Excerpt from The Furniture of Heaven

With Christopher Rainbow and me, right from the start it was one of those stormy romances: on again, off again, on again, off again. So when the news first came out about this new technique for merging two people into one, we simply made up our minds one night, he and I, to throw caution to the winds and give it a try. I guess it just seemed high time for us to take some kind of permanent, irreversible step, and so we thought–well, why not? Why not go all the way?

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Excerpt of a story from The Mystery of the Word (no longer in print, but still available from online bookstores)

It was a sunny day with a light breeze and the world could not have been more beautiful. I was picking wild flowers in the woods beside the airstrip in Chizela, a mission station in Zambia, when just as I reached for one last flower, a flame lily, all at once I felt something slam into the back of my leg. It was a real hit, like a gunshot, a powerful stinging blow that actually made me jump into the air. I spun around, caught just a glimpse of the familiar coffin-shaped head and those eyes like the tiniest black diamonds, and knew immediately I was as good as dead. There had been no warning whatsoever, yet instantly my astonishment gave way to an eerie sense of fatalism, as though everything leading up to this event had been meticulously and uncannily prepared. Is that, I wonder, what passes through everyone’s mind at the moment of death?

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