J. Robert King

The reason human knowledge advances so slowly is that those who discover any real answers use their findings selfishly. They withdraw into paradise. We benefit only from the failures of failures, who stick around hoping for Nobels and Pulitzers. If Einstein had found the Unified Field Theory, he’d’ve combed his hair, chucked his Attends, and [...]

Worms have very small brains, pin-sized things that straddle the digestive tract like a man straddling a blue whale. Two principles reside in that brain: Eat Dirt and Squirm. It must be understood that all actions undertaken by the worm are categorized accordingly. For example, when a worm encounters a corpse, it must categorize it [...]

He gazed down lovingly at his distended abdomen, at the fetus that nestled soft and warm within the melon-sized blister on his belly, where brown hair yet descended across the stretched skin and toward his puckered navel. “My little blister baby.” When his pregnancy had begun, he had had no idea how translucent his skin [...]

He had walked from 51st to 43rd in his new gray cotton sweatpants before the friction between his legs resulted in a negative ionic polarization of the left knee and a positive polarization in the right panel of his silk boxers. He should have stopped then. The electrostatic elevation of leg hair was clear enough [...]

Do you know why Frenchmen hate Americans? It’s a long story, but I’ll try to make it short. When they gave us the Statue of Liberty they had 10,000 French warriors inside who waited until dark to spring out and capture New York, only when they did they found out they were on Liberty Island [...]

Hypodermics are scary enough: the cocked plunger poised to strike, the translucent plastic shaft that gleams like wet sharkskin, the needle tip prepared to pierce with its oozing fang. . . . Knowing they come in cellular size is just plain horrifying; viruses, which aren’t even alive, penetrate living cells and inject their own dead DNA. That’d be [...]

Grandpa had been a job printer. He stood now beneath the maple tree and its sharp-edged embossments of leaves, and pointed to the empty amber shell that had once been a huge and grotesque insect but now was nothing. “Cicada,” he said. They came every seven years, like the plague of Exodus. And, as though [...]