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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: It took a while for Stan to get over his girlfriend Shelia turning into a cloud of yellow gumballs--enough to found a roaring e-Commerce startup and take it to IPO. But his dreams continue to haunt him--dreams of Sheila in the clutches of the Ant King. This surreal romance is a madcap satire of the Internet boom years, video games, fairy tales, love, and gumballs.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 2001
Fictionwise Release Date: March 2005

5 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [282 KB], eReader (PDB) [36 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [23 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [22 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [81 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [95 KB], hiebook (KML) [71 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [59 KB], iSilo (PDB) [19 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [25 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [53 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [37 KB]
Words: 6813
Reading time: 19-27 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"..brilliant, comical, touching ... one of the finest pieces ever published by the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction."--Cory Doctorow, Campbell-Award winner

Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, fought for her heart, believed in their love until finally she had come around. They were about to kiss for the first time and then this: yellow gumballs.

Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.

After several months of hard work on himself with the group, Stan was ready to open a shop and sell the thousands of yellow gumballs. He did this because he believed in capitalism, he loved capitalism. He loved the dynamic surge and crash of Amazon's stock price, he loved the great concrete malls spreading across America like blood staining through a handkerchief, he loved how everything could be tracked and mirrored in numbers. When he closed the store each night he would count the gumballs sold, and he would determine his gross revenue, his operating expenses, his operating margin; he would adjust his balance sheet and learn his debt to equity ratio; and after this exercise each night, Stan felt he understood himself and was at peace, and he could go home to his apartment and drink tea and sleep, without shooting himself or thinking about Sheila.

On the night before the IPO of gumballs.com, Sheila came to Stan in a dream. She was standing in a kiddie pool; Stan and his brothers and sisters were running around splashing and screaming; she had managed to insert herself into a Super-8 home movie of Stan's family, shot in the late 70's. She looked terribly sad.

"Sheila, where are you?" Stan said. "Why did you leave me, why did you become gumballs?"

"The Ant King has me," Sheila said. "You must rescue me."