Stefen Styrsky

Image courtesy of Judy Dean This piece was originally published on December 12, 2023. Show me that picture again. How marvelous. Of all the photos, this one made it into a textbook. This must be from ‘67. The discovery gets, what, a paragraph? A line? But I can see why they chose to include the picture. It’s a good one. I’d forgotten about it, but I remember the day. Lizzie’s smile is genuine.

Jonah and the Whale, Folio from a Jami al-Tavarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) This piece was originally published on March 25, 2015. A small child can swim through the veins of a blue whale. This was how I swam to you in one night. They told me you were lost in war, but I knew you were a fighter. On the third day that you were gone, I walked to the edge of the wooden world and dived into the ocean to get swallowed up. The blue whale ate me in one gulp.

Spyros This story was originally published on July 19, 2016. It was because of the bike crash that I volunteered for an HIV-vaccine trial. I blame Brian. For the crash, not the trial. Well, I volunteered for various reasons, the accident was one, but mostly because I needed the money. This was sometime around the summer of ’01, before Memorial Day, before the winter and the cold that blurred us into `02. I ran a bike for www.vroom.com (corporate logo: VrooM!), a customized delivery service.