Challenge 1098

Three-Day Count

1. In G. Michael Smith’s The Rise of the Thinking Pig:

   1. Why is it important that Viola’s fingers be located on or next to her snout? Where else could they occur?
   2. Does the story appear to be a modern fable, one in which animals talk and think like people but still function as animals? If it is a fable, what might its moral be?

2. In Jeffrey Greene’s The Bite:

   1. How soon might readers realize that Roger Dennison is assaulted by himself?
   2. If the narrative is taken literally, where is Roger Dennison’s time machine? If figuratively, when and where does Roger Dennison generate an interpretation of his own life?
   3. Does the story overstep Bewildering Stories’ dream stories guideline?

3. In Dylan Haversack’s My Life as a Mole:

   1. Why is does it seem unlikely that the narrator would take up the hobby of functioning as a kind of librarian?
   2. What changes occur in the characters of the maid and homeowner? To what is due the change in the maid’s attitude toward the “mole”?

4. In Frances Koziar’s What’s Left in the End: How might the story illustrate the mood of many cities’ inhabitants in the year the story was completed, namely 2021?

5. In Gary Clifton’s Bring on the Clowns: The story’s conclusion confirms that it is an allegory, but of what? And what detail is the conclusive key to the allegory?

6. In Matt Lyman’s How the Human Immune System Can Heal Our Democracy: The “t-reg” cells function as a moderating control mechanism in human immunity; that is their design and purpose. What must human beings acquire if they are to serve a similar function?

Responses welcome!

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