The Tanuki Who Helps
Not a lot of people will tell you they love their job and mean it. They may _like_ their job, sure, especially comparing it to rough times in the past. And the boss may be nice, the clientele 99% decent, and the hours okay, but it's still _work_ and...
Laying Pipe
Sometimes when you've been at a job for a long time, you feel you've pretty much seen every crazy situation it can throw at you. In my case, that meant every manner of perverse piping job and every imaginable clog thereof. And yet when I was contacted...
Skunktemberfest
The bus was not the fastest way to go downtown, but I wasn't hurried enough to shell out extra for a cab. While the seats were a little cramped for someone like me who's both taller and rounder than most people I encounter on a daily basis, _most_...
Getting Even
There's an old saying, 'don't get mad, get even.' Sure, it sounds nice on paper, but who wants to stop at getting even? Why go to all the trouble of holding a grudge and plotting revenge and carrying out your clever and glorious retaliation when your...
Insatiable Drives
There were probably people better qualified to hunt down Cardo. I mean, he was a _mad scientist_, a wolf who'd been wreaking corruption in people's minds from world to world, and I was just a small-time detective, a red panda-tanuki hybrid travelling...
Hisham
Christmas morning on my own, rain splattering on the motel room window in the dark. The holiday doesn't mean as much when you don't have family or friends around; work had me in the city for the whole month, and my chief exposure to the holiday season...
Not a Finger
It was hard to get used to just how early it got dark here when winter came. Sure, you expect the evenings to be dark, but on this edge of the time zone the sun was already gone from the sky before five. The combination of the darkness, the snowy...
Closer than Brothers
Some people say you have to work hard to make it in this world--that work is virtue, and poverty is a sign of laziness. On the other hand, one of my economics texts pointed out that the higher-status and the higher-paying jobs tend to be _less_ manual...
Richmond
I had the misfortune to be alone in the locker room when Barry burst in. My first impulse was to hide: I'd had one too many bad encounters with him before. He wasn't... _mean_, or anything--specieist as it may be to point out, the hyena _did_ always...
The New Assistant
One of the major troubles of being a big hyper is how the world interacts with you. Sure, I hear lots of idle fantasies from my friends and admirers online about how great it would be to have a dick as big as mine, all of which begin at arousal and end...
Pizza with Tommy
So what do you do when you want to start over? Me, I'd been hunting work. Most of my day had been spent pounding the pavement around the neighborhood, but as afternoon came on I was coming to accept the understanding that I was not going to get...
Pliable and Compliant
Tonight was another night to spend alone at home. I'd been spending most of my nights with Rockwell, but this weekend he had a business trip to Detroit and I couldn't get away to join him. He always kept things pretty intense for me, so really it was...