The Love Machine & Other Contraptions Read Free

it would help me convince you.”
    “I see,” the dreamer said. “It didn’t.”
    “My offer still makes sense,” the blue man said.
    “True,” the dreamer said.
    “What?”
    “True, it makes sense. I accept.”
    “But...”
    It didn’t make sense. It really didn’t. It was too easy. Decisions on this scale weren’t really...
    “Stand here and don’t move,” the dreamer said. “There isn’t much time until the night ends.”
    “But...”
    “Quiet. Don’t delay me. Don’t move! Already it took you too long to get here, and I always wake up with the sunrise.”
    “I know,” the blue man said.
    Something was not right. Something didn’t fit. How did he know? Where did the knowledge of the dreamer’s sleep pattern come from? How did he know, with such confidence, to come here and not somewhere else? And the only decision he had reached on his own, now that he thought about it, throughout this entire journey—was the decision to go down instead of up. Why?
    “Don’t bother,” he said.
    “Don’t move,” the dreamer said.
    The once-blue man closed his eyes and stepped and walked and ran through the wall and beyond it and fell, down toward the lights, toward the city he had never really grown up in, toward the street where he had appeared out of nothing only a short time before, he and his backpack and his bulldozer, toward the nothing from whence he came and to which, now, even before he hit the ground, he returned.
    And the dreamer in his high castle upon the Tel Aviv beachfront sighed in his sleep and turned, disappointed.
    And when the sun rose over the city of nightmares and lights and fruitless escapes, there were gone from the skyline one building, and one street, and three apes.

The Word of God
    The beginning of the end was very simple, but no one suspected it.
       
    Ofer searched through his pockets like a man possessed. “A pen!” he said. “My kingdom for a pen!” and immediately found one, in the pocket of his shirt, and upon returning home he discovered that the door refused to open. He couldn’t understand why.
    ~
    “This time it will work,” she said to herself, while waiting at the café for a guy she had never seen. “This time it will work out. He will be handsome, rich, intelligent, kind, considerate, and he will fall madly in love with me. I know it.”
    And so it was.
    ~
    “I wish I had a shekel for every time you said you’ll be here on time,” Uri Schwartz said to Rafi, his business partner.
    Pop! Something said, and a heap of coins materialized around him, swallowing him whole.
    “I don’t believe it,” said Rafi. “Shit!”
    His fate was much worse.
    ~
    “Moshe, you stupid lump of meat!” shouted fat Nati at his rebellious nephew and Pop! —and in the end, the rest of the family enjoyed a particularly delicate barbeque on the nearest traffic-island.
    “Look Dad,” said Yoni, “Meow! I’m a cat! — Pop! —Meow! Meow! Meo...”
    ~
    “Thank you very much!” Rivka Meirovich said to her neighbor. “What a wonderful cake! You’re pure gold!” Pop!
    Those, so it turned out immediately, were the most profitable words she’s ever said.
    ~
    “Yes, oh... you’re so good, you’re great, oh... yes, yes... Oh, Rami, yes, more, more, you’re so big, you’re huge , you’re—” Pop!
    It was a mess.
    ~
    “Listen to me, and listen good,” said the sergeant, “You’re all a bunch of fucking dicks!”
    Pop.
    “Oh my God!” said the sergeant.
    I am the Lord your God, said the voice of pop gravely, and something appeared—the last thing the sergeant ever saw in his life.
    Do not take my name in vain!
    ~
    The middle of the end was rather complicated, but man generally continued undeterred with his own affairs.
       
    “I wish His Honor happiness and wealth, but such as can not be interpreted literally or constitute a form of harm to His Honor or any of his family, friends or acquaintances.”
    “Thank you,” said the judge to the council of