Writing short stories is not easy. The reason it isn't easy is because they are short. The writer is still charged with producing living characters who have personalities: good, bad, or milksop. Add to that a dynamic narrative that gives you, the reader, an opportunity to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste what the folks who inhabit those little stories do, and the authors have a demanding job on their hands. Short stories are a great deal more than sitting on an old apple crate and hammering away at the QWERTY.    

Does time exist as a separate dimension? Does it have a unique place with definable limits in space? Does it move independently according to its own purpose? Or does it only move when other things move, completely dependent on prevailing conditions and binding dimensions in its surrounding space-a causal result bound to the whole? Perhaps it’s just a simpleminded construct humans have concocted to explain the inexplicable. Is it vaguely possible that it’s a set of branes slightly out of sync and we may pass from one to the next at will? Maybe it’s a simple kink in dimensions that can be crossed by anyone walking in precisely the right direction. It could be that it’s just a mental state altered simply by a minor amount of imagination applied correctly. Perhaps it is no more than a drug- or mantra-induced change of mental state-something hallucinated-something seen but unseeable. Or is there more to it than we can fathom? In the world of physics, all of this-and much more-is being looked into by serious, conservative scientists as well as those with their mental equipment more loosely adjusted-or even unfastened completely, their brains rolling about like marbles in an empty railroad freight car.