Short Fiction

Vincent

Charles Vincent is an ordinary man navigating a city where clocks, engines, and people have all slowed to impossible stillness, their eyes closing and opening in slow cycles. His instinct is to help—he brakes a dead driver's taxi, braces a stranger's face against a wheel—but he quickly senses that interference may only cause more damage. His wary, self-questioning restraint makes him the reader's grounded witness as the world's rules quietly dissolve.

Anthony Trotz

Anthony Trotz—who sometimes calls himself Aloys Foulcault-Oeg—arrives in the city filthy, penniless, and half-starved, having stowed away on boats and begged in rich-poor streets. He is torn between genuine awe of the celebrated scientists he reveres and a flickering, undernourished pride that insists he alone has grasped the heart of things. His terror of speaking, his fear of forgetting English, and his trembling vanity make his long walk to the Commendation hall a study in self-doubt.

Professor Aloys Foulcault-Oeg

Aloys Foulcault-Oeg is a man of vast theoretical ambition and almost no social courage, cowering before the great scientists he is meant to address. A mysterious gentleman—actually Willy McGilly in disguise—ushers him into a small room, where he gobbles, sniffles, and forgets his English entirely. What emerges is a nineteen-point outline of cosmic, mathematical, and metaphysical wonders, and a transformed speaker whose soft rumble silences the hall before he even begins.

Marlow

Marshal Marlow is a local lawman whose night is interrupted by an acid-voiced, four-inch man on his bedside table, demanding the return of a stolen tax list. Paralyzed from the neck down and insulted as a clod, he nonetheless trades barbs with his captor, learning that the little people believe they own the world—bought from a con man. His dry, unimpressed defiance sets the tone for a story where the smallest creatures hold the largest claims.

Texas Manuel

Texas Manuel is a rough Texan who disappeared into the little people's town of Nuevo Danae, where an encanto bound him and a companion to a treadmill for thirty-five years. He returns as a dwarf with a cracked voice, a stolen list of a million little people, and a shaky grip on his own identity—wondering aloud whether he is really Manuel at all. His bewildered testimony forces Marshal and the police to confront a census that will not add up.

Colonel Peter Cooper

Colonel Peter Cooper is a military administrator whose real interest lies not in paper shuffling but in reports of the unusual, and who receives Anthony's frantic confession that he knows every human being in the world with unnerving calm. His measured, almost bureaucratic response—'Yes, Anthony, we realize that'—suggests he has heard stranger things and is waiting for the detail that actually matters. His patience and his priorities frame the story's central question of what counts as a reportable anomaly.