by submission | Apr 14, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
At 16,400 feet on the Chajnantor plateau high in the Atacama Desert in central Chile, Sabyll fell off her saddle when the light finally went, the muted sun expiring.
Darkness should’ve prevailed. She was prepared for that—the immensity of emptiness. But it was not so. Even in the protection of the array, she was surrounded, as if in a snow globe, by the ever-crowding stars that threatened to sweep her off the plateau.
She grasped her mule’s leg to brace herself against the sudden vertigo of interstellar light. Moments ago, she’d thought the ALMA antennas, long abandoned, would provide some kind of stability, an anchor that might secure her when night arrived and the heavens came to suck her soul away. But there was nowhere to hide.
So foolish to have come. So foolish to ignore the tales. Sabyll had been warned. Yet, who could fathom such bottomless light still existed in a world gone dark. In the choked world below where smoke and grit ate the sky, few would believe there was a way through it, but Sabyll had been given the key. A simple talisman, keepsake from another time, another world.
A star chip.
An ancient, etched crystalline city that hung around her neck, its markings too complex for the naked eye, redolent of delicacy, purity, divinity. A product of finer elements, manufactured of dreams, not of the fouling furnaces of industry.
Earth was a fuming mess, a toxic bloom humanity had unleashed in the atmosphere over a thousand busy, busy years. A world blighted by the descendants of Edi-son. Sabyll knew the tales. Knew of a brighter epoch when suns like her own were harnessed as great steeds to conquer galaxies.
Her mother had said Sabyll could set it right. That the Atacama was beyond the blight. That great machines and their masters could call back the Age of Light. Free them from the darkness. Make them whole.
The star chip.
Still, she hesitated. Questioned. Was the darkness so bad? Maybe better to drown in smoke, sink into the particulates, become bottom dwellers, blind and insensate. Rather than naked to the riotous cosmos above that both enticed and accused.
She clasped the star chip. Felt the hum of her history. The cellular urge to expand, grow. Neither the darkness nor light would suffocate her. She had a duty to earthkind. She must remind those that had fled this world of their obligation. A time for calling out.
The quiet domes of ALMA, silos of an old harvest, should awaken to her touch. Sabyll stepped onto the wide platform and faced the formidable gleam of polished metal barring her entrance to the array, she perceived another creature. A large, dark form looming by the entrance.
A Nether? Could it really be that monstrous creature from tales meant to keep curious young ones from venturing into the high passes and succumbing to toxic shock?
She stepped quickly back and saw the looming form shrink. Did it cower as well? Was it frightened of her?
Why not? She was a terror herself. Twice dead. She’d killed herself once by leaving her people and again by braving the Atacama. She should never have survived the climb through the upper toxicity. She threw up her arms and laughed, and the dark shape mimicked her movements.
“Well met,” Sabyll whispered to her self-spirit, her shadow, rarely seen in the miasma of the lowlands. “Well met.”
Removing the star chip from her neck and waving it before her like a talisman, approached the entrance with greater confidence. She had no idea what would happen, but she trusted in the legends her mother had told. She believed in the fantastic powers of those from before. And that trust was rewarded by an aperture that began to glow and then hum, as if hungry for the star chip. Like any good pilgrim, Sabyll offered it.
Without fuss. The bleached door retreated and a blackness, the wholeness of possibility, presented itself. Sabyll stared into the darkness. She knew this kind of darkness, as had so many generations. They’d grown up with so little light, with so much unknown. She’d come to call back the Edi-son, builders of ALMA and starry empires, to reclaim and repair the world they’d abandoned.
Star chip in hand she entered the array, turning a last time to countenance the vast firmament’s radiance. Sure that her shadow, the reminder of a lost past, could not follow her steady steps into the black wholeness beyond.
by submission | Apr 12, 2026 | Story |
Author: H. Young
The monastery was often quiet at shadow-time. There was something about the darkness that inspired a meditative silence among the monks of the Godhead. The giant metal beast that lurked in the sky cast its massive shadow down upon the earth beneath, bathing the planet in semi-night whenever the sun reached a certain height in the sky.
The only sound was bells and chimes that rang throughout the mountainside leading up to the monastery, stirred by the freezing wind brought on by the sudden darkness. Isaal Smithe staggered his way up to the high temple, arms wrapped around himself, holding his jacket tight to his body in order to save some warmth. Turning to look upwards at the sky before entering the temple, he cursed the Godhead silently. The empty monstrosity was indifferent to his displeasure, floating in space as it always had.
The high priest sat at his long wooden desk, sipping on a caramel-colored liquor that he swirled incessantly in its glass.
