at the store on her way home from work, and was carrying a bag of groceries in addition to her backpack. She pushed open the heavy steel door with a creek, while dexterously guiding Max the cat to one side with her Reebock-clad right foot. It wouldn’t do to have him slipping out into the hallway, as none of the sixteen cats currently living in the building were allowed there according to their owners’ leases. Kicking the door shut with a thud behind her, she dropped ...

“You’d’ve thought he’d make it home…just this once. He could have at least managed that.” Sarah sat on the edge of the ancient living room couch, her torso leaned far forward, her face in her hands. She sobbed quietly as her Aunt Anne Marie sat by her side, one reassuring hand massaging her niece’s knee. It had just passed six in the afternoon, and the musty, high-ceilinged room still resonated slightly with the last chime of the antique mantel clock. The just-slightly-off-center ticking and resonant striking of the walnut Ingraham had been a part of the house’s rhythm for longer than anyone could remember. “He’ll come. You just wait and see,” Anne Marie said reassuringly. “He’ll come.” “No…he won’t. I ...

Terry Peterson’s life has been one of non-decisions. At fifty-four, most of what he is and does and believes are the results of either decisions he has failed to make or, in a few cases, decisions someone else has made on his behalf (whether he wanted them to or not). Like, for example, his marriage, which commenced shortly after his fortieth birthday and not because of some mid-life epiphany or even any greater-than-average concern about what the neighbors might think of a forty-year-old guy living by himself. As it happened, Clinton Pendergrast was his boss at the time—an executive of that all-too-common sort who deeply, viscerally enjoys terrorizing his employees—and he (Pendergrast) had also happened to have a daughter, Renee, ...

A dense cloud of highly radioactive steam billowed and swirled around the broken reactor pipefitting. The technicians before the control room’s large monitor struggled to see through the cloud, occasionally catching glimpses of the labyrinthine mass of stainless steel tubing surrounding the main vessel. The observers could also clearly hear over the intercom the piercing hiss of steam being forced out under high pressure from the fractured valve joint. The control room foreman turned for a quick glance at the radioactivity gauge in the center of the Vessel 3 control instrument cluster – thirty seven thousand rems, more than one hundred times the fatal short-term dosage for a human. As he turned back to the monitor screen, the hissing ...

If the sun were any brighter, fiercer, Randy would have spontaneously burst into flames and been reduced to cinders right there on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Hendricks’ house. As it was barely two in the afternoon, he supposed he had nothing but increasing quantities of this inferno to look forward to in the coming hours, for each of which he would be compensated but seven dollars and fifty cents, scarcely sufficient to justify the apocalyptic discomfort, certainly not enough to pay for the skin grafts he felt sure would be required by the end of the week. It was barely mid-May for Christ’s sake and already Baxter had endured twelve mind-numbing days of above-one-hundred-degree temperatures with above-ninety-percent humidity, ...