Challenge 953

An Appearance of Matter

In Channie Greenberg’s A Nemesis’ Hinky Commitment: Lima feels that her mother’s free spending on her, Lima’s, idiosyncracies means that Ms. Quinn is failing to provide for Lima’s future. Does Ms. Quinn appear to have the means to support her daughter’s future?
In Gary Clifton’s Bottom of the Pile:
1. To what extent does the preference for Coca-Cola date the action in the story?
2. Why might readers be confident that McCoy will be able to produce enough evidence to convict the two mental-hospital guards of mistreating Shonda?
3. Who is the story about? What is the object of the story?
In Lester L. Weil’s The Guardian Angel and the Predator:
1. Does the drone’s crashing across the canyon really prove that the stranger is an angel? What if the guardian angel’s gestures failed for some reason; what would a dead narrator prove? Why is the guardian angel miserly with its powers? Why doesn’t it have the drone land safely?
2. What kind of deity does the narrator say he would like to believe in? How does it differ from the God implicitly depicted in Bottom of the Pile?
In Shauna Checkley’s Days of the Spider King: In what way do the spiders in the poem act contrary to what spiders actually do in real life?