Tony Urgo :: Stories

STORIES

Wayward fables, sinister sentiments, and cautionary tales in the early morning of the twenty-first century. To be taken with a pleasurably hot cup of tea, if one is so inclined.

	PDFs
We Dead Men Do Solemnly Swear Neue York, now Goebbelstadt, appears on the horizon like a vast shimmering prism, a mirror reflecting the fading evening stars. Our plane descends as dawn subdues the earthly night, leaving undimmed the darkness of the Reign of the Thousand Years. Yet we are the flame. We are the candle in the dark. And we have come now to America.
Micromorphosis This night, like every single night for the past quarter century, a dense, layered mist shrouded the digitopia of San Francisco. Net nodes glowed neon blue at each crossway and trisection, steady and bright as quasars, seeming to waver only because of the floating white gauze of fog sliding through the streets of the city. Korbescki didn't use to mind the chill when he was younger, but now it seemed to eat away at him subliminally, like a ghostly pack of dogs. He felt as if his body were seeping away, pulled into the darkness by swirling tendrils. The soft, pleasing hum of the net nodes kept him sane. He embraced the sound like a mantra as he waited for his contact, now all of three minutes late.
Hills Like White Minotaurs They walked along the beach, he trying to match his steps with hers, but her stride was longer and his legs, though lean and strong, walked with shorter steps. To their left the waves cascaded onto the shallow sand. They could see clearly thirty feet into the water. They walked without talking, he wanting to say something to her, to broach the subject again. But he didn't know how. In front of them an outcropping of rock broke the surf. Every minute or so a larger wave would strike, and white spray would linger, splattered against the canvas of the sky, hovering in the air above the rocks, then disappearing. Each time she stopped to watch the arc of white water with a ferocious attention, then walked on until the next rise of surf fell against the miniature promontory.
Zatoichi For the seventh Monday in a row Aaron Miller had a compelling reason to get to work early. He rose at five-twenty, ten minutes before the alarm would go off, and was in his car on the L.I.E. with his second cup on the way in by a quarter after six. Miller had rigged his computer to self-boot at six-thirty. With all the crap he had loaded, it took nearly five minutes before he could sit down and use it. He rehearsed what he was going to say this time. He had a strategy. If he was right, he'd know something crucial by seven-thirty, and he'd either be twenty dollars ahead or pissed as hell.

The Franklin And Amy Stories

In 1998-1999 I was given the opportunity to write a column for Comcast Online, an in-house web startup for the cable company looking to extend into Internet delivery via cable modem. With James Irwin as my managing editor and me as web designer, we developed and ran the New Jersey regional Comcast website, InTheGardenState.com (now defunct).

By 1999 we had acquired a robust roster of freelance columnists writing everything for us from movie reviews to financial advice. James encouraged me to contribute my own column. I really didn't have an interest until I considered combining op-ed within a fictional context; that got me excited, and James — to his undying credit — allowed me to go for it.

The first story, "Masks Of Halloween", set the theme and structure of my semiregular postings, which I called "Fallibility And Other Virtues". It was October, and I wanted to do something that could be freshly posted for, and be about, Halloween. That seemed to go over well, so I planned new stories for Christmas/New Year's and Valentine's Day. It was an afterthought, when it came time to begin story number two, to continue with the same characters. By the third, I had a trilogy, showing the arc of time and life of these two people, Franklin and Amy, with themes and cross-references intertwining the three. I don't know if I can rightly call these stories. The op-ed contingent is present, as you'll see, but I hope done most entertainingly.

Tony Urgo :: online, unfiltered, and otherwise occupied

STORIES

We Dead Men Do Solemnly Swear

Micromorphosis

Hills Like White Minotaurs

Zatoichi

The Franklin And Amy Stories