Brian Kenneth Swain

In my dream[1] I run aimless and panting up and down the neutrallypainted, cinderblock-lined corridors of Brunswick High School, trying desperately to recall which of the countless thousands of lockers stretching before me is, in fact, my locker, and, having eventually located it after much fretting and fuming, struggling with even greater desperation to recall the specific left/right/left combination that will open it. It doesn’t help that all of the lockers look exactly the same—battleship gray, arrayed in a grid two high and effectively infinite in length, extending down both sides of the corridor to a distant vanishing point. That each is uniquely numbered with a small riveted brass plate is of no use either, since, given my ...

~ Transgenic Technology and the Foods We Eat ~ Humans eat food to survive. Most, if they’re fortunate, do it multiple times each day. And if we go very long without doing it, our bodies have limitless creative ways of making their displeasure known. But we also eat for pleasure—pleasure derived from taste and texture, from culture and tradition, and, for some, from the very process of creating food in the first place. That creation involves three distinctly different types of individuals. Best known are those who combine raw ingredients in creative ways—sometimes exciting, sometimes banal. These are the chefs who craft memorable dishes, the artisans who bake fine bread and pastry, the vintners who magically turn the humble grape ...

Morte nihil melius[1] Anonymous Introduction I know what you’re thinking, sitting there, furtively skimming this introduction, hoping no one sees you holding the manuscript. Why on earth would I read this? Who, for that matter, would even publish such a thing? Pessimism? Dear God, things are so bleak and heinous these days; what the world needs is optimism, damn it. Well that, my friend, is where you’re mistaken, and I mean to spend the next few pages explaining precisely why. Now please don’t get me wrong. This is, after all, a self-help piece. And self-help books and essays are about achieving happiness, success, self-actualization, and other hard-to-define but generally positive states of being. My working hypothesis ...

Dark weathered patina belies the strength of iron wrought to battle stone. With weight and heft of Roman broadsword, the honed tip slams down into blinding white limestone. And the stone yields. In shards that burst upward, luminous moths that sting and die. Again and again. Iron versus stone, ringing out across the hill country. Til blisters and blood draw the day down to evening, and the hole, ever so slightly deeper, reflects a last fragment of ...

I’m no horror writer, but I’ve lingered over their work enough to know that they deal primarily in the fear trade. I begin my story with this observation only because, in like vein, I have carried with me these many years, in the farthest recesses of my mind, a story that, if not generally horrific, at least qualifies as the most fearful period of my long and humble existence. Truth be told, it’s not so much a story as a series of recollections that begin with an article I came across in the local paper a few months after I moved into that second-floor apartment out on Mill Street. The article described an event that took place at the local paper mill, an ancient small-town icon, now long closed but in whose employ I served ...

Growing up in Maine, it is reasonably assumed that my halcyon youth was filled with an unending orgy of skiing, camping, fishing, hunting, and all the other rustic backwood sorts of recreation that out-of-staters generally associate with the place. The bitter truth of the matter is that I never—not even once—participated in any of these activities until I was fully grown and had moved away to other places.[1] Non-Mainers harbor, as well, one additional myth about native downeasters, viz that we daily gorge ourselves on great heaping platters of lobster. Indeed, it was the popularity of this myth that prompted an associate to suggest that I might be uniquely qualified to expound in an entertaining (perhaps even informative) manner ...

I don’t recall ever being so afraid at any time in my life, and I hope to god I never am again.Still, stuck as I am now in this wheelchair, which they tell me I will almost certainly never get out of, it seems highly unlikely I could ever again manage to get myself into the sort of pickle that put me here in the first place. Which may turn out to be a mixed blessing, because having been like this for just a few weeks, it occurs to me that in a year or two I may so dread the rest of my life that I will sincerely wish for the ability to end it. Or maybe not—who’s to say? There’s plenty of folks who do this their whole lives and don’t seem any the worse for it, issues of mobility notwithstanding. Just not sure if I’m made of ...

I never doubted for a moment that this day would come. At some point in nearly every introductory conversation I have, the topic of children comes up. Do I have any? None, huh? Why is that, exactly? Then, sensing discomfort, awkwardness, we tacitly agree to move on to some different, safer topic of conversation. It’s at these moments that I frequently feel compelled to retort with something like, so, why did you decide to have kids? How would you rate the pros and cons? Would you do it again if you had it to do over?[1] We live, though, in a society that regards child bearing as so self-evidently worthwhile, indeed necessary to the advancement of civilization, that daring to scrutinize the process with anything approaching ...

Or Why Skiing is an Especially Apt Metaphor for Life Itself What do you get when you combine the annoyance factor of golf, the vast expense of scuba, and the bodily risk of skydiving? That’s right—skiing, a pastime whose origins are lost to antiquity, but which, in all likelihood, involved some Swiss or Austrian misanthrope—let’s agree to call him Gunther—living high on a mountain, who awakens one day to discover he is snowed in by a couple of feet of fresh powder from the previous night’s storm, and on the very day he had meant to go into the village at the base of the mountain for his semi-annual consignment of groceries. Well, shucks, our antiquarian hero[1] says to himself, looks like the only way I’m going to ...

“So what’s the big meeting all about?” Peter asked. The two men stood in the office’s small third-floor kitchenette, Gabe at the counter, pouring the last half-cup of decaf from a badly-stained pot into an only slightly less stained mug, its “Earth 2.0” logo emblazoned in navy blue on the side. He set the empty carafe back on the heater with a hiss, and reached up to one of the overhead cupboards, searching for sugar packets. He found, instead, nothing but an empty bowl where the packets should have been. Fuming, he poured the half-filled cup into the sink. “Who in the hell can drink this stuff without sugar?” he said, annoyed. “We made dozens of countries down on earth that can grow sugar, but can we get one goddam…one ...