by submission | Oct 14, 2022 | Story |
Author: Ross Field
“It’s time Mason”. His flip flops slapped down the hallways, they seemed as foreign to him as the hands holding his shackles and shoulders. Hands crawled all over his body as soon as they dropped him into the chair. Restraints were winched, electrodes connected and veins impaled. After the years and appeals he was here. There were men in suits and white coats examining him and their screens. He heard the end of a speech by one of the suited men to a gallery of well dressed spectators, “…..a paradigm shift for society”. As the orator nodded to a white coat a wailing began from behind him.
As it began, his eyes burned and dried. His brain remembered the story his grandfather had told him of how Native Americans had torn the eyelids of their prisoners and staked them to the ground staring into the sun. His mouth drowned in metallic taste. Then he was there, he saw them again, asleep and entangled in front of the fireplace in the half refurbished room. The familiar smells both swarmed into his nostrils and seeped out of his brain. He saw again the fireplace poker, the hammer and screwdriver. He cried when he did it this time. Afterwards he knew that he had to get away, his life depended on it, but the exhaustion dragged him to the floor of an untainted corner. He hit, cut and burned himself to fight the closing eyes.
He was brought back by the sound of wailing. The suited and white coated men were grim faced, he turned to see a white coat by his side, the face turned away and in its hand a plunged syringe. He didn’t have time for his eyes to navigate down the tubing from the syringe to his arm as he closed his eyes a second time.
*********
“It’s time Hernandez”. The suited man nodded. His eyes felt aflame and his mouth rusted. He saw the lights race off down the country road before he saw the broken body. Exiting his car he followed the path of the bullet holes down the decimated car to the other bodies. He ran when he saw the blue lights come over the hill behind him. When he opened his eyes there was the suited man and the white coat in the empty room, even the guards had gone. The white coated man stepped to his side.
*********
Dear Dr Ritten
I am afraid to inform you that as of this moment the Plain Valley correctional facility will terminate its partnership with Caventon University. After the participation and execution of 32 inmates at a vastly increased timeline of your discretion you have still been unable to prove the Ritten-Heiss Theorem. No one is more disappointed than myself to not see an empty chair as hypothesized by yourself and your recently deceased colleague Dr Heiss. Instead, this pursuit of a new era in rehabilitation has tainted us all.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur Temball
Head Warden, Plain Valley Correctional Facility
by submission | Oct 13, 2022 | Story |
Author: Bill Cox
“Hello, my name is Fragog”.
The voice was the deepest I’d ever heard. I’d been playing in the garden with some action figures, as you do at age seven and looked around to see who’d spoken.
“Oh, I’m not there on Earth,” Fragog explained, somehow sensing my bewilderment, “I’m on the planet Saturn. My people are telepathic and I’m contacting you with our telepathy telescope. I’m speaking in your mind.”
Even at that young age, the popular culture of the time helped me to understand.
“Just like Professor X!” I replied. “Am I going to be an X-Man?”
Fragog laughed, a deep bass sound that I felt all the way through my body, down to my feet.
“No, Kevin, you’re going to be my test subject! You’re going to help me learn more about your world.”
And that’s what happened. When I woke up every morning, I would feel Fragog’s presence behind my eyes, watching as I went about my daily routine. Sometimes he would ask questions and I would do my best to answer. My parents caught me speaking to him a couple of times.
“A bit old for imaginary friends, aren’t you?” asked my Dad.
I just shrugged. I knew Fragog was real, but I also knew, somehow, that there was no way I could persuade my parents of this. So I didn’t try.
After a while, Fragog stopped asking questions and started asking me to do things instead.
“Observation is part of the scientific method, but so is experiment,” he explained.
At first, most of these experiments seemed boring and pointless to my younger self. Then one day he told me to get one of my sister’s hamsters from her room. Despite my trepidation, Fragog whispered words of encouragement to me and I went into Sally’s bedroom and lifted Hokey out from his cage.
“Good,” said Fragog, “Now I want you to bash its head in.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. I knew that it was wrong. I liked Hokey!
“But you have to,” said Fragog, “It’s for science!”
“No”, I shouted, “I’m not going to!”
“Then I’ll make you,” Fragog replied.
Suddenly, I felt as if I was looking down a long tunnel at my hands as they held Hokey. I watched those small fingers take the hamster and smash it repeatedly against the bedroom door.
“There,” said Fragog, “that wasn’t too hard, was it?”
Then I rushed down the tunnel and was back inside my body, holding Hokey’s bloody corpse. I dropped it on the carpet and ran out of the bedroom, tears flowing down my cheeks. My mother eventually found me hiding under my bed. I told her everything, about Fragog and how he’d made me hurt Hokey. She went through to Sally’s room and I heard her gasp then shout for my dad. I can still remember the panic in her voice.
Afterwards, the doctors taught me that Fragog wasn’t real and eventually I was prescribed anti-psychotics which seemed to block his voice out completely. I’ve been on them ever since. It took me a long while to feel well again, but I’ve had some good years since then and have built a life for myself that I’m quite proud of.
