#169: Up North

“So, what have you been working on, lately?”
        Clarissa was still sweaty from the hot and heavy sex with Gene, who had risen from bed and put on his boxers. She watched his glistening body in the early morning light that bathed the modern Mies Van Der Rohe apartment. Scars were evident across his taut, brown musculature.

#168: Undercover Overachiever

Barnes presented himself at the office of Student Activities Director Ernie Penn Pierson promptly at eight-thirty Friday morning, tattered oboe case under his arm, to register late for the Robert Louis Stevenson Senior High School Summer Arts Camp. After he filled out the requisite paperwork, Ernie told him, “The camp’s half over, you know. Next week is the second and final week. And we knock off early today; you won’t get to some of your workshops until Monday.”

#167: The Scene of the Crime

John Bradford pulled into the visitors parking lot of Garden City Osteopathic Hospital in his 1978 Ford Fairlane with copyboy Barnes along for the ride. “You wait here,” he told Barnes. “Read your comic books.”

#166: The Tele-Organic Health Food Co-Op

On a fifteen-minute break from her job at the Tele-Organic Health Food Co-Op, Cody Revell sat on a weathered picnic table next to the store’s small parking lot, reading a copy of the daily newspaper, The Detroit Day. She was also smoking a light cigarette, a habit she’d picked up since landing on late twentieth-century earth.

#165: The Bizarre Files

Dallas and Hoskins clicked their utility belts about a block from the Newburgh Road hotel to become visible again.
        “Lucky you spirited away that spitfire before those Earthling agent types confiscated it,” said Dallas. “I just hope Hatori and Merino don’t find out you mislaid it—and that it was involved in that explosion. They’re the alpha-type personalities in our group and think they’re our den mothers. Munro and Jordyn I’m less worried about.”

#164: Roberts

Agent Lemon Lime woke with a start. “Did you hear that?” she asked. It had sounded to her like a thud, a boom, in the distance, like an artillery shell in war.

#163: One of Our Spitfires Is Missing

Hoskins woke up Dallas with a hoarse whisper.
        “C’mon, we’ve got to go back to the high school.”
        “What are you talking about?” said Dalam Malayu groggily. “It’s after midnight.”
        “I can’t find my spitfire anywhere,” said Hoskins, who by habit was already climbing into her Domain Fleet-issued starship uniform, ignoring the civilian earthling clothes they had worn during the day. “I must have left it in shop class.”

#162: What Cape Saw

Music blared in basement of the West Forest apartment of the James sisters, Clarissa and Avie, as they worked out on weight machines a couple of college girls should not have been able to afford. The Police, the B-52s, Was (Not Was), Prince and the Revolution, and Morris Day and The Time, carefully curated by Avie on high bias chrome type-II mixed cassette tape, streamed from a boom box, replete with Dolby noise reduction.

#161: Open Solo

The descent and landing of Lieutenant Kaarn Pinsen’s away team, with her detail of three crewmembers of the Domain Fleet Starship Bogdanove—Orion and Tarsus, two burly male security officers, one light-skinned, one dark, and Kingsley, a raven-haired Cambodian communications and tracking expert—had taken place without incident. The small, sleek cruiser had found a school playground, abandoned for the summer save for dog walkers and some neighborhood kids who played sandlot baseball on a neglected diamond in the far corner —pitcher’s hand, right field out—sometimes three times a day, and cloaked the vessel from earthling eyes.

#160: Telegraph Road

Lemon Lime had a mind of her own.

#159: Green Eyes

Clarissa thought she saw a shimmer in the alley as she climbed down the ladder from the roof of her apartment building. But her Ms. Megaton Man visor was in her garment bag, along with her uniform. She landed on the back stoop of her apartment and rifled through the bag; by the time she affixed the visor and scanned the alley, whatever it was she thought she saw had gone.

#158: Screen Door

Avie James thought she heard what sounded like tires on gravel in the alley behind the apartment. She was in the kitchen at the rear of the apartment, not cooking or cleaning but planning a stage production on the small kitchenette table. Her notebooks, sketchbooks, and drawing and writing implements were spread out.

#157: Green Dolphin Street

The red Ferrari pulled off of East Jefferson, turning toward the Detroit River on cobblestoned Dauphin Street in the city’s warehouse district past the intersection with Verdigris Street. The French names were a vestige of Détroit’s colonial past. The vehicle roared to a stop in front of a sashed warehouse that might have been new at the turn of the century. Faded, painted letters barely legible on red bricks read: Green Dolphin Street—Warehousing, Inc.

#156: Garage Band

Eddy Pershing stood in the middle of his neighbor’s empty garage blowing into a tenor saxophone. The garage was spotless, Eddy noted; not even so much as an oil stain from the one parked car it was built to hold. Eddy also noted that his own family’s garage, built for two, was so crammed full of his father’s junk it couldn’t hold any cars.

#155: Stakeout

The Phantom Jungle Girl and Clarissa sat in the Pinto belonging to Donna Blank, which was parked along a residential neighborhood in Detroit. Fanny wielded a camera with a long telephoto lens propped atop the steering wheel; she had it trained on an apartment house further down the street. Clarissa sat with a comic book-sized brown paper bag on her lap; she was flipping through newly-purchased copies of Megatron Man #3 and #4.

#154: Visiting Artists

Consternation was brewing in the offices of Vice Principal Victoria Bryant. The ambitious young African-American administrator was seeing her dreams crumble before her eyes. Always upbeat Student Activities Director Ernie Penn Pierson, for whom “school spirit” was an unofficial middle name, was doing his best to cheer her up.

#153: The Blow Dryer

The orbiting killer satellite of the Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning made for a pretty picture against the stars and black space and misty-white horizon of Earth. Shaped like a handheld hair pistol, but scaled a thousand times bigger, it amply earned the nickname agents of ICHHL called it—the Blow Dryer.

#152: Shore Leave

There was commotion on the bridge of the starship. Something had gone slightly wrong. Already, officers were scrutinizing monitors, recalculating calculations, looking for answers …
        “What just happened?”

#151: Around the World

Volume VI: Starship Summer

A small group of kids assembled on the sidewalk to watch something they had never seen before. The tallest of the kids, a boy around ten or eleven, stood straddling a black, rugged-looking his old bike that looked like it might have been new in the 1950s. He was about ten or eleven, with greased-back longish hair and thick, black-rimmed glasses, corduroys that were too short, and a light blue cotton button down shirt—definitely out of style for 1985. His nose was too big for his longish face, and his mouth had too many teeth, out of which he tended to breathe as he watched through lenses that were too thick. His complexion made him look older than his age, as if it were already preparing for the pockmarks of severe acne to come.

#150: Megahero Gossip

That was my spring 1985 semester in a nutshell, completing my first year of grad school. It wasn’t the entire semester of course; just the main highlight. I still had several weeks of finishing up my classes, both those that I taught and those I was taking, along with seminars. But grading papers and all that stuff is boring, so you get the gist of it.