Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University – Long Beach. A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he is the author of a collection of novellas entitled Spies & Saucers (PS Publishing, 2014). His first book of nonfiction, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, was published in 2012. He's written stories and articles for numerous magazines and anthologies, among them Fortean Times, Mysteries, Nameless Magazine, New Dawn, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paranoia, The Third Alternative, and Video Watchdog Magazine.

From Kim Hastreiter's introduction to @heaven

Dion never really needed a good reason to try and kill himself, but now he was being given one on a silver platter. His latest suicide attempt began with a food fight.

One afternoon two jarheads were following him around the city. A nearby Mexican restaurant that had been failing for years experienced a sudden upsurge in business thanks to all the military types who would eat there whenever Dion decided to drop in and purchase an enchilada combo dinner. All of these agents were apparently on rotation. Dion never saw the same shadow twice. Two annoying shadows had been up his ass throughout the entire weekend. They were particularly brazen, as they would camp out on the other side of a wooden fence outside his kitchen window. While he was standing there making breakfast or lunch or dinner, these guys would peek over the fence and try to take photos of him and observe his activities through a pair of binoculars. Their purpose, no doubt, was just to annoy him. Imagine a ridiculous college fraternity with the resources of the entire black budget of the United States of America deciding to play one long prank on some faceless guy in San Diego. And imagine that the faceless guy is you. It might seem absurd at first, until you start to lose your mind.

The military types parked in the lot outside never left. One time Dion got fed up and called the cops just to see what would happen. One of the officers, some young kid, seemed interested in Dion's story while the older cop kept implying that the gentlemen who were parked outside weren’t really there at all. The young kid just looked confused, as if one cop was in on the joke and the other wasn’t. Or perhaps it was just a classic good cop/bad cop routine. Who knows? The point is, Dion could seek no help from local law enforcement as they had clearly been told to allow this operation to continue.

So one sunny afternoon, while Dion was making lunch, he glanced out the curtains and saw (sure enough) two of his most recent shadows peeking at him through the slats in the wooden fence right outside the kitchen window. By this point (early November) Dion had become resigned to these terrorist tactics. Like Number 6 in Patrick McGoohan's TV series The Prisoner four decades in the past, and Winston Smith two decades before Number 6, Dion had grown accustomed to being under constant surveillance. He had no other choice. He would sleep, eat, fuck, whatever, knowing someone was either watching him or recording it all for posterity. In fact, there were several times when the invisible midgets would make their presence known while he was jacking off in the bathroom.

Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University – Long Beach. A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he is the author of a collection of novellas entitled Spies & Saucers (PS Publishing, 2014). His first book of nonfiction, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, was published in 2012. He's written stories and articles for numerous magazines and anthologies, among them Fortean Times, Mysteries, Nameless Magazine, New Dawn, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paranoia, The Third Alternative, and Video Watchdog Magazine.

From Kim Hastreiter's introduction to @heaven

Dion never really needed a good reason to try and kill himself, but now he was being given one on a silver platter. His latest suicide attempt began with a food fight.

One afternoon two jarheads were following him around the city. A nearby Mexican restaurant that had been failing for years experienced a sudden upsurge in business thanks to all the military types who would eat there whenever Dion decided to drop in and purchase an enchilada combo dinner. All of these agents were apparently on rotation. Dion never saw the same shadow twice. Two annoying shadows had been up his ass throughout the entire weekend. They were particularly brazen, as they would camp out on the other side of a wooden fence outside his kitchen window. While he was standing there making breakfast or lunch or dinner, these guys would peek over the fence and try to take photos of him and observe his activities through a pair of binoculars. Their purpose, no doubt, was just to annoy him. Imagine a ridiculous college fraternity with the resources of the entire black budget of the United States of America deciding to play one long prank on some faceless guy in San Diego. And imagine that the faceless guy is you. It might seem absurd at first, until you start to lose your mind.

The military types parked in the lot outside never left. One time Dion got fed up and called the cops just to see what would happen. One of the officers, some young kid, seemed interested in Dion's story while the older cop kept implying that the gentlemen who were parked outside weren’t really there at all. The young kid just looked confused, as if one cop was in on the joke and the other wasn’t. Or perhaps it was just a classic good cop/bad cop routine. Who knows? The point is, Dion could seek no help from local law enforcement as they had clearly been told to allow this operation to continue.

So one sunny afternoon, while Dion was making lunch, he glanced out the curtains and saw (sure enough) two of his most recent shadows peeking at him through the slats in the wooden fence right outside the kitchen window. By this point (early November) Dion had become resigned to these terrorist tactics. Like Number 6 in Patrick McGoohan's TV series The Prisoner four decades in the past, and Winston Smith two decades before Number 6, Dion had grown accustomed to being under constant surveillance. He had no other choice. He would sleep, eat, fuck, whatever, knowing someone was either watching him or recording it all for posterity. In fact, there were several times when the invisible midgets would make their presence known while he was jacking off in the bathroom.