by submission | Nov 18, 2020 | Story |
Author: Steven Holland
“The owl isn’t an owl.”
“What?” I asked.
In retrospect, this was a stupid question. Far better questions to ask would have been “how are you able to talk?” Cats aren’t known for doing this. Or better yet “why am I on a spaceship?” At least, it looked like a spaceship.
My cat looked up at me with her seaweed green eyes and repeated: “the owl isn’t an owl.”
I was struck by her voice. Crisp. Articulate. Confident. This wasn’t the voice of sexy kitty cosplay or a deliberately misspelled internet meme. No, this cat was educated.
The owl – which apparently wasn’t really an owl – flew off its perch and over to me. As it did, a mechanical arm raised a holographic display. The screen filled with some alien language – a combination of letters, hieroglyphics, and a suspiciously high number of purple triangles.
“There’s been a terrible mistake.” said the owl. “Sign this form and you’ll be returned to Earth immediately.”
“As your representative, I would advise against that.” said my cat. “This is an agreement for an invasive, full-body medical screening. Intergalactic law gives you the right to decline.”
The owl clicked its talons and glared at her.
“Uh… I decline to sign.” I said.
A different form appeared on the screen. Before the owl could speak, my cat interjected: “That’s a spleen donor volunteer form.”
“I decline,” I said.
“Fine.” muttered the owl. “Just put your thumbprint here.”
“That means you agree to a memory erasure,” she informed me. “The procedure carries a 3% risk of a fatal brain aneurysm.
“I definitely decline that.”
There was a moment of awkward silence.
“Things were so much better before all these damn regulations.” the owl grumbled. It clicked several buttons and then–
I’m not exactly sure what happened next. I snapped to attention as my car drifted into the ridged edge of the highway. Yanking the wheel to the left, I nearly overcorrected into a passing semi-truck before stabilizing course.
I took a deep breath. Maybe it had all been a daytime nightmare.
“Careful.” said my cat from the passenger seat. “Eyes on the road.”
It had not been a dream. Also, she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
As we drove, my cat began giving me instructions. We were going to make some changes at the house. We needed brand new food and water dishes and a litter box. The water needed to be changed every day – from the filtered water of the refrigerator, not the tap. High-quality gourmet cat food, not the cheap processed crap. The bowls needed to be stenciled with her name. Zaphrenia. With a “ph.”
I was glad she mentioned her name. It’s always awkward when you’ve known someone long enough to be their acquaintance, but can’t remember their name.
A sudden thought struck me. Had I ever owned a cat before? Well, I did now. And given the jam she got me out of, returning the favor seemed like the right thing to do.
After shopping at two different high-end pet stores, we returned home. We never spoke of that day again.
by submission | Nov 17, 2020 | Story |
Author: Connor Long-Johnson
We haven’t forgotten the moment the monsters came, and we still pass on the stories of that day. They descended in their rocket ships, cutting holes through our peaceful skies and filling our air with their toxic fumes.
First, they came in drabbles, then in droves.
The hoards greedily stretched their hands over our fields, our forests, and our skies.
The Interplanetary Peoples Agreement is what they called it up there, where they make the decisions for the rest of the galaxy. Down here we call it The Suicide Pact.
We should never have made a deal with humans.
They brought wonders we could never have imagined, flying machines the size of continents, powered by fusion drives.
Language, words we have never heard of like megacorporation, capitalism, and petroleum, flew from their mouths and swayed into our ears like leaves to the ground, finding new life in the rich soil of our curiosity.
Their arrival gave us unspoken promises that we might escape our terrestrial bonds and fly among the stars, our dreams powered by human industry.
We willingly welcomed them, our arms and minds open.
Our curiosity set ablaze, burning brightly like the dual suns above.
Then the rumble of thunder signaled the arrival of the warships.
The dropships descended like carrion to feast on the carcass of Praxion-5.
We cowered while The Federation raped our planet, too weak to fight but too loyal to flee.
The starlight fled as The Undoer, the flagship of the Federation’s fleet, entered orbit over the Ebony Continent.
The fission drill opened a fissure the size of the Great Crystal Glacier in the desert. Turning the black sands to glass in search of fuel for their conquest of the stars.
Leaving us on our knees, the humans left, their hunger unsated.
by submission | Nov 15, 2020 | Story |
Author: Jatayu
When David first met her she seemed sad, but afterward, when their time had expired she held him close, asking him to stay a little longer.
When he came back the next week her eyes lit up and she smiled just a little, unsure if it was okay. They made love, each trying to please the other. She kissed his body and face, responding to his touch, whispering his name. They fell asleep in each other’s arms, rousing only when the concierge came to knock on the door.