“All the supplies have been delivered, as usual,” Smithe told the clergyman, lurking in the doorway, itching to leave.
“Come in, Isaal, have a seat.”
Smithe grimaced and hesitated a moment before obliging the man. As much as he hated the cold, he hated more to be in the presence of the priest during shadow time. The man was prone to becoming overly preachy when his God blotted out the sun, and Isaal Smithe hated being lectured. It was only by necessity that he had come so late during the day.
“Many years ago you told me, but I’ve since forgotten. What is it that you believe God to be?” the priest pointed up at the Godhead.
Isaal chewed on his lower lip, uncomfortable; he swallowed hard before answering.
“A vessel.”
“A vessel?”
He sighed.
“Five hundred years ago, man longed to join the stars in heaven, so he built the Godhead as a means of transportation. For some reason he gave up, but left the skeleton of his desires in the sky as a reminder. Many years later, men like you have forgotten and have taken to worshiping our creation as if it was our creator.”
The priest’s beady eyes watched him with an amused glint.
“And what do you believe that God is?” the priest asked facetiously.
Smithe laughed in spite of himself. “Something in between an ethereal force and an old man in the sky? It’s never explicitly stated, and no one living really knows. The only way we know he exists are the prophets he sent us many years ago.”
“So you believe the words of men who died thousands of years ago over the specter of God that sits above your head and casts a second night upon you daily?” The cleric said with a smirk, but there was a thin layer of malice under the surface.
Isaal said nothing.
“I could have you killed for spreading such heresy, you know.”
He ignored the empty threat.
“I heard something in the market today that made me think of you,” he told the priest, still looking out the grand window and up at the derelict spacecraft that sat in the sky. “I heard that the Godhead is getting closer every year to the earth, and will one day come crashing down upon us.”
The priest was silent, taking a long sip of his drink.
“I guess your way or mine, God will someday rain fury down upon our heads.”
Isaal Smithe made his way back down the mountainside, grateful for the sun that had begun to peek out from behind the Godhead.
by submission | Apr 11, 2026 | Story |
Author: Logan S. Ryan
They landed and attacked faster than we could name them. They flattened armies like moist clay. They didn’t swarm the skies with high-tech ships or storm our streets with laser rifles. Our extermination wasn’t cinematic at all. They just rolled over us.
To no one’s surprise, social media was instantly flooded with the carnage. I got lost in doomsday posts while sitting on my porch. My cat Briciola was sprawled across my lap. One video had been taken in Rome– that meant invaders were just minutes away from my own town, wedged between Italy’s volcanic hills.
Their cloud-like bodies engulfed everything. Ornate architecture emerged from their haze as rubble. An alien billowed toward the filmer right before the clip ended. I shuddered. That could be me. That will be me. I looked up. Hysterical crowds slalomed through town.
I had vanished from work without a word. I hadn’t called my family in years. I had nobody to protect or flee with. I would never talk or laugh or reconcile with anybody again because I was dead. The aliens hadn’t come yet, and I was already dead.
What can a corpse even do? Icy adrenaline coursed through my body. I would run. It didn’t matter if I sprinted into a sanctuary or a stampede of annihilation. I lurched forward in my chair and–
Briciola gawked with offense in her jade-marble eyes, mewling softly in protest. She remained tucked in my lap, even though her hips half-dangled off the chair. “Go!” I spat. Her tail flourished up and down, as if to scold me.
I found myself kneading her silky, mottled fur. My palms became tender and adorned in stray strands of hair. Her body rippled with purring; the sensation seeped through the tattered quilt into my thighs. She offered a slow blink, which I returned. My joints creaked as I slouched back into a comfortable position. She draped her head between my knees with her eyelids lulled closed.
How could I shun such a delicate creature? I became transfixed by the flexing of her rubbery pads as her claws crocheted the quilt. We took deep breaths. The air passed through her hair-thin nostrils with the timbre of a tender flute and through mine like a drowsy cymbal. She flopped onto her back, exposing more waves of fur to my eager hand. Her warm paw furled around my knuckles, strapping my hand to her velvety chest, but she still wasn’t satisfied. I had to toss my phone aside so that my other hand could join the fray.
Haze crested over the hills. Screams ignited from every direction. They had us surrounded.
My gaze sank from the tumultuous streets back to Briciola’s still face. Despite the shrieking, she didn’t stir beyond the occasional twitch of an ear. If I were already dead, I might as well have died with a cat on my lap. Besides, if she wasn’t going to surrender so easily, why should I?
by submission | Apr 10, 2026 | Story |
Author: Emma Atkins
There was a snail on the wall: a little circle of brown marring the white cladding, innocuous enough that security hadn’t removed it and repainted the entire block. Inside, they were making the future, showing it off like Sammie had his science-project volcano, grinning with pride as he’d wheeled it in. His first attempt had erupted inside itself and collapsed into a pile of soggy papier-mâché.
