I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.

“THE PROBLEM OF SUSAN”

The doctor the hotel had called told me the reason my neck hurt so badly, that I was throwing up and in pain and confused, was flu, and he began to list painkillers and muscle relaxants he thought I might appreciate. I picked a painkiller from the list and stumbled back to my hotel room, where I passed out, unable to move or think or hold my head up straight. On the third day my own doctor from home called, alerted by my assistant, Lorraine, and talked to me. “I don’t like to make diagnoses over the phone, but you have meningitis,” he said, and he was right, I did.

It was some months before I could think clearly enough to write, and this was the first piece of fiction I attempted. It was like learning to walk all over again. It was written for Al Sarrantonio’s Flights, an anthology of fantasy stories.

I read the Narnia books to myself hundreds of times as a boy, and then aloud as an adult, twice, to my children. There is so much in the books that I love, but each time I found the disposal of Susan to be intensely problematic and deeply irritating. I suppose I wanted to write a story that would be equally problematic, and just as much of an irritant, if from a different direction, and to talk about the remarkable power of children’s literature.

“INSTRUCTIONS”

Although I put several poems into Smoke and Mirrors, my last collection, I had originally planned that this collection would be prose only. I eventually decided to put the poems in anyway, mostly because I like this one so much. If you’re one of the people who doesn’t like poems, you may console yourself with the knowledge that they are, like this introduction, free. The book would cost you the same with or without them, and nobody pays me anything extra to put them in. Sometimes it’s nice to have something short to pick up and read and put down again, just as sometimes it’s interesting knowing a little about the background of a story, and you don’t have to read it, either. (And while I’ve spent weeks cheerfully agonizing about what order to put this collection into, how best to shape and order it, you can-and should-read it in any way that strikes your fancy.)