Girl in the Meadow and Other Unusual Stories

The short stories in this book are all works of the imagination—my imagination, to be exact. So, all the brickbats and all the bouquets belong to me, and to nobody else. Since I have led a singularly blameless life, I expect that the bouquets will outstrip the brickbats by a considerable margin; however, the ways of this world are mysterious in the extreme, as the quantum physicists discovered nearly a hundred years ago.

The stories you are about to read cover a largish ground; I cannot say that there is a theme linking them all together. Some of them have a somewhat surprising ending, like C++, The Dragon and Special FX; some are straightforward tales which have been told in a perhaps non-linear manner, such as Schubert’s Eighth and The New Life. Some are tales which have happened to lots of other people; I have taken the liberty of telling them differently. Some of the stories are as old as the world, but that does not prevent them from happening over and over again across the centuries.

Taken all in all, these are stories I have liked telling and loved writing down, and I hope that you will like reading them. And before you ask, no, none of these stories have happened to me. Like I told you before, I have led a truly blameless existence and thus have only followed the strictly straight and narrow. So there.