Bring on the Dancing HorsesWhen I call my parents, my mom tells me my dad is busy teaching a class on the internet. That is, the class is in a classroom but the topic is the internet. More specifically, he’s teaching seniors—that is, old people—how to blog, write anonymous comments on news articles without panicking, poke their children on Facebook, and get away with not writing h, t, t, p, colon, forward slash, forward slash, w, w, w, dot before every web address.
I had no idea my dad liked the internet so much. “Who said anything about like?” my mom says. I can hear her clicking away at her keyboard in the background.
My dad is retired—or was. Is it that they need the money? I fantasize about a heretofore unknown gambling problem, hush funds, love children. My mom sells my old comic books and De La Soul cassingles on eBay. She doesn’t know I know. Every so often I’ll think about stuff I loved in my youth, and a search inevitably brings up her dealer name.
I amp the bidding when it seems safe. You could say I’m looking out for her. But how is it that her four grown kids have neglected their parents’ financial needs?
I go to bed with a nagging sense of guilt, though this is how I usually go to bed.
≈My girlfriend, Tabby, reviews science fiction for a living, which just goes to show you that America is still the greatest, most useless country in the world.
She went to Penumbra College in Vermont and is ABD in comparative literature at Rue University. She’s been ABD ever since we met, back when I didn’t know what it stood for. Her dissertation is about one or possibly all of these things: manservant literature, robot literature, and the literature of deception.
Tabby is considerably older than me, and by considerably I mean over ten years. I told my parents five, but I don’t think they believed me. Tabitha Grammaticus remembers not only life before the internet, but life before the affordable and relatively silent electric typewriter.
She reads fast, writes faster. She does monthly columns for the
California Science Fiction Review, Exoplanets magazine, and the website for the Northwest Airlines’ Frequent Flier Book Club, which is getting a soft launch.
≈I didn’t think it was possible for someone to read as fast as Tabby does, and for a long time I assumed she was a skimmer. But whenever I’d quiz her on a novel that we’d both read, she knew every detail. I’d sit there with the book open and ask things like: “Who answers the door in the middle of chapter 7?”
I tried to keep up with Tabby’s reviewing, but it’s hard when someone’s so prolific. I am not friends with many writers, mostly because that means having to read all their articles, stories, essays, books, and even poetry. They expect you to have read it all. With Tabby, I tried. I really did.
But she’s what she calls a stylist. I gave up on her Exoplanets column after the third one. I got stuck on the opening line: “All time travel is essentially Oedipal.”
Tabby is a brilliant genius in her own way, but sometimes I worry that she is turning into an alien. Lately we don’t go out much, and she has taken to wearing what she calls a housecoat about the house. Whenever I’d come across the word “housecoat” in a brittle British novel of misaddressed correspondence and quiet adultery, I would try to picture what was meant. I was never sure, but surely it isn’t this thing that Tabby more or less lives in, a sort of down-filled poncho with stirrups.
≈At the same time I’m attracted to this girl at work. I don’t even want to know how old she is. My guess is that she’s younger than me by a margin nearly as great as that separating me from Tabby. But what do I know about age? I thought Tabby was my age when I met her. I’m not a good judge of these things, possibly of anything.
The girl at work. I think English is her second language or possibly her third. She has a lisp and does crazy things with her hair. Her name is Deletia. I think it’s the most beautiful name in the world.
Here’s a secret. I wrote that down on a Post-it once—You have the most beautiful name in the world—and carried it stuck to the inside of a folder. All day I was hideously excited as I sat at my desk, roamed the corridors. Then I forgot about the note for a week. When I saw it again the words looked strange, like someone else had written them. Before throwing it away, I used the sticky edge to clean out the crevices of my keyboard.
≈I have two older brothers, whom I despise, and a younger sister, whom I adore. My brothers have always been exceedingly nice to me, including me in all manner of conversation and sport, yet I can’t stand the sight of them. At least individually. When the three of us sons are together, my ill will dissipates somewhat, into a tan-colored mist of indifference. My sister, Grace, on the other hand, speaks sharply to me and expects me to do things like pick up her dry cleaning and find her cheap tickets to Cancún on the internet. I mean the real Cancún, not some virtual
playa. But she’s the baby of the family and I’m happy to oblige.
We children all live in the city, and gatherings are complicated for me. If it’s me, my eldest brother, Dan, and my sister, I get argumentative the second I walk in, under the impression that he is picking on her, being the bully that he undoubtedly is. If it’s me, my other brother, and my sister, I’ll tell jokes nonstop, poorly thought-out jokes that hinge on antiquated wordplay. I’m trying to defuse the tension caused by the fact that this brother is a withholding control freak.
In fact, my brothers are exceedingly nice to my sister as well, and she does not speak sharply to them or expect them to run her errands. Sometimes I think she respects them because they make money and I don’t, really. Or because their wives are elegant, capable women, and Tabby is something of an eccentric and a bit of a slob.
Once I was on a bus going crosstown and saw Grace and my brothers walking out of a restaurant, laughing. They looked gloriously happy. Dan posted a picture of their lunch on Facebook. I don’t know what he was thinking.
≈After internet class, my dad emails. His spelling, in flowing longhand, has always been impeccable, but something about email makes him spell like Prince. I often have to read his messages aloud, pronouncing the letters and numbers until I figure out the meaning.
I email back and ask if he wants to chat online. No response, though I know he’s still awake. He keeps updating his Facebook posts. Doesn’t he know I can see them? Doesn’t he know I’m his friend? I stay up till two watching his wording get terse.
≈Every day, sometimes more than once, science-fiction books arrive at the door by mail or messenger. Tabby tears into them. Slabs of space opera line the hall, mortared with mindbenders in which the Union loses or Hitler is an android.
There’s this one FedEx guy who drops by a couple times a week, bearing such goodies. He’s practically family at this point. He buzzes from the lobby three times, insistently, like he’s doing an O in Morse code. Tabby hits the door button without asking who it is.
The FedEx guy looks, she once said, like an underwear model with clothes on. Of course Tabby’s not attracted to FedEx, as she’s easily twice his age. But you can never be sure. They always make a suspicious amount of small talk. Today she tells me that he’s an aspiring writer and wants her advice on where to send stories.
“Are they even science fiction?” I ask.
“They’re
speculative fiction,” she says. FedEx has given her some of his work, and apparently it’s pretty good, a self-conscious throwback to the age of the pulps, with a slick commercial veneer. She’s thinking of writing a column about him.
“But he hasn’t published anything yet,” I say.
“Oh he will, and he has,” she says, like someone well acquainted with time travel.
≈I never told my siblings that I saw them from the bus, though I put up a cryptic post on my secret blog. “Sometimes the people you think you can depend on turn out to be
not so dependable,” I wrote. No one knows I have the blog. I’ve had it for two years but in my mind I’ve had it for longer, from even before there was something called the internet. It averages three readers a week, people not named me. I keep meaning to delete the thing, but the required authentications have changed so much that I can’t even figure out how to do it.
Maybe my dad could help me. Lately I’ve been wondering if he can do my sister’s internet chores for her, like get those plane tickets or update her Facebook status. Grace hasn’t logged on to Facebook in a long time. I know this because I keep getting little messages in the corner: Reconnect with Grace. Write on her Wall.
Copyright © 2026 by Ed Park. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
