by submission | Sep 17, 2025 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
On Varish, blue belonged to the sky alone.
The seas were dun-colored dunes rippling across the basins. Hills of beige and taupe rose from hectares of an ocher fescue, fading to a wan grey in winter. For more than half the year, only the sky was un-brown or un-gray on Varish.
And it was a wonder for it never blemished. The sky showed no difference in tone between its horizon and azimuth. Nothing in the atmosphere diluted its color, not even the presence of a star. For no sun was visible on Varish and night never fell.
The air felt forever fresh, pure and bracing. Days were an unvarying cool as though the entire planet stood at an alpine elevation in one of Earth’s equatorial regions. It neither rained nor snowed. Trees grew from subterranean nutrient sources, sprouting and shedding leaves on a schedule unconnected to changes in temperature or length of day. Their foliage was lavender and indigo with rounded lobes. At no point did leaf pigmentation falter or the blades turn brittle. No creatures bit the ends off the leaves, and no fungi formed anywhere on the trees. In autumn, children collected the falling colors to shield themselves from a looming time of seemingly endless dun, beige, and taupe.
Even though the Varish sky was a skein of astonishing beauty, as planetary visitors never failed to mention, the children remained insensible to it. Since the young experience time slowly, the months of pewter and dross were unyielding. With no night, no lamps lit their lives. Colored glass was unknown to this civilization, as was the light bulb.
A sameness seemed to settle over every young mind and spirit, its vortices swallowing visual perception itself.
In time, the children asked their parents for more color. Domed structures were built and purple leaved trees were planted, in profusion, under glass to fill the leafless months. Since neither temperature nor light declension caused leaf fall, these artificial environments were mere shelters where parents hoped to create hothouse style conditions. They imagined that they could suspend the depredations of the outside world. They hardly knew what they were doing, but succeeded, nonetheless. They became botanists, arborists. One could stroll beneath purple arbors and canopies of lavender for hours. The domes grew in size and ambition. Every adult on Varish became an arborist, working long days to develop new hues and tones, to preserve the color purple.
For a time, the children felt better. A variegated canopy swelled and contentment reigned. This was important, for the planet had always been a quiescent place. It was a destination for the disturbed, for those needing to rehabilitate their humours, their bones and vessels. It had been so since the planet was settled by utopian seekers. Visitors were always treated with care; each was guided across a landscape of soothing sights. Nothing was sharp and there were no horned creatures. An increase in purple did not change this, and the analgesic economy flourished.
Soon, trees that never shed their leaves moved outdoors. Parks of everpurple became commonplace. While this brought pleasure, it too lost its lustre. The children said they needed something to touch. Could the tree bark grow fur, they asked.
Certainly, it could. Purple pelted trunks appeared along boulevards. Varishites of all ages enjoyed a new pastime: grooming bark. The craze for fur grew, and domes became fulltime laboratories rather than leisure destinations. New fur varieties were released each month on trees and in take-home form. And these shone with new tones like mauve and fuchsia. Soon, the arborists bred foliage to match.
But the children grew tired of this as well. They abandoned the bark and trees and turned their attention to the fescue. Crossing the hectares, they tousled its tassels. Until then, the children had only known the plant as a source of food. But now they were drawn to the velvet of its leaves, the emboss of its seeds. And they adored its ocher, that un-purple color. For days, weeks, and months they felt their way through the fields. Parents looked up from their bark work and sighed. It was time to focus on fescue.
One morning, a child lay down in a hectare. She looked past the tassels and into the blue heavens. When other children found her, she was unresponsive. Her eyes were open but unblinking. Her pupils did not dilate; her irises remained static.
She was alive, with a pulse slow and plodding. Her breath, while shallow, maintained her pallor. She appeared to be in a trance rather than a state of shock. Other children, intrigued, lay down with her and looked up. Gazing past the tassels to the sky, they, too, became insensible. When ships of the disturbed approached Varish, passengers found hectares of children lying on their backs seemingly dead. But they had been forewarned and the sight brought them peace. This was further proof that a vaunted tranquility beckoned.
Seasons passed. Soon no children were up and about. Purple trees matured and the land sported a cloak of colors it had never known. Long months of pewter and taupe, of a dun undifferentiated were largely gone, exiled to distant quadrants of the planet. As word of the children’s trance spread, more and more visitors arrived and the land began to fill up.
The parents, those adults who had been led by their children to change the face of their home; to find an arboreal avocation that soon became a fulltime botanical vocation, they did not miss their children. For each day, they worked to produce small amounts of aqueous food and drink which they inserted into the arms of their progeny, using tiny needles.