Until yesterday, when, despite my meds, I once again felt Fragog’s calculating presence watching from behind my eyes.
Yesterday and that final item on the news: ‘Objects erupting from the atmosphere of Saturn, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists are baffled.’
Yesterday and that single sonorous sentence ringing through my mind.
“See you soon, Kevin!”
by submission | Oct 12, 2022 | Story |
Author: James Callan
Picking up the pieces is useless, a failed enterprise, like eating bisque with a fork. The bits that were my lover are like autumn leaves late in the season, too many to count, frayed, half-liquefied, one with the mud. I hold what may have been her brains, the organ of her sharp intellect, as memory cells containing our lives spill through my trembling fingers to join the detritus of a war-torn urban ruin. Satellites dot the sky, daytime stars, raining death and doom, laser beams and radiation. Tallies of hot hues, angry, searing tears, streak vertical to mar the tender, baby blue above, now blemished with deep bruises of billowing black smoke. The stones beside my bent legs vibrate; in a dead world, the inanimate come alive. My gaze falls to the earth, the rubble before me, the sullied puddles of groundwater coming up from the big blast. Among the charred fragments of obliterated landscape, the molten corners of toppled buildings, fallen giants, I recognize the anklet she wore, blackened and broken, the vague outline of her delicate foot. I take the trinket for a keepsake, a memento of our love, and cough among the scattered ash, the cloud of black that is her ankle turned to dust, airborne, like an angel off to a far better place.
by submission | Oct 11, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Location. Location. Location. That’s what I always preach. You have to really think about where you’re going to live. Really consider what a place is going to mean to you and your family over the long haul.
That’s why the greenbelt is perfect.
Space. Privacy. Prey.
You have to go where the food is. Where you can feed a growing family of mutants. Hungry, hungry young mutants.
See, humans are discovering greenbelts, too. Building more and more homes right up against steeply wooded hills, deeply sluicing ravines, densely fecund wetlands. Their backyards butting right against my front yard.
Humans love the thought of wilderness out their back door. A refuge from their urban and suburban dependency. Best of all, a place for their kids to grow up around nature. On their own privileged terms: tamed but untamed.
I get that. I’m fairly sophisticated for a mutant. I owe that understanding to not having to spend as much energy searching for prey. Our meals come happily, curiously, to me.
Everyday, kids and parents set out to play and hike in the greenbelt, not really questioning who made the network of trails snaking the trees and undergrowth. Thinking maybe the narrow paths were made by deer or other wildlife.
Never imagining me.
Me, with the razor teeth and claws of a wolf, the hulking muscles of a great ape, the feral cunning of an adapter.
That’s me. An adaptation. An unnatural selection catalyzed by exotic toxins released for generations at an old lab site in the high hills–from which all the local greenbelts spread.
I suppose I should be more curious about my origins, but I’m an accepting sort. And so are my spawn. We live like kings in the greenbelt, feasting on the bounty of suburban sprawl.
It’s a lovely life.
And we feel lucky. Grateful for all humans who love the wild and want a taste of it every day. We sure love the taste of them.
Location. Location. Location. That’s what I preach. Mutation. Mutation. Mutation. That’s what I praise.
by submission | Oct 9, 2022 | Story |
Author: Tim Goldstone
I first met you at that stage where I couldn’t sleep because I needed to stretch and stretch and stretch but it’s never ever enough all night long, every night, and I know the only certain way to achieve relief is to stretch so far so violently that my bones burst out of the ends of each and every one of my fingers and toes and only then the calm I yearn for will come and at last I will be able to sleep, in peace, in bliss, a lovely little temporary death and when I come out of it I won’t ever need anything so desperately again. But it doesn’t come. It never comes.
You were wearing perfume someone had hastily sprayed on you to hide the smell of the bile you’d retched up until there was nothing left inside you.
The town’s allocated rehab center was a room in a hostel, one room: standard construction, peeling walls, a flickering strip light, a crackling radio, a shorting kettle.
We would learn later why after each meeting every one of us felt so drained. Back then though, we could see just you – the solitary female, just under five feet tall, discarded, dumped there by court order, final chance, losing weight as we watched, on your hard seat, your head falling in gulps towards the dark green lino. The state you were in made us all feel better about ourselves.
All of us in that semi-circle noticed only your classic addict’s thinness, none of us suspecting the energy humming deep within you – that you’d soldered together from the few functioning pieces you still had left, draining power from the room to aid your own recovery.
And on the day you finally strode out, heroically leaving the rest of us behind, the weary well-meaning volunteer tried desperately to explain to our demoralized group, the ferocious force behind your tiny home-made waste-dump dynamo. And he told us how he wished from the depths of his human heart that the addiction chip had never been invented. We knew humans ridiculously attributed emotions to their blood-pump. But we knew also that it was too late – that their obsessive ambition to give us human characteristics had gone too far. Much too far.
