Sex, death and a snake in the grass: 19 linked short stories, fiction for the Internet. Read in narrative sequence using the left-hand menu or follow characters through the in-page links
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After some years, two old friends met in a bar for a couple of drinks. Jake was an aspiring writer and he spent some time telling Mark about a story he'd recently sold. It was about a man who sat down and typed the name of his girlfriend into Google. The girlfriend didn't have an uncommon name, and the computer showed the man a list of seven women with that name who lived locally. The story described how the man had tracked down each woman, introduced himself and, in some cases, gone out with them. But by the time he met the sixth woman on the list he had grown tired of the game and also realised that he no longer wanted his girlfriend.
Mark listened to the story with growing irritation. He'd have liked to spend the evening catching up on old times. Also, he didn't think the story was up to much. He might have been only a cube rat, as Jake called it, but to him it lacked magic. Oh, it was clever, and Jake was talented - he could see that his old school pal was going to go places. But it was a cold and depressing talent, he thought, and suddenly he wanted very much to be at home with Alice.
If Jake noticed Mark's irritation he didn't mention it. At the end of the evening the two men shook hands, promising to meet again soon. But that never happened. And Mark would never know it, but Jake would not write another word from that moment on.
