Spending 8 Hours In Milan For A Layover Included The Essentials: Visiting Cute Bookshops And Looking

Mikhail Koptev

Short stories that live in my head rent free and make me go a little crazy:

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (horror)

Lamb to The Slaughter by Roald Dahl (horror)

We Ate The Children Last by Yann Martel (satire/horror)

The Empty Prison by Matt Dymerski (horror)

The October Game by Ray Bradbury (horror)

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (horror/sci-fi)

A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor (horror)

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (sci-fi)

One of the stranger things about training brand new nurses is explaining how to min max small talk. It feels very weird to coach people on how to chat.

Water For The People, Paul D’Amato

Libuse Safránková, Lenka Kolegarova, Libuse Geprtová, Magda Vásáryová

Two elderly women visiting the graves of their dead parents in the Appalachian Mountains sit on the headstones and talk, 1983 - by David Turnley (1955), American/French

Reading a book about slavery in the middle-ages, and as the author sorts through different source materials from different eras, I am starting to understand why so many completely fantastical accounts of "faraway lands" went without as much as a shrug. The world is such a weird place that you can either refuse to believe any of it or just go "yeah that might as well happen" and carry on with your day.

There was this 10th century arab traveller who wrote into an account that the fine trade furs come from a land where the night only lasts one hour in the summer and the sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, people use dogs to travel, and where children have white hair. I don't think I'd believe something like that either if I didn't live here.

It still astounds me that people take the true fact that old or sick wolves will wander away from their pack to die as some kind of indication that wolves are cold and unfeeling.

It's an act of self-sacrifice. Wolf packs will do almost anything to help their sick or infirm - they will literally put themselves in danger to help the ones they love! The sick and elderly wolves don't wander away from their packs because their packs threw them out, it's explicitly the opposite - their pack won't abandon them! The only option is to force the issue by wandering away from the pack and not coming back.

I can't imagine how much love it would take to leave your family behind and d let yourself die alone because you'd become too sick for them to look after, and you know they'd never abandon you.

And you know what? Sometimes they don't die. Sometimes they start feeling better - the sickness recedes, or the elderly get a second wind - and they come back! They come back, and their pack is overjoyed to see them again. Wolves mourn, and wolves experience relief as well.

Vyacheslav Belov, Russia

Nightmare or salvation, nothingness or existence

observations from urgent care

- People who exercise a lot get knee injuries from overdoing it

- People who only exercise occasionally get knee injuries from being unprepared for the exertion

- People who don’t exercise get knee injuries from being out of shape

- Maybe knees just suck