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M. Darusha Wehm

Explorer of Worlds Real and Imagined

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  • Short Stories
    • Bodies at Rest, Bodies in Motion
    • Fire. Escape. – Sample
    • The Foreigner
    • Major Tom and the Lucky Lady
    • The Interview
    • Lucidity
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    • Chekhov’s Phaser
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  • Science Fiction
    • Beautiful Red
    • Children of Arkadia
    • Andersson Dexter
      • Self Made
      • Act of Will
      • The Beauty of Our Weapons
      • Pixels and Flesh
    • Modern Love and other stories
    • The Voyage of the White Cloud
    • Retaking Elysium
    • The Qubit Zirconium
    • Hamlet, Prince of Robots
  • Mainstream Fiction
    • Devi Jones’ Locker
      • Packet Trade
      • Sea Change
      • Storm Cloud
      • Floating Point
    • The Home for Wayward Parrots
  • Anthologies
    • The Stars Beyond
    • Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy, Volume 4
    • KeyForge: Tales From the Crucible
    • Trans-Galactic Bike Ride
    • Fireweed: Stories from the Revolution
    • Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I
    • The Dame Was Trouble
    • Dystopia Utopia Short Stories
    • Science Fiction Short Stories
    • Procyon Press Science Fiction Anthology 2016
    • Use Only As Directed
  • Games/Interactive
    • The Martian Job
    • Alexander Systems
    • You Do You
    • if ink could flow backward
  • Books

The Home for Wayward Parrots — Sample

Chapter One—Gumbo

I was sitting on the toilet the first time I ever spoke with my mother. It was a bad habit, taking the phone into the bathroom, but I did it every time. Ever since I got one of those phones with the internet and everything, I’d find myself surfing while taking a crap. I figure that it’s just the twenty-first century equivalent of reading the sports section on the john. Of course, the sports section never rings with the phone call you’ve been wanting to get for thirty years.

Don’t get me wrong — I grew up with a mom and dad just like about half the rest of the world. It was almost like the descriptions in a badly written children’s book; we lived in a white clapboard house on a tree-lined street in a quaint little town. The reality is that I don’t even know what clapboard is and the house was blue, except for the year my dad got creative. Mom repainted it the next summer. Blue.

I think she liked the blue because Mom was a cop. When I was little I thought her first name was Officer. I think she would have worn her uniform on her days off if she were allowed. On the other hand, unless you lived with us, you’d hardly even know that Dad had a job. Some people thought he was embarrassed — he was a nurse — but really it was just that he didn’t care about work like Mom did. Dad was a good nurse, but he didn’t love nursing like Mom loved policing. It was just a job for him and he left the patients at the hospital. Being a cop was like Mom’s religion.

Other kids used to make fun of me because of Mom and Dad. “Does your dad wear an apron, too?” they’d ask. I knew it was supposed to be mean, but he did wear an apron sometimes. It never seemed weird to me, I guess because it’s just what was normal in my house. Looking back, I guess I’m lucky they named me Brian; I could have been saddled with one of those horrible gender-neutral monikers you see everywhere these days. Logan, Mason and Taylor, like some kind of unisex law firm.

I was lucky in a lot of ways, I know. My parents never let me forget that they loved me; they even spun the whole adopted thing as a way of proving it. They picked me — I was no accident. And I love my folks just fine, but I can’t say I never thought about it. To be honest, I thought about the fact that I was adopted all the time.

Read on a single page

Pages: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5

Primary Sidebar

Book cover for “Hamlet, Prince of Robots” by M. Darusha Wehm. A blue-green robot skull with a golden crown in the style of a neon sign, over a dark glitchy background. In the top left is a quote reading “Enormous fun and a real gift to lovers of Shakespeare or science fiction or both. Familiar and surprising, clever and moving.” From Kate Heartfield, author of Sunday Times bestseller The Embroidered Book.

Hamlet, Prince of Robots

Like Succession meets Blade Runner … an extremely compelling and satisfying read that allowed me to investigate my own place in our time of communion and interdependence with machines.

—Pip Adam, author of Acorn Prize winner The New Animals

Something is rotten in the state of cybernetics.

Elsinore Robotics is on the cusp of a breakthrough—the company is poised to create the first humanoid androids powered by true artificial intelligence. Their only rival, Norwegian Technologies, lost a publicly streamed contest between their flagship model, Fortinbras, and Elsinore’s HAM(let) v.1.

But when the first Hamlet model is found irreparably deactivated, the apparent victim of wild malware, the field of consumer cybernetics is thrown wide open.

Learn More

Free Stories

Career Opportunities

Jo-Lynn had always laughed at Charlotte, her stupid sister-in-law, who believed the crap in those so-called newspapers she bought at the supermarket every week. It was no wonder that her no-good … Read More... about Career Opportunities

Major Tom and the Lucky Lady

I was balancing a cup of tea in one hand, while hanging on to the side of the companionway hatch with the other. I climbed into the cockpit sideways, compensating for the roll of the boat. I was only … Read More... about Major Tom and the Lucky Lady

The Interview

Originally published in Podioracket Presents - Glimpses “I was working at this stim joint, a place called Ultra-Sissons. It’s not where I’m working now — I wasn’t a bartender then, just a busser. … Read More... about The Interview

Publications

  • . ….. ..story .. time
  • A Most Elegant Solution
  • A Most Elegant Solution (audio)
  • A Thorn in Your Memory
  • A Wish and a Hope and a Dream
  • Alexander Systems
  • Fear of Lying
  • Force Nine
  • Good Hunting
  • Home Sick
  • Home Sick (audio)
  • Homecoming
  • I Open My Eyes
  • if ink could flow backward
  • Microfiction @Thaumatrope
  • Modern Love
  • Modern Love (audio)
  • Preventative Maintenance
  • recursion
  • Reflections on a Life Story
  • Showing the Colours (audio)
  • The Care and Feeding of Mammalian Bipeds, v. 2.1
  • The Interview
  • The Stars Above Eos
  • War Profiteering
  • War Profiteering (audio)
  • we are all energy

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Poetry

  • . ….. ..story .. time
  • 140 and Counting
  • creation myth
  • Force Nine
  • how to make time
  • if ink could flow backward
  • recursion
  • the chrononaut
  • we are all energy

Non-fiction

  • 90ways.com

Elsewhere

  • Darkly Lem
  • Many Worlds
  • Mastadon

Copyright © 2023 M. Darusha Wehm