As they turned their attention from leaves and bark to manufacturing life itself, the parents grew reacquainted with what they’d once loved about Varish.
by submission | Sep 16, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
It wasn’t long after I’d begun my USGS project near a little southern town that I began hearing threats and warnings about The Shady.
“Don’t be messing near The Shady after dark.”
“Behave or I’ll chase your sassy mouth out to The Shady.”
“You don’t know no real trouble ‘til you been to The Shady.”
It soon became clear to me that to the townsfolk The Shady was more a thing, than a place. Though it was definitely a place. I’d gone down there after hearing some of the talk.
About two miles off the only paved road west of town was a steep, wooded gulch that led to a dark, stagnant pond surrounded by tangled forest and vines. It was one dismal nitch, and I couldn’t see why anyone would want to willingly head down there.
But for some reason, I kept thinking about The Shady, and the local warnings about it, especially from parents to their children. When you work for the U.S. Geological Survey, you kind of always want to dig into things. And something about The Shady’s gulch and pond felt, well, a little shady to me, so I decided to dig a bit deeper into its surroundings.
Digging becomes a whole lot easier when you have access to LiDAR. I put in a request for one of our aerial survey teams to make a LiDAR pass over the area. It was well within my project parameters, so in about a week, I had the point cloud data on my laptop and began building a three-dimensional model of The Shady.
Let’s just say, it was highly anomalous. So, I sent a request for another LiDAR pass over the area to rule out a number of aberrant readings. In reality, I was crapping my pants over what the 3-D imaging had revealed beneath the pond, but you can’t tell that to your USGS colleagues.
Maybe I should have. Because during the second survey, the plane disappeared over The Shady. Vanished. All contact lost. No wreckage found. The three crew members gone.
I was gutted and felt guilty as hell. I’d heard the warnings since day one: “You don’t know no real trouble ‘til you been to The Shady.” And I knew that real trouble was coming. I don’t know how long The Shady had been there, but it was clear from my initial 3-D model of the gulch and pond that it wasn’t from around here.
A giant, hollow, metallic sphere was sitting underground there, and whatever was going on deep beneath that black pond was looking extra shady. Or, more precisely, extraterrestrial shady.
by submission | Sep 14, 2025 | Story |
Author: Bob DeRosa
The aliens landed and spoke to humanity in a language we all could understand. They had the power to conquer us in a day, take all of our natural resources, and leave before the sun brightened the blackness of night. But there was a unique word in their language, one we came to understand as “fair fight”.
There were rules. Every person on Earth would have a chance to fight for our survival. If even one of us prevailed, the aliens would leave peacefully. Arenas were constructed in every country. We were encouraged to send our strongest. In the spirit of a fair fight, they would send their weakest.
The weakest of their species was still ten feet tall with bulging muscles, armored skin, and razor sharp fingers. The United States sent a Navy SEAL. The alien knocked his head off.
So we strategized. We sent heavyweight boxers. Pulverized. Karate experts never drew a drop of alien blood. The aliens said to keep trying. Maybe we’d get lucky. We wondered if mercy was the key. We sent a grandmother. The alien kicked her so hard she bent in half.
The rest of the world fared just as well. It took months, but eventually we understood. There was no winning. Maybe they didn’t understand the word “fair” as we understood it. Perhaps giving humanity any chance at all was enough for them. But we saw the writing on the wall. We would never win.
Still we lined up. We went in costumes. We played theme songs. Clowns did okay at first, lasting longer than a minute. Something about the way they moved confused the aliens. But they learn fast. Now clowns are smushed like the rest of us.
Our population is dwindling. We tried saving the children for last but worried about who’d take care of them when all the adults were dead. Now the youngest fight, too. The rich don’t fight. They hide. We know if they don’t show up, the aliens will simply decimate the planet. So now we hunt the rich, force them to do their duty. They hide in bunkers and submarines. If they spent as much time and money learning how to fight as they spent learning how to hide, they might have a sporting chance in the arena.
Just kidding, they’d have no chance.
My father had cancer, and I spent the last year taking care of him. I asked if he wanted to fight and he said no, he wanted to listen to record albums and go the old fashioned way. Now that he’s gone, there’s nothing keeping me here.
I reserve a time slot and show up early. My last meal is a cheeseburger. I don’t bring a weapon. I don’t cry or beg for mercy. I haven’t been in a fight since I was a kid. I look at the ten-foot monstrosity and prepare to battle for humanity’s right to exist.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky.
by submission | Sep 13, 2025 | Story |
Author: Aubrey Williams
“I don’t want this to happen again, going on around and around.”