David came back every week and soon every few days and, though expensive, their trysts lasted longer each time. She asked him what he liked to eat and every Friday they would have a late dinner on the balcony. There in the sun’s last warmth, he would tell her about his day and never ask her about hers. She asked questions and listened, her eyes always on his face, her fingers caressing his cheek or touching his hand.
Once, he mentioned a woman he was fond of and a look of hurt crossed her face. She gripped his fingers tightly and whispered,
“But you’re mine!” as tears slid down her cheeks. He stood up and drew her to him, whispering his love, kissing away her tears…
*
” I’m sorry sir but our units are not for sale.”
David regarded the dapper little man before him.
“She isn’t a unit. Her name is Christine and I love her. And she loves me. Please, name your price and I will meet it.”
The dapper little man named an exorbitant figure, but David was a wealthy man. He would have paid twice as much without blinking.
When David went to her apartment and told her what he had done, she trembled with excitement and threw her arms around him, weeping with joy.
“Oh my dearest, I promise you I will make you so happy!”
“Sweet woman, you already have.”
And they lived happily ever after.
*
The dapper little man was on the phone,
“TeleGen? Hi. We’ll be needing a replacement for our Christine model xj- 243622. Oh? Well. Tell me about the new models…”
by submission | Nov 14, 2020 | Story |
Author: Kathleen Bryson
We only travel at night and we only travel in a small pen. The pen is an invention that means we can keep our time travelling in a small place so we can’t create anomalies. We only travel at night is a phrase that popped up in a dream of my mine and now it is our motto. We explore dinosaur worlds but we cannot explore the future as it has not happened yet and it has not happened yet. We explore Ming dynasties and the less salubrious. We keep inside these little KFC buckets we call pens so it is not much fun so far despite how much we paid for the series of individualised vacation packages. Also everything is dark. Because we only travel at night.
Last week we travelled to 2006. The craze back then was big cities like Rome, London, Berlin, Budapest creating fake beaches and people coming out in bathing suits and umbrellas on the sands poured over concretes. It was just that it was so dark because we only travel at night and it was like entering a house party after its peak; people overdrunk and the floor sticky.
There was a flyer amongst the grains for a new floating pool named after Josephine Baker based on one in 1973, so we took inspiration and also travelled to Paris in 1973. There was the floating pool in the nighttime Seine and like the fake beaches the floating pool was community-minded, set up with lap lanes. No one was swimming at the late hour but we bobbed the pen around for a few floats to see the concentric circles rising, to make a mark upon this old time, but the circles on the water just grew and then faded. And like the fake beaches the floating pool in the inky river was a fake on a fake, an elaboration on something already curlicued. Like the previous sentence. We only travel at night.
We only travel at night. We are meta upon meta. We are the sunless thing that reflects the thing. We hate metacomments on the process, as pure evil as critiques of 1) one’s creative process or 2) good sex. We watch these other times like television shows. So we cannot claim Baudrillard is wrong. We consider however Baudrillard’s own writings on simulacra just reflections themselves too, the fractals spoiling. Or, worse, the water circles fading, we never were and really we never weren’t.
by submission | Nov 13, 2020 | Story |
Author: Kathleen Bryson
We succumbed to space tourism at last and went last week to see the prickly end of the sun, you know it’s always got those jutting little rays like in a good graphic design, and we petted the end of one sunbeam. It was furry like a sun kitten, oops I mean a sun dog, you know what I mean, something small and cuddly, or maybe you don’t; we petted and stroked that little star till it purred. You, being a former professional face-painter, mentioned that based on this experience you might have in the past constructed something marvellous for a paying child: a beautiful dandelion masterpiece from ear to ear.
Then you grabbed it with both hands, the perspective was working in your favour, you grabbed it with both hands and you started to knead our sun like bread. It was the opposite of yeast; our sun grew smaller and smaller; you held a glowing piece of amber between your thumb and forefinger eventually, and then you swallowed it down. Ouch, you said. It’s hot! Hot-hot, not spicy hot, you clarified, but as if you needed to tell me that.
It is permeating your stomach walls, I told you as a secret, it’s not going to make it to your digestive system. It’s in your uterus now.
The sun was further gone than that by then; it was in your bloodstream; your blood was yellow. You were a yellow-bellied coward. You were a hot-golden-blooded regular gal. Our sun, our Sol, became even more insignificant than that; it was only in your mind; it was in molecules; it was working from an entirely new periodic table of elements, atoms, smaller than the clinic, smaller than the ultrasound, smaller than the insufficient nurse’s acronym for something spontaneous, SAB, outer space.
I think we need some space, you said, after you swallowed our sun.
