Bartholomew Xander Wohlblätter III threw open the door to Indiana Scones and the Raiders of the Lost Latte with significantly more effort than was required. The little bell that hung from the entryway rang madly from the effort, like there was a tiny hunchback sitting on top of the door and just going absolutely nuts on it. Everyone in the coffee shop turned to watch the visibly frustrated man enter.

Cheese in space! It is Gruyere and it is brave!

“We’ve got a lock on the little devil. Get him.” Cheese has enemies. Cut from a mighty wheel, flung at relativistic speeds outward into the dark to defend its own, cheese is brave, and cheese is lonely.

Cheese in space! It is alive! It will survive!

After giving birth to triplets, their exhausted mother lay down on the couch and fell into a deep sleep. Thus the triplets were left to their own devices.

When it was time to go to school, the Doctor went dressed in a long white coat, with the collar of his crisp white dress shirt and knot of his blue silk tie peeking out the top. He wore jeans instead of slacks because he was still in possession of a little boy’s body, a stocky one at that.

As kids, we were always getting in trouble—fights with other neighborhood kids and bad report cards and petty arson, and for the most part Mom took it in stride. But there were times when we pushed her too far, and that was when our middle names would come out. “Alexander Lawrence Hidecress,” she’d say, and my back would stiffen reflexively, sweat beading on my face.

I overheard what I think was a three-person writing group in a coffee shop the other day. There was a woman talking about all of the interesting things that had happened to her in her past, and how whenever she tried to write them down, the “voice” was wrong; it came out all wrong and it wasn’t any good. I thought, why didn’t she just write that down instead of saying it to her friends: that was, the way she told the story, just then, was surely as good as the story was ever going to be, so why not write it down, or record herself telling it and transcribe it later, and look at it to see if it’s a good story, or nearly as good as it would have been if, when you’d written it down, the voice had been right and it had been good.