by submission | Jan 15, 2026 | Story |
Author: Alzo David-West
an autonomous
neural capsule drifts
in the orion nebula
This is my star song to you. Here I am in this watercolor night. Listen. Hear my whisper. I love you. My words will travel across the cloudy trails. And even after a billion years, my song will come, journeying to be with you. Accept my love, and accept my fear. Know that my passing life is now this form. Tomorrow was always today. No one understands, other than us, how this love endures even after our particles become the birth and death of stars. Your dusty tired eyes are closed now. But look at the planets amid the purple and sepia vapors, rotating far, rotating near. See these sparkling apparitions, the plasmic storms and the veils, the stars like mountains, the terrains of electric gravity, the rain of my song, the sounds of our happiness. See it now. Here it is. Believe me. It is true. I lived, and I lay down to dream, and with meteors, I live again for you, in cycles and spirals and turns, from levels to dimensions that go from near, to in, and far, and out, and back again.
by submission | Jan 14, 2026 | Story |
Author: Mark Renney
All those who can afford to are jumping ahead. Almost everyone has the App, and those who don’t are excluded, and are seen as social pariahs. This is how we now connect, where we communicate. Admittedly the App isn’t any different to the other platforms, apart from the fact it allows us to jump ahead. And this is why we are here, it is the reason that we stay.
The longest anyone has managed to move forward so far is eighty seconds but for most of us it is less than a minute and the estimated average is fifty five seconds. It is a minute segment, a tiny slice, but it is time travel. There is much debate as to whether this is enough for us to actually manipulate time. Whenever anyone jumps ahead it is recorded on the App and so we can’t use it for personal gain. Even so, we have to check our phones if we wish to enter a casino or a betting shop or a sporting event, anything that is ticketed in fact. Most of us have dispensed with communal entertainment and I haven’t visited a cinema or theatre, or listened to live music in over a year. Like everyone else, I cannot bear to be away from my phone and not have access to the App.
We are all jumping ahead as often as we can now, and to do so is quick and easy. We listen to the audio, the noise and we engage with the spirals and the colours, immerse ourselves in the convex and complicated patterns. It isn’t difficult but pleasurable and all a part of the trip. We don’t feel the elation until we circle back and complete the loop and it doesn’t matter how trivial or mundane, or how frivolous it is, it is the knowing that creates the buzz. The high continues after we move beyond the jump and are stumbling again in the dark. It isn’t long before we need to jump ahead again but we have to rest, a period of gestation. This is difficult, and like everyone else I keep trying and failing. It is costly because, even when we don’t hear the noise and the screen remains blank, we have to pay. But I keep trying and paying because I need my fix. Some people are upset by this phrase, by this type of terminology, and they insist that time is not drug and perhaps they are right. But time travel is certainly a trip and what we feel in its aftermath is the ultimate high.
by submission | Jan 13, 2026 | Story |
Author: Majoki
on the white poppy
a butterfly’s wing
is a keepsake
A keepsake? More likely a ransom. The cost of freedom. Basho understood this, the price of cutting loose, of becoming or regaining the self, whatever its toll. His haiku relied on kireji, cutting words, a kind of breathy punctuation conjuring unspoken dimensions of expression.
An ancient Japanese poetic device is likely academic, esoteric, and completely irrelevant in your day-to-day, but it’s damn essential to me, unless you know some other way to travel between unspoken dimensions.
And I’m not chirping about the pedestrian dimensions of a Calibi-Yau manifold, I’m talking interior dimensionality, the place identity is manufactured. That’s much darker matter than the quantum stuff of stars and much harder to find. Much less hold.
But that’s what I have to do: cut a way to my core. Broken and bereft of context, I must pierce each dimensional membrane, until I find what I’ve become. An almost impossible reality for the mind to grasp. I just need a toehold. Luckily, Basho and others have scouted the route and carved a crude pathway through poetry.
With sentience, it always comes down to language. To describe is to see. To posit is to become. Every world turns on a word.
Cutting words.
It was time to swing my lexical ax, chop through the forest of branes between me, myself and I to find home. And, among multiple universes, infinite choices, strike the one place that is truly mine. Would I know it?
The keepsake.
The ransom.
There is always a piece left behind in sheering events. The compass never loses true north, though we do: Rosebud, Tara, Eden, a butterfly’s wing on a poppy.
What had I kept?
What could I give?
Unspoken dimensions to hack through, but too sharp an edge would sheer it all away. What words to wield? What ties to cut?
