After Dinner Conversation: After Dinner Conversation Magazine, #4

By Hunter Liguore, Veronica Leigh, A.M. Todd and 3 more

"After Dinner Conversation" Magazine - October 2020

• Marble Lions: A conflicted employee must decide if she is willing to infect a remote tribal community to bring it generational developmental benefits.
• Holy Night: Three Auschwitz prisoners find a contraband bible and have to decide if they are willing to risk their lives to keep it.
• Performance: A sheepish brother is forced through an experimental program to take on the overbearing traits of his crime boss twin.
• Sacrificing Mercy: A devote Christian refuses a heart transplant based on her religious convictions.
• As You Wish: An elderly woman finds a trunk of tattered stuffed animals and makes a promise to fix them all. (All-Ages)
• Lay On: Three outcast witches visit the hippy era to tempt a street musician.

After Dinner Conversation believes humanity is improved by ethics and morals grounded in philosophical truth.  Philosophical truth is discovered through intentional reflection and respectful debate. In order to facilitate that process, we have created a growing series of short stories, audio and video podcast discussions, across genres, as accessible examples of abstract ethical and philosophical ideas intended to draw out deeper discussions with friends and family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: After Dinner Conversation
• Release date: Aug 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9798201954413

Book preview

After Dinner Conversation Magazine – October 2020

This magazine publishes fictional stories that explore ethical and philosophical questions in an informal manner. The purpose of these stories is to generate thoughtful discussion in an open and easily accessible manner.

Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The magazine is published monthly in electronic format.

All rights reserved. After Dinner Conversation Magazine is published by After Dinner Conversation in the United States of America. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher. Abstracts and brief quotations may be used without permission for citations, critical articles, or reviews. Contact the publisher for more information at [e-mail]

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ISSN# 2693-8359      Vol. 1, No. 4  

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Copyright © 2020 After Dinner Conversation

Editor-In-Chief:  Kolby Granville | Acquisitions Editor:  Viggy Parr Hampton

Design, layout, and discussion questions by After Dinner Conversation Magazine.

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https://www.afterdinnerconversation.com

Table Of Contents

From the Publisher

Marble Lions

Holy Night

Performance

Sacrificing Mercy

As You Wish (Children’s Story)

Lay On

Additional Information

From The Editor

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From the Publisher

AFTER DINNER CONVERSATION believes humanity is improved by ethics and morals grounded in philosophical truth.  Philosophical truth is discovered through intentional reflection and respectful debate. In order to facilitate that process, we have created a growing series of short stories, audio and video podcast discussions, across genres, as accessible examples of abstract ethical and philosophical ideas intended to draw out deeper discussions with friends, family, and students.

ENJOY THESE SHORT STORIES?  Purchase our print anthologies, After Dinner Conversation Season One or Season Two.  They are both collections of our best short stories published in the After Dinner Conversation series complete with discussion questions.

SUBSCRIBE TO THIS MONTHLY magazine for $1.95/month or $19.95/year and receive it every month!

Marble Lions

Hunter Liguore

...the distribution of various disease germs was no longer a merely theoretical possibility. Little containers, made to look like fountain pens, were already being manufactured. The caps would be removed to expose the soluble ends, and they could be dropped into reservoirs or running streams ... easy to distribute but hard to limit their field of action...

–H. G. Wells, Shape of Things to Come.

JANICE FLINT SAT BESIDE the riverbank holding open a blank journal. In her right hand, hovering over the empty page, she held a pen. The jungle surrounded her with tall, bowed trees, where slabs of light cut through the vines and branches like heavenly beacons. The smell of clay and earth mingled with the mist rising up from the dewy vegetation. Stillness ruled, despite the stitching movement of water over stone and mud.

This was her mark.

The place of rendezvous to complete her mission.

She needed only toss the candy-looking pen into the river, where it would dissolve against the current and rush down into the water supply of an unsuspecting village, sickening thousands and killing hundreds.

What are you waiting for? she wrote.

She didn’t actually expect the pen to work, but it scrolled with ease in blue. As she waited for an answer to come from inside her, she studied the pen, imagining a child finding it—one like her own—pulling off the clear casing and licking the yellow glob like a lollipop. It looked sweet, she thought, but in it contained the seeds of death—germs that would spread and mutate, before it destroyed.

Janice’s hand cramped. She didn’t dare set it down. She noticed the rest of her body hadn’t moved either, stiff and still like the wood. She reminded herself that she’d already been inoculated—it held no threat to her.

Just throw the goddamn pen and go.

She had a train to catch, at least an hour’s walk, through hills of stone and huts. Her family waited for her in the tourist area of Calcutta, two-hours away. The trip was a cover for her real purpose. It was one of the perks of the job, to travel to places she’d always dreamed of going, places that she’d marked on a map with colored flags when just a girl—China, Sri Lanka, India—she was always fascinated with the Far East ever since she’d read the travels of Marco Polo. But when the little girl in her imagined seeing India, it wasn’t quite like this.

There was a reason Janice signed on to this. Research, knowledge—she would study the germ strands, find its weakness, help create a super-antidote. People would no longer be at risk. Money turned on all sides of the endeavor—the pharmaceutical company she worked for, the doctors needing to administer it, the stores selling it, the generic versions that would spin-off, body bags for the dead, funerals, coffins, newspapers that kept the world updated, flowers and tombstones, food for gatherings, the transportation delivering the antidote, the research teams, doctors, journalists, aid workers, and the displaced people as they tried to beat the flow of the disease—money that kept her and her family clothed and fed.

It kept many fed.

She couldn’t forget this.

Someone had to start the wheel turning—her job was like the masked executioner, putting the head of the accused on the block, and hefting the axe to separate head from body—life from unlife. She was in company with all the other people pulling triggers—doing jobs that no one wanted to do, but needed to be done. It was part of an already established order. This was just how things were, she told herself.

Janice imagined the hands of those with jobs like hers, ordinary people who did unordinary things. She found them in articles, on the TV, in the street, through gossip—people that were more carnival-wonder than human...

...Like the hands stuffing newly born male chicks into a shredder for fertilizer, someone had to do it—there was no moral dilemma—the hatcheries didn’t need male chicks, only females. The scraps turned into feed, to fertilizer—bought and sold people made money—families were fed. Or the hands that dropped the Bomb—it was a duty, an order, a condition to receive a paycheck, which kept poverty at bay. Hundreds of hands released bombs, or gas, or bullets. Hundreds of hands tortured other humans. Hundreds of hands gave the deathblow to cows and chickens. Hundreds of hands cheated and bribed. Hundreds of hands caused others to suffer. It was a way of life, a behavior that made the world spin and function, without it there would be no order, no way to subsist. At the end of every trail of suffering, there was one person, like her, numb to its true implication, willing to betray the rest of humankind.

Without suffering, there would be no healing.

Janice toughened her resolve.

Privation begets prosperity.

Without suffering there would be no churches or prayers, the gods and goddesses would be out of business, bankrupt without tears. People wouldn’t need to rely on each other, or come together with banners of hope. Without Suffering Inc. there would be islands