Short-a-Day: Steven Millhauser's "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne"
Originally published in Little Kingdoms, 1993. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 92.The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible -- therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. And yet it was d…