The simplest. Pretension is the most dangerous of dimensions. Minimize. Shorten the path from here to there. This moment. Exhale. Listen for the breathy punctuation, the cutting of words that open worlds.
on the white poppy
a butterfly’s wing
is for our sake
by submission | Jan 11, 2026 | Story |
Author: Sylvia Melvin
The atmosphere in our spacecraft was charged with excitement as I, along with a crew of four, drew closer to our destination. For three long years, we journeyed through this endless expanse of startling beauty. Lone specks of shimmering starlight stood out like diamonds cast upon black velvet.
At last, spinning in a void of eternal twilight, was Saturn—a cosmic jewel. Like a lighthouse casting its beams in the darkness for all travelers, this planet beckoned us onward. We approached reverently, for its size and splendor commanded it. Nothing we had ever seen or pictured, nor any of the data our computer compiled, had adequately prepared us for the reality of this experience. Almost ten times the size of Earth, Saturn occupies its place in the universe with nothing less than regal majesty. In comparison, our ship was a speck of dust. There was no stopping us now—no turning back. The lure of the unknown reached out its tentacles and held us in its grip.
Not only did the magnitude of Saturn overwhelmed us, but also the one characteristic that sets it apart from all other planets in our universe. An alabaster halo completely encircled this glowing sphere. Composed of whirling ice chunks that traveled in a circular orbit, it gave the impression that a giant neon- lit carousel was in constant motion.
-2-
Piqued with an unquenchable curiosity, we cautiously approached this fluorescent ring. At first, the brilliance appeared to be an unknown circle; however, as we dove below the planet and looked up, no fewer than four rings were visible. Each band of opalescence was separated by a contrasting ribbon of darkness. As these frigid chunks spun past us, we noted that some were thick and opaque like common milk glass; others were much thinner and displayed a transparent, crystal-like quality.
As we dared to venture nearer, waves of tarnished gold cast a soft blush on the restless clouds that eddied above Saturn. Constantly in motion, this gigantic mass of hydrogen and helium blended light from the sun 890,700,000 miles away. A kaleidoscope of color paraded before our eyes.
As beautiful as a temptress, Saturn flaunted her wiles. It would have been so easy to fall victim to her beauty—to enter the pulse of her being. But we knew savage winds blew across her surface at nine hundred miles an hour. The beast in this beauty could not be tamed. We would have to be satisfied with the vision of loveliness this magnificent creation exhibited.
Increasing our speed in order to overcome the gravitational pull of Saturn, we gently arched into the trajectory that would lead us back to Earth. One thing was certain. We took back with us much more than we brought; we took the memory of a treasure found only in God’s own jewel box.
by submission | Jan 10, 2026 | Story |
Author: Sandra Paul
The birth of things.
The beginning and the end,
All intertwined
In a cycle called LIFE.
She danced under the plumeria tree, swirling like a creature born arthropod—graceful and wild. The cold air kissed her bare skin, and the tiny bumps rising along her delicate frame hummed in response to the melody of birds chirping. She moved to the left, then forward, arms raised, her feet matching the rhythm of an imaginary ogene– It felt like a dream.
On an ordinary day, this might have been a nightmare—but today, the wind washed away every trace of fear. This place was far removed from the world of chaos, where poverty birthed hunger and shame.
In the real world, today would have been a day closer to Eke market. Men would be trekking the Anuofia path to their farms, their hoes and cutlasses glinting in the sun. Chants of harvest would fill the air as cassava and yams were unearthed, and sweats teasing the soil. Women would gather by the field edges, tending vegetables, swapping stories about their husbands’ kindness and strength.
On such days, the one known as Ndemli would stroll past the workers, heading toward the Idemili river. There, she would sing praises to the goddess, pleading for her only son, Nnameka, to be blessed with a child. Nnameka had been married for ten years. His wife had not conceived. After five childless years, he stopped visiting Ndemli, staying back in the city. The villagers whispered cruel names about his wife—ogbanje, they called her. But Ndemli knew, as her son did, that his wife was innocent.
So she cried to the goddess of the stream. If the goddess could not bless her with a grandchild, could she at least soften her son’s heart so he would return and let her see his face again?
The goddess answered—but with her own sense of humor.
Her son’s visit came, not in joy, but at the body’s grave. The tombstone read:
NDEMLI
Loving Mother and Daughter.
As her spirit danced on, light enveloped her. She was pulled into a realm beyond, where pain became song, and screams dissolved into the rush of blood and birth. A child emerged—eyes flickering open for the first time—and met a familiar gaze.
She knew those eyes. She had seen them when she once carried her stillborn son to the river and pleaded with Idemili:
“If you restore him to life, I will give you anything.”
The goddess restored him—at a price. She took the boy’s fertility.
Even then, those dark brown eyes had looked back at her with defiance. And now, years later, they stared down again—gentler, softened, filled with wonder.
His brows creased, his gaze shifting from the baby to his wife.
“We will call her Ndemli”.
