Greetings from the Vodka Sea by Chris Gudgeon

wife”— here the doctor lowered his voice — “my wife’s not acting herself these days. I think she’s fucking around. Can you believe that? Fifteen years of . . .” Starky searched for but could not find the right words to describe his marriage.
    â€œIt’s going like mad, Starks. I can’t guarantee I’ll have anything left by the end of the week.”
    â€œI can’t take the chance. You know, I caught her going through my office yesterday. She’s looking for something she can hold over my head —”
    â€œCost, Starker. I’ll give it to you at cost, because you’re a friend. I want to move it, that’s all. I’m trying to make room for new inventory.”
    Starky stood up. No. Sorry.
    â€œTuesday night, Sticks. Shoot some hoops, okay? You gonna be there, Sticks? You gonna shoot some hoops?”
    . . .
    Rudy liked Duke. They’d gone to a Duke game once, maybe five years ago, back when Murph was still clinging to the diminishing dream of his son one day playing pro hoops. Rudy had the time of his life. Murph took the kid to the locker room afterwards (he was friends with a friend of the trainer), and all the guys had come over and said hello and signed a hat for him. Rudy wore that Duke hat every day for two years, until it was finally nothing but a band of tattered cloth and plastic, stapled together.
    Maybe he’d get Rudy a Duke hat. Notre Dame was on sale. He asked for the sale price on the Duke hat. The store owner said no. He’d got a deal on the Notre Dame hats. The Duke hats were cost plus as it was. He couldn’t give Murph a break. He’d like to, but he couldn’t.
    Murph cut through the park on the way back to his car. He’d still wanted to get something for Rudy, something for Rudy to remember. They hadn’t had many memories lately. He thought of Baby’s First Book and all the things it missed and all the things he’d never know about his son. His first kiss. His first orgasm. His first screw. His first disappointment. His first betrayal. His first bad trip. His first crime. His first good love gone bad. Everything. It.
    Murph passed a couple of teenagers, lurking in the shadows by the monkey bars. He could tell one was holding, he knew the look, he’d worn the look himself; maybe he was wearing it now.
    â€œOH vam QaQ shit?” the one kid asked.
    The young dealer closed his eyes and nodded emphatically. “HIja’, ioD, vam shit ‘oH QaQ . . .”
    . . .
    The Klingon concept of Honour is tremendously complex. Unlike contemporary Western culture, which renders every complicated idea into an abstraction (honour, love, valour, truth, peace), Klingons leave nothing up to interpretation. Their Code of Honour, the paq vo’ quv, runs some twenty-five thousand pages and is constantly being expanded and reinterpreted by the Klingon High Council. In fact, like Earth’s Eskimos, who have some fifty words to cover every nuance and grade of the concept snow, Klingons have some eight hundred and sixty degrees (counting changes in inflection and dialect quirks) of honour. There is the honour of a warrior in his first battle (“quv lak”), which varies greatly from the honour of a warrior in his last battle (“quV LuZ”). There is the honour a Klingon woman shows her living mate (for example, “qUUv lOn,” although this can vary depending on the mate’s standing within in the community), which should not be confused with the honour she shows her deceased mate (which, again, varies greatly depending on the manner in which her mate died). Surprisingly too, for such a essentially conservative culture, there is the honour of a divorced woman, which ranges from the lowest order, “quvV tU,” for the woman who quietly acquiesces as her mate takes another lover, to “quv tulG,” reserved only for those great women who kill their mates in a highly