The theme of The Avenue, Issue VII, is "freedom". This is a slippery concept because of the million ways each person's freedom treads on the toes of some other person's freedom.
A world of perfect freedom would be a world of utter inequality.
And it would lead to the paradox that, because you haven't really got a freedom that you cannot exercise, all persons' freedom would erode all other persons' freedom until few or none of us were truly free.
I've thought a lot, in my slow and inadequate way, about what I think freedom even means. The idea that it means being allowed to do whatever you like is obviously adolescent—it is the teenager's petulant "you can't tell me what to do!" distilled into a principle. So I find myself wanting some other definition, or at least a working definition.
I've come up with this: freedom is the feeling that you have a fighting chance.
Maybe that sounds too solipsistic. I'm still working out what I think it means. In any case, two ideas distantly related to the notion freedom made their way into parables of mine.
One of them, called "Creeping Infallibility", takes a silly look at the internal processes of the exercise of free will. It is not a story but a goofy musing.
The other, a flash fiction-type parable called "Retroactive Discontinuity", imagines how a cheeky Bellatrix Sakakino might exercise free will to thumb her nose at an apparently fixed fate.
Whatever their paltry merits. these parables were included in the aforementioned issue of The Avenue. I do not think you can read the magazine online, but you can buy it here if you're feeling flush.