New Story! Totes By Me! "Four Scenes…" At Fantasy Scroll!

Today, you can read one of my beloved stories – it’s set in Cleveland, a little down the street from me, and it features one of my favorite protagonists.  It’s about time passing by new technologies, and friendships that form and never quite reset again.
This is an Ohio story all the way through, as it was inspired by a visit to a bed-and-breakfast where the owner was one of the first doctors to own an X-Ray.  It was an incredible, miracle machine when it all started, something that nobody could have imagined, and by the end of his career the X-Ray was barely even noticable in the welter of changes that had happened since then.  And Blockbuster was closing at the time, and I realized the little video shops were the same thing: this technological spasm that had started on a ground level as hobbyists, enabled a brief cottage industry of do-it-yourselfers, and then consumed.
So I wrote “Four Scenes From Wieczniak’s Whisk-U-Away, And One Not.”  The obligatory sample:

Have a seat, the two of you, and your little girl. You took a taxi here, as I requested? Oh, good. The mall owner, Mrs. Tiffin, she’s always hounding the police to tow away everyone’s cars. I tell her you’re my customers, travelers, you need a place to park overnight — but no, she claims you’re stealing spaces from the Hallmark store. That’s a valid complaint, I guess, since sometimes people are gone for weeks… but I’d like it to be more convenient for you. When you return, you should just step out of the dimensional gate from Perth, Australia, and into your car and whoosh, you’re home! Not sit around this old place waiting for a cab. But I have a taxi driver — a friend of mine, Gregor. He’ll get you back in a jiffy if you call ahead. He’s a good man. Reliable.
I’ll just put in the adjustments here — it takes a good fifteen minutes for the computer to figure out the mathematics of folding space correctly, even with the assistance of the computer on the other side of the gate….

You can read the rest of the story at Fantasy Scroll Magazine, an exciting new startup that, on its second issue, has already published tales by Mike Resnick, Ken Liu, Alex Shvartsman, and now me.  Watch out for these guys.  And now, read a tale of a small business owner who’s going to watch the world literally move for him…