“Look, Auntie Gracie, look!”
Sammie had clapped his hands excitedly as the implosion had caused liquid to leak through the cardboard base of Vesuvius, spreading across the table and dripping down to pool on the linoleum floor. It took two other projects as its Pompeii. Sammie’s next volcano had been a work of art – all’s fair in the name of progress. This volcano was the machine, and rather than bubbling up red-dyed sodium, it was supposed to solve our greatest problems and win first prize in stopping the end of the world.
I’d come outside for a cigarette, hiding around the back to avoid the main cameras. Jim in security would overlook it if he spotted me on one of the back-entrance monitors, just as innocuous as a brown snail on a white wall. The guys on the front desk weren’t nearly so understanding. I’d like to put them in my shoes, have them make small talk in that stuffy box of bespectacled idiots for longer than an hour and see how desperate they got for a smoke. Or something stronger. I could do with something stronger.
‘You always have to be drunk’ Charles Baudelaire had gotten that right. Only he’d followed it up with some philosophical drivel about being drunk on wine, poetry or virtue rather than the whisky I was craving as I smoked and observed the snail. They say the machine knows poetry, that it can recite you Shakespeare’s homoerotic epics or Lovecraft’s nightmare fuel just as easily as calculate which Pompeii should burn in the name of progress, which massacres to justify or condemn and which snails to cull or let live on white walls.
I pluck the snail from the wall, holding it carefully between finger and thumb to get a better look at this little world. Cornu aspersum – the ‘common garden snail’ – a relic from back when people still had gardens, before the world became steel and plastic. There was a bite to the wind this late in the year, a cold edge to everything. From the white film over the mouth of its shell, I assumed the snail was hibernating; sleeping peacefully while the men inside debated whether or not it would wake again come Spring.
Sammie had picked one up once. He’d run off into the woods and come back with it held carefully between finger and thumb.
“What is it, Auntie Gracie?”
He’d squealed in delight as the grey body unfurled, like molten rock from a volcano, spilling out over his chubby hand. I stubbed out my cigarette on the wall, creating a little circle of black where the snail had been. I had to go back inside. I held the snail up to the camera, knowing that Jim was watching when the lens blinked in confusion, then put it in my pocket and went to help burn Pompeii for the second time – all in the name of progress.
by submission | Apr 9, 2026 | Story |
Author: Katherine Sanger
She reflected on “The Metamorphosis” and discovered that she was jealous of Gregor Samsa. Sure, he woke up and found himself a giant cockroach, and that sucked for him. But she’d fallen asleep watching a made-for-TV-movie on the couch and woken up to find a giant, person-sized spider sitting in the wingback chair in the living room. It hadn’t gone away since.
She didn’t try to engage it – him? her? how did you tell on a spider? – in conversation. Not that she wasn’t curious about how it had gotten there or why it had gotten there or even when it had gotten there, but she was afraid that talking to it would somehow make it more real or that it might provide answers to all those questions. The truth may have been scarier than her imagination. And her imagination made it pretty damn scary.
Friends stopped coming over. No one wanted to see the giant spider. At least, not more than once. It was too unnatural and unreal. No one would help her get rid of it, either. It seemed that everyone feared it, and attacking a human-sized spider made even the bravest turn away. In private, she was told that some worried it wasn’t the only one of its kind; that there might be a revenge-killing or mass migration of human-sized spiders in the area if they killed this one. She couldn’t blame them. The thought of taking it on was frightening. The thought of an army of them appearing was beyond horrifying.
So the spider just kept sitting in her wing back chair. Sometimes, when she’d go out, she’d come back to find it had drained a stray dog or cat and left the body on the carpet. She disposed of the carcasses, crying every time, but the spider needed to eat, and it was controlling the homeless pet population. She assured herself that at least it wasn’t going after children or other people. She didn’t know how the spider caught the animals, if it had a web somewhere or some other magic spider way of getting them. Honestly? She felt better not knowing.
Life went on that way.
Until one day she came home and found two surprises. One was a dead dog on the carpet. The other was a huge egg sack on the spider’s back, large enough to make the spider lean forward uncomfortably in the wing back chair, like a reverse pregnant woman in her final month of gestation.
That night, she packed a bag with trinkets, mementos, and pictures she couldn’t live without. Before dawn, she crept to her car and drove away from the town, from her house, from the wing back chair, and from the spider with its pulsating sack of eggs.
