by submission | Jun 19, 2019 | Story |
Author: Elaine Thomas
Somewhere, in a forest, lightning strikes a tree.
Elsewhere, in a cabin, a man tosses a log onto the fire. Startled, the man jumps backward, then laughs at himself. He knows any slight moisture left in wood as it cures can emit a high-pitched whistle when flames lick at it. He has heard the sound many times. Still, this one sounded almost like a scream. He shakes his head at his own silliness, adds more wood to the now roaring fire, warms his hands holding the palms forward in the glow, then turns both body and mind back to other ordinary tasks.
The crackling blaze and radiant heat of an open hearth keep the dark and the cold at bay. Thus has it been since the earliest primitive residents of this planet discovered fire, millions and millions of flames ago, a powerful and comforting presence through the centuries.
Smoke crawls up the chimney and surfaces into the air, where it dissipates, although not really. Instead Smoke hangs above the roof, spreading, waiting, knowing more will come. So, too, has it been since the earliest residents on this planet discovered fire.
Once free and floating there, Smoke evaluates its situation. There is no loneliness here. It knows other trees in other forests in other lands all around the planet will replicate its being, are replicating it. It knows new forms based on mass production and chemicals will join it. It knows the process will move across the universe, planet by planet, from caves to cabins to corporations. Smoke will not be alone long, at least not as it understands time. Such is progress, Smoke reflects, in a manner of thought as diffuse and unsubstantial as its very being.
More and more Smoke continues to be released and spread, joining all that has already been set free, over eons covering the surface of the world. As it slowly blocks any warmth and light from above, the planet’s residents respond just as Smoke knew they would. They struggle to control their environment. They seek their own benefit. They light more fires, burn more logs, destroy more forests and other resources in order to create warmth and light from below.
As Smoke accumulates in the air, the process speeds up. Residents of the planet cease to see the sun burning in the heavens, yet heat becomes trapped and magnified by Smoke. No one sleeps well as light breaks boundaries between night and day. Forest fires rage. Polar bears starve as habitats change. Choked plant life withers. Water and wetlands recede. Food becomes more and more difficult to grow or obtain, then impossible. Generation by generation, the planet grows dark and lifeless, enshrouded in Smoke.
In the mythology of the planet’s residents, the creator they pretended to worship once destroyed life through drowning, then promised on a rainbow that would never again happen. It would be fire next time, they prophesied, but they forgot that where there is fire there is Smoke. And after the fire Smoke remains.
by submission | Jun 16, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Henson
The days were all the same like links on a chain. I had to break free. Then came a flash in the middle of another toss-and-turn night. I got to the window in time to see a beam of light retracting into the sky. In the yard was a shape — glowing white, irregular with sharp edges and about the size of a person.
I went outside and circled the form, which appeared to be two-dimensional. When I pushed a stick into the shape, the stick disappeared and reappeared when I retracted it. I posted online several photos and a video of the vanishing stick. I eventually sat in a lawn chair beside the shape and fell asleep.
My first thought when dawn woke me was that it had all been a dream. But there was the form twinkling in the sunlight. I checked my postings and saw they’d gone viral. I went inside to clean up and was surprised the shape drifted along behind me.
I called in sick, uploaded more images and videos and spent hours watching the number of views explode.
A few days later, a local TV station sent a crew to interview me. I hesitated at first, concerned my boss might see I wasn’t really sick. But I didn’t like my number-crunching job anyway.
When the reporter swept a stick, it disappeared as it passed through the form. “What’s the trick? Mirrors? Projectors?” I assured her it was real. She decided, fake or not, it was a good story. My shape and I got five minutes on the news. I also got fired.
The broadcast snagged the attention of a physicist at the university. He asked me to bring the shape to his lab. I realized his tests might make for some good posts.
The scientist reached a startling conclusion: The shape was comprised of nothing. No electrons, photons, quarks or even quantum vacuum fluctuations. It was Absolutely. Nothing.
I uploaded a video of the physicist describing the miraculous form and launched my own website dedicated to Nothing. I posted images of Nothing in a flower bed, by the kitchen sink, with a puppy. Nothing became an internet sensation. I monetized my website and thought I’d never have to work again.
One evening, I was out back admiring the night sky. Nothing, as always, was beside me. At the sight of a shooting star, I disappeared a finger into Nothing. “I wish you could talk,” I sighed.
Next morning when I awoke, Nothing was gone and a beautiful woman was in its place. “I’m the answer to your wish,” the woman said.
I thought this was a good thing. But when I uploaded a video of the woman explaining how she used to be Nothing, the views slowed to a trickle. Then came the comments — “Boring” … “Who Cares?” … “Fraud.”
If that wasn’t bad enough, the woman thought I should get a job as a website designer. She wanted us to start a family. She wanted a puppy. My head whirled. “I wish you could go back to the way you were,” I said.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
I deleted the video of the woman and promised my followers that the next day I would do the unthinkable: Stick my head into the shape.
That night I could hardly sleep knowing I would have Nothing to live for again. Sometime after midnight, there was a bright flash out back. I ran to the window just in time to see a beam of light pulling Nothing into the sky.
by submission | Jun 15, 2019 | Story |
Author: Phoebe Wagner
The saplings haven’t grown. This is expected.
