Robert Gulack
Stories (10)
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Brazen
He had known, even as he had accepted the large brown envelope and vanished into a swirl of airport-bound traffic, that Ferencz would find him and kill him, wherever he tried to flee. It was just a question of how much he would enjoy the weeks of enormous wealth prior to the moment Ferencz caught up with him. And really – it hadn’t been bad. For more than a year, he had skipped from island to island, living the life and bedding the women he had always dreamed of, taking a break at random intervals for plastic surgery and passport forgery. Finally, as was inevitable from the beginning, he felt the gun pushing into the back of his neck. His only real mistake, he now realized, was that he hadn’t forced them to shoot him.
By Robert Gulack4 years ago in Criminal
Gone Fishing
Au’ko gestured toward the solid white brilliance that had been the upward border for our entire lives. “The Sky, by definition, is what is above,” he pointed out, shaking his neural sac. “To speak of something above the sky is therefore a contradiction in terms.” He emphasized the force of his argument by throwing out a feeler, seizing a tanark that was singing a little song as it floated by, and munching upon it with great firmness.
By Robert Gulack4 years ago in Futurism
One Day's Admission
His parents could only afford one day’s admission to the (over-priced) wonderland they had driven so far to see. So they planned carefully to make the most of it, waking Adam up early at the motel, getting him dressed, and breakfasting efficiently by the motel pool. Fortunately, the weather was lovely and warm. A blue sky melted upward to the zenith, with only the most cheerful of puffy white clouds. Soon the three of them were making their way to the entrance of the wonderland. Next to the entrance, a richly laden pear tree gleamed verdantly in the morning sun.
By Robert Gulack4 years ago in Fiction
The Van Gogh Sunrise
I had been bitten by something during the night – I never got a clear look at exactly what – so I was especially motivated to get the hell out of my crummy apartment and go over to the luxury skyscraper where the Rock King was rooming during his performances at Madison Square Garden. I had my foot in the door because the woman who advised him on new songs had enjoyed one of my songwriting efforts. I had waited a long time for this opportunity.
By Robert Gulack4 years ago in Fiction
The Cake in the Window
Little Tommy was a penniless and illiterate orphan whose frozen feet, wrapped in rags, stumbled through the snowfall clogging the London slums. He knew nothing of the numerous frauds and manipulations that had recently resulted in the collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange, or the subsequent bank failures in Vienna; he knew only his own hunger; he would never find out how historians and economists would someday link the fraud and the hunger. He knew only there was no work to be had, no money to be had, no food to be had – and no place to go and be warm for a few precious moments. For Queen Victoria’s Britain, the decades of the “Long Depression” had only begun.
By Robert Gulack4 years ago in Fiction
Enter the Witches
The best way to think of it was as a race, I realized. Across the medieval battlefield, priests would hurry to offer the dying soldiers the last rites of the Church – knowing that witches would seek out those who had died without the benefit of extreme unction. Above the bloody fields, freshly soaked by war, the gleeful witches would swoop on their brooms to prey upon lost souls, who, seized by Satan’s henchwomen, would know no resting place. That was why the three witches in Shakespeare’s Scottish play (I certainly knew better than to name it, even in my thoughts) were so anxious to visit battlefields. They were harvesting wandering souls, lost for eternity between the worlds.
By Robert Gulack5 years ago in Fiction
The Two Hidden Truths
There are two hidden, yet self-evident, truths that underlie all I try to accomplish as a storyteller, playwright, and social activist. These two simple realities, once understood, transform your attitudes toward the prevention of crime and toward democratic government in general.
By Robert Gulack5 years ago in Futurism
AFTERWARD
It was a quiet late afternoon in autumn when the two young women came up the dirt road, their worn boots dragging in the dust, their sore feet limping at every step. Both wore ragged military uniforms. One bore a dirty bandage wrapped around her eyes. The other young woman kept a gentle hold on the arm of the bandaged woman; she was clearly guiding her bandaged companion up the road. The house, with its clapboard porch, and hand-operated front yard water pipe, could be distinguished from the other New England homes in its area only in that the others were visibly abandoned.
By Robert Gulack5 years ago in Futurism
A Hug From Oscar
“You’re only 73. You’re much too young to be thinking about something like this.” It was his wife talking, and she sounded worried, as she had since the topic had first come up, as she had since she had first found the slim black notebook in which he had written the address of the clinic. “This is something that people in assisted living do, or even old folks in nursing homes. You’ve only been retired a few years.” She had made these points before, and -- perhaps realizing that he was not giving her his full attention -- she began to wander off and speak more to herself than her husband. “Some people want to relive some sort of sexual experience,” she said. “At least that you could understand.”
By Robert Gulack5 years ago in Futurism
