Josh is Five. Josh is Always Five.

Jeffty is Five, the Locus-winning classic short tale by Harlan Ellison, has long held a melancholy spell over me. (It is on page 71, and the book takes a little while to load).

It traces long lines into my own sense of the memorable (and malleable) past, touches on the eternal and the transient, and places nostalgia and reality on parallel tracks which intersect at tragedy. The beautfully-written story of the friendship between a five-year old boy who never ages and his normally-aging pal got its title from a misheard bit of conversation.

At a party, Ellison overheard actor Jack Danon * saying something like "Jeff is fine. He's always fine!" but thought he said "Jeff is five. Jeff is always five." The man who said it was a guest at a party hosted by Walter Koenig, Star Trek's "Chekov."

I had no idea, until today, that the character inspiration for "Jeffty" was another person at the party: a five-year old Joshua Andrew Koenig.

In the words of the author: "Writers take tours in other people's lives. Jeffty is me; he is also you. This is a short, memory-filled trip through your own life."

*Danon, incidentally, started his career in radio shows, like Fibber McGee and Molly, which casts an interesting, if wholly unrelated, light on the strange transoms of inspiration that helped carry this particular story to its fullness.

Which Zombie Will You Be? [Personality Test]

Every zombie movie has a set number of zombie types - a horde, a random guy, the first one to get shot.

But these zombies were once people, you know, with lives and dreams and ambitions.

Like you.

Which one will you be? Take the quiz and find out.

The Man With Hammered Nails for the Pupils of His Eyes

I'd been chopping most of the day. Chips of granite spread at my feet, dusted my sweaty shirt, clouded my spectacles. But I'd made progress. The boulder had scars on it: closer, certainly, to the monument I wanted than it had been that morning.

A man walked out of the Infinity building, grey suit, red tie, briefcase in hand. He stumbled against my rock, and staggered to his knees. I put the axe down and helped him up. It was there, his uncertain hand on my tricep, elbow in my palm, that I looked into his face and saw the pupils of his eyes: they were the heads of nails, and his eyes, I am quite certain now, were wooden balls, smoothed on a lathe.

He blinked, one lid catching, and slowly crossing over the nail.

"Your shoulder," he said. I smiled, proud of the muscle my endeavors had built. "It is torn. You are ruining yourself. You don't look well."

I helped him up and stepped back, annoyed. "How can you see anything?"

"I can't."

"Why do you have nails where your pupils ought to be?"

"They keep the eyes inside my head."

After a silence too long, he wandered down the sidewalk. I did not look to see if he navigated the intersection safely, but returned to my task, my shoulder throbbing.

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This is completely and wholly, as usual, the fault of a far greater writer.