We are prepped on day one—you will not see progress. Expect none. For this reason, the deployments are for three years. The generational weight was too much for the initial ten-year rotations.
We brag and boast—we could do it, plant the tiny green bursts for weeks, months, years, a decade. We know we don’t plant for our children or grandchildren. We plant for the millennia—and the next.
We walk the dusty loam in deerhide slippers, heavy skin bags slung across out shoulders, hefting found metal tools, fire-hardened wooden shovels, and spades.
The first month, we ache with the weight of roots.
Now, our moods lightning with the saplings bags until a starscape of green stretches behind.
Sometimes, we unearth a stump. According to the elders, the sequoias were some of the last to be harvested, but when whole cities died of the cold, when no materials remained to build storm shelters, when another hurricane was swirling inland—they came for majesty.
People died for the trees. Chained themselves, defended with guns, committed mass suicide. The trees became gods to some, ghosts to others, and survival for many.
We’ve never seen a live one, just the stumps unearthed from the loam and dust the roots once held in place.
The stumps were hacked to spindles. Sometimes, a hallowed, blackened center speaks to final fires in the California winters that never should have grown so cold.
The stumps tell a story of time. As we shed our bags and scoop away the dirt, it is a broken map appearing between our fingers. A maze of promises past—of breath and shade and all that shade breeds, of moss and leaves turning to hummus and leaves eaten from stems by insects now lost.
Each ring is a word in a poem, and as we shoulder our bags, as we scoop holes and ease in the saplings’ roots, we record the first line.
by submission | Jun 14, 2019 | Story |
Author: Kevlin Henney
The first sun set behind the mountains before she turned to look across the plain to the darker sky opposite. A new star had appeared on the horizon. Rising in counterpoint to the evening suns, it scored a white trail across the sky, dividing the world above in two. Then one new star became two, became three…
By second sundown the sky was combed with light, tidy parallels painted up from the edge of the plain, over and down to a ragged leading edge that chased the remaining sun into night.
By the curtain fall of third sundown they had caught up, completing their arc across the sky. The gone embers of suns were replaced by a blue–white glow. It was not the loss of sunlight that chilled her skin.
When had the ground started to hum? She felt it before she knew it. She felt the fear before she could think what to do.
The children? She could have gone back inside to wake them, to take them to the shelter, to tell them everything would be all right, to again wrap the truth in comfort and lies while holding them tight. The false promise that they could outrun everything that had happened to them. Outrun a marriage divided by war. Outrun a war dividing worlds, engulfing family after family, system after system.
The hum grew to rumbling harmonies, the horizon’s glow burst into a false and unstopping sunrise that reached up to swallow the painted streaks and remaining sky, that bled over the mountains, melting them as it flowed.
The sanctuary of this outermost system had fallen. An end approached her faster than sound. There would be no more running.
She would not wake the children. A lasting sleep was the peace she could finally give them.
by submission | Jun 13, 2019 | Story |
Author: Caius Finswith
“The trick is you can’t look right at them: not like you ever could,” my partner said.
It was my latest job on Parrhesia 9 and it was all about the exotics. Transporting everything from radioactive waste to actual grass-fed beef, I’d seen just about everything. Over the course of my 6 years working on the Penny Lou transport, I’d seen my fair share of exotics too. Exotics seemed like a writhing kaleidoscope: fantastic creatures that morphed, melded and mutated into colorful beasts the human eye was never meant to see.
Pneumas were different though; no eye had been meant to see them and strangely none ever had. They seemed to be magnetically pulled to humans but it was only just possible to glimpse them out of the corner of your eye. In that heartbeat it took you to focus, they’d have flitted off to the other corner of your vision. There was never any certainty if the reflection of that old crimson sun or an oddly out of place shadow could be one of those phantoms. Parrhesia 9’s air was humid with them, wisping tantalizingly about. While our sensors were blind to them, the only thing that could perceive those phantasms were the one thing they seemed made to avoid: the eye. Because of that, we were planetside trying to cage one. Harmlessly swinging our carroll batons at a hazy half seen flicker, we desperately tried to herd, even accidentally, one into our pens.
No one was quite sure what the Pnuemas might be good for. Something so swirlingly mysterious must be beautiful when finally seen. Perhaps science could find a long-awaited answer among the doubtless thousand questions raised. At its core, the expedition was fueled by greed and a chance to monetize something about the being.
We wasted countless hours trying to catch one, all so someone else could profit. Although we had failed to catch one and the corporation was hemorrhaging funds, I couldn’t care less. What I wanted, was to see what others had only dreamed to know: the full Pneuma form. My last night planetside it happened. The corporation had ended our contract and shamelessly retreated in defeat leaving us to make our own way home.
It could have been a summer zephyr or lover’s kiss that awoke me but it was more tender. With an antithetical stillness, a Pneuma floated inches from my face. Like gasping a deep breath before going underwater, I desperately tried to memorize those gracefully slow currents and radiant edges. The natural elegance of something so ephemeral yet so tangible made me stretch out my hand to prove it belonged in the world beyond my imagination. As I dipped my hand in its outer streams, it seamlessly swirled into me, becoming one with my soul.
Worry or concern was not what I felt; rather, it was the knowledge of a grandeur which couldn’t be explained. Turning inward on myself, I would begin to search my depths to find that timeless magnificence that had united with me, long after we had left Parrhesia 9.
