by Parker Young
Project Pigeon
In 1943, the United States government paid behaviorist B.F. Skinner to develop a homing missile of his own devising. The missile was to be guided by pigeons stationed inside the missile’s nose cone. Skinner believed that by pecking on an image projected via camera obscura, the pigeons could guide the missile to its target with near-perfect accuracy.
“Our problem,” Skinner later said, “was no one would take us seriously.”
Hey Y'all, Watch This
I spent weeks trying to write a scene in which the phrase “be coming toward us” is misheard as “becoming tortoise,” but I couldn’t manage to do it. Nothing I came up with qualified as believable realist dialogue. This suggests, or so it seemed to me at the time, that the category believable realist dialogue may be shrinking. Soon it may consist of only a few choice words.
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Parker Young is the author of the story collection Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane. His fiction has appeared in Joyland, Forever Magazine, SARKA, and elsewhere.