“What do you mean?”
The first man drank his coffee, squinting in the sun of a Parisian winter. His hat wasn’t shading him from the rays.
“It keeps happening in my dream: you and I meet here, I know something’s wrong, and we keep coming back here and repeating the same routine.”
The second man slowly poured milk into his coffee from the stainless-steel jug.
“When you say— hold on a moment”, said the second man, as he removed his hat, dusted it, and put it back on, drawing himself back up straight. “What do you mean “keeps happening”? Do you mean that you keep having the same dream, or that it happens continuously in the one dream?”
It was quite a busy terrace, but the cold of the middle-day meant the people spoke in muted voices. Inside was dense and warm, the wood shining with the varnish of cheerful conversation, but the outside was like the perfect dessert in the organised freezer.
“I don’t know, honestly,” replied the first man, looking off into the distance with a slightly pained, confused look on his face. “I thought it was the one dream, but then I have this feeling I’ve had it before… maybe it’s both; could that happen?”
The second man pondered this, stiffly.
“Well, yes, the mind is capable of all sorts of things. But, tell me, what else happens? You look concerned.”
The first man looked over the top of the second man’s head, who turned instinctively around. It was only a waiter and the fellow patrons of the atmosphere. The first man learned in, looking up at his friend with his eager eyes.
“There’s a woman in the park, with a pram… only the pram’s empty, and she looks at me with this horrifying expression on her face, and I realise she’s doing the bad things around me…”
“What bad things?”
“Everything. There’s a car, and a drunken man in the doorway of an abandoned building who shouts at me… I don’t understand.”
The second man thought he’d seen a film like that before.
“Well, we can sit here until we got for lunch, or we see the park. If you’re brave enough, you might at least know for sure.”
The first man knew the second man would say that, and the acid of fear burned, but he knew that he really ought to.
They paid for their drinks, and then walked over the road— quiet now— to the oval-shaped park. One path crossed over another, and the bushes were untidy, so you didn’t quite know whether it was straight or not. The men looked out to the other side, over the frozen-over pond, and the various benches were unoccupied, but for a deserted sleeping bag. However, they turned to the side, and saw her—
She had a haggard face, with eyes that practically popped-out of her skill, and wore a cold sneer. She rocked a pram that was empty. Her skin was pallid, and her free hand was clenched in a fist. She laughed silently at the first man, and tears welled in his eyes. He darted back across the road, nearly getting hit by a large black vehicle. He heard someone yelling at him, but couldn’t bring himself to look around. He felt faint, drained…
He sat down at the table outside, panting, then ordered a glass of water. After a moment, his friend sat down, ever elegant and poised.
“I had the strangest dream, and I need to tell you about it.”
by submission | Sep 12, 2025 | Story |
Author: James Rhodes
I first met Veronica Charlemagne in a gin bar on Callisto. Man, she was something else.
Veronica sat cross-legged on her stool. She dressed like a lawyer and posed like a model. Even her wine glass seemed in awe of her.
Veronica was one of about eight women on Callisto that I hadn’t either offended or disappointed. But that was just because we hadn’t met yet.
I was about to offer her a drink when I saw him. Mulon,the big shot drone CEO who had pocketed his workers’ salaries and left them stranded in space.
Mulon oozed onto the stool beside her. I waited for her to look disgusted, but Veronica just sipped her gin.
“You won’t get away with this,” said Mulon.
“It’s not me that needs to worry about getting away with things,” Veronica told him.
“I have the law on my side.”
Mulon grinned.
“Not the law of what is right, honey,” said Veronica.
Mulon slipped an envelope across the counter. Veronica placed it neatly in her jacket.
“The files?” Mulon asked.
The slender fingers of Veronica reached into her pocket. With a quick flick of her wrist, she banged her fist down on Mulon’s thigh.
“You ran up some bad debt with some good people.”
A look of pain and confusion crossed Mulon’s face.
“What?”
Veronica took her hand away from his leg. A large hypodermic syringe protruded from his leg. She slipped a data disk along the bar so that it sat in front of him.
“Enjoy your company healthcare,” she told him, “It might give you an extra six months.”
Mulon was wide-eyed, maybe he was too rich to scream. I watched his hand tighten into a fist. Veronica laid a hand on his forearm.
“You’ll need to save your strength,” she told him.”
Veronica Charlemagne stood up, turned her back on Mulon and sauntered out of the bar, just like she owned the place. And just like that, I was in love.
