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vast pools are filled with milk to make them cloudy. The puppeteers lurk beneath the water, breathing through straws as they animate the puppets that seem to walk on water. Sydney has forgotten where he got the urge to create water puppet plays, but it was from looking at a Time Golden Book with a blurry photo of a scene from just such a play. Now, Sydney has built a secret swimming pool which he keeps filled with chlorinated milk at all times. For years, he has scribbled down his intricate, twelve-act plays in the margins of official army journals, keeping the details sharp in his memory. Now that he’s settled down as a water resources planner, he has found the time to stage many of the plays. Sydney has a unique style for these plays, since he has been reluctant to tell his family about his pastime—or to enlist other actors in the production of his plays. Or, even, to divulge the secret of his tarp-hidden swimming pool. But many is the rainy Sunday afternoon when he can be found submerged in his milk pool, breathing through a straw, as he manipulates the ten finger puppets on his hands and the ten toe puppets on his feet—creating a great crescendo of drama such as the world has never seen. Someday, he thinks, he will go legit. He will stage his plays at the public pool, to a great and watery applause. Someday . . . But until then, this is his secret life.

THE SECRET LIFE OF
    JIM HENRY
    Jim Henry has a fluency with languages that extends beyond his mastery of Esperanto and the languages inherent in being a network systems programmer. Not only has he learned the musical language first put forth by French crackpots in the 19th century—
    a language that required the intricate use of several musical instruments just to “say” common every-day words—but he has also learned to understand the secret language of dust. Wherever he goes, their voices follow him—small, reedy, mellifluous voices. They call out to him with a poignancy that speaks of decay and loss. As motes swirl around him in the light of the midday sun, he understands that they are only ghosts, only shadows, of the people or animals they once encroached upon, their language a kind of insensate memory of the shapes of the past. Mumbled, whispered, rattled. There’s nothing the dust can’t tell him, if only he listens hard enough.

THE SECRET LIFE OF
    FLENSING U.K. HLANITH
    Flensing U.K. Hlanith stalks his graveyard patch in search of the ghost of Clark Ashton Smith. The only thing that can wrench him from his obsession is watching gonzo XXX movies until late at night. Otherwise, he watches over his graveyard, alert for the ghost of Clark Ashton Smith. “I saw him once,” he’ll explain to anyone who will listen. “I saw him here—I swear.” Although he’s not really certain, when it comes down to it, if he saw Smith in the graveyard or if the image of Smith’s likeness had so burned itself into his retinas from his repeated re-readings of the man’s books that he only thought he saw Smith’s ghost. Does it make sense that Smith’s ghost should haunt this particular graveyard. Of course not, but the nature of obsession withholds from the brain the information vital to the rejection of the obsession. “There’s no reason he couldn’t be here,” he mutters. “No reason at all.” Flensing has a question for Mr. Smith should he ever make another appearance. It’s a question that he feels must haunt the ghost, as it haunts him. The question is this: “Did you have to use quite so many compound adverbs and adjectives?” For it is this usage that Flensing believes has robbed Mr. Smith of his rightful due as the best writer of his century, better than H. or F. or even N. “Why, Clark Ashton Smith?” Flensing shouts into the darkness sometimes. “WHY?!” But this is not his secret life—this is his all-too-public life. In his secret life, Flensing collects coupons. His secret is that he has flown to Hawaii three times and vacationed in