by submission | Feb 4, 2018 | Story |
Author: Rollin T. Gentry
I’d heard stories about my doppelganger for over a month, but I’d never seen him.
My supervisor saw this guy singing in her church choir. The geek two cubicles over saw him in the coffee shop. The lady running the cash register in the cafeteria needed to see my badge now because the other me, a contractor, didn’t get the company discount.
It bugged me that I’d never crossed paths with this … imposter. Everyone said he even had glasses and a beard like mine. Some people even said he was friendlier than me. In over a month, you’d think I’d see myself strolling around the campus.
One afternoon I was delayed by a meeting and was an hour late getting to my car. Winding my way down the parking garage, I saw what could only be described as my double arguing with a third, clean-shaven me.
I slowed to a stop. Then suddenly the bearded version of me pointed a TV remote-control sized object at the third me. A blinding flash of light and he was gone. I punched the gas, squealing my tires. In the rearview mirror, I saw me staring back at me.
That night, I tossed and turned with wild theories cycling through my mind. Time travel? A parallel universe thing? Was I a clone or an android and didn’t know? I returned to my bottle of ZzzQuil three times before I finally nodded off.
I dragged myself into work the next day. That afternoon, I decided to stay late and see if I could find that sneaky bastard in the parking garage. The only problem was that I had no weapons and this guy had a freakin’ ray gun. Scissors felt too flimsy, but The Red Hat Linux Bible was perfect. It was hefty but snug in my hand.
At 5:55 PM, I headed out with my three-inch-thick volume in tow. I knelt behind a concrete column for what felt like an eternity.
I’d almost given up when I heard a voice behind me.
“Don’t turn around,” the voice said. I cringed. The sound of my own voice played back always made me feel icky. “Put down the book.”
I turned around. Besides thicker glasses, longer hair, and a scar on the left side of his face, he could have been my mirror image.
“I told you not to turn around,” he said.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“The same thing we all want,” he said. “To take over your perfect little life. The ‘you’ you saw yesterday managed to slip through my quantum lock, but I sent him back easily enough. Now it’s just us. Mano y mano.”
“I’d hardly call my life perfect,” I replied, laughing nervously.
“Oh, it’s pretty sweet, though — you’ve gotta admit — but you wouldn’t know it the way you complain all the time: ‘this chair hurts my back’, ‘they’re out of green tea in the break room’.”
“Well boyo, you don’t know the first thing about suffering.” He touched the scar on his face. “Shrapnel.” He pointed to his body, up and down, front and back. “Plasma rifle … electro-whip … rusty scalpel … red-hot poker.
“I could tell you a sad story for each one, but you wouldn’t care. Not really. That’s what happens to people living in paradise, isn’t it?” He sighed.
“Oh, well, no need to draw this out. You’ll find out for yourself soon enough.” He pointed the small, black stick in my direction. “Ready…Set…”
“Please, wait…”
“Go!”
by submission | Feb 3, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro
The Martian, he creeps through my window and sits on my chest whilst his steed it looks on with eyes swollen and glazed. Eyes whose voyeuristic bulge look set now to split and ooze their shimmering vitreous down upon the taunting rhythm of his billowing cheek.
My nightgown flows the length of my outstretched form, folding and lapping as it statically clings. A fabulist shroud that tells tales in white; of purity, loyalty, and love. The lids of my eyes they twitch as they feign the depths of a slumber now long since enjoyed and I gnaw the flesh of my lip.
I cannot look again upon this weight that now presses. I cannot face this alien, this impossible thing, this verdant cold huddle of sinew and fat. He that now inches the stub of his toe beneath buttons closed tight at my chest, a digit that curls its filthy nail against the beading flesh of my breast.
I feel the Martian shifting his weight, the bones in his ass they click and they crunch and I want to call out your name. I want to roll over, draw you to me and smother stone dead this hideous thing. I want my ear at your chest to savor as your asthma does rattle, that which ground my patience and kept me from sleep, but now reaches to lovingly anchor me so.
I want your lips to stay closed and not mutter through the night reliving the hell that I wrought. To kiss at your cheek and have you not flinch, to have all of me here with no parts sold nor bartered; all of me here for you.
A midnight breeze seethes through the fall of my scarlet curtains and the horse he forces a grin. He knows what I’m thinking, he knows what’s to come, so accustomed to these visits is he. And so I oblige by twisting ever so slowly, a turn primed with such tension that it surely should creak, toward the man at my side – my husband, asleep.
The Martian unmoved, he stoically too gloats as I waltz into each beat of this dark symphony I wrote. I crane for my husband and my lips brush your lobe as words they struggle to form – a whisper as silent as death.
“I must leave you now, best that I go. I have stabbed through your back and your sides and your chest, sleeping soundly as you broke into two. I lay with that bastard in so many beds licking and caressing not you. I was curious and bored, I wanted my youth and I wanted his words to be true. I am dirt and I’m shame, and center of all I survey. Just hear this my testament, it is I that’s lamented not you. So selfish am I, sleep well and goodbye. I love you”, I don’t say as I rise and to leave.
Now to receive that which I truly deserve, to live in the red dust on the planet of whores. Hoisted across the rump of a celestial hack, we’ll launch my arms wrapped around the fattest of green guts, my face pressed to hair greased at his back.
I sit at the edge of my bed, my sheets they reach for the floor. The weight it is gone and of course so his horse and you dear lay snoring just so. They have left me again, to stew in my pot and wait as I will for this day to be gone and for the return of the night and its mare.
by submission | Feb 2, 2018 | Story |
Author: Colin Lubner
The year is 2296, and she’s doing that thing, with her knuckle. She doesn’t bite down, but she sucks on it, you know, so her bottom lip’s lipstick makes a little top lip on the inside of her right index finger. This finger not-biting is her thing, right, her unique way of asserting and apologizing all at once. Like: “I’ve won, right? And I’m sorry for that.” For example—and this was in 2293, ’94, when we’d first unthawed from cryo-sleep—this one time, we were at Argo’s lancer track, and she bet on the right Refenelian lancer. 27/1 odds and she wins. Twenty-eight thousand in the blink of a lancer’s headlamp. And then her father teleports into the box. One of the four directors who’d made it onboard, he was hired by Argo’s government to make these propaganda films for the natives on New Earth. Everfall? The Clouds of Reykjavik? You’ve seen his stuff. Anyway, he sees us, sees Nadia (and that’s her name, here we go), and this transformation takes place. See, for the past two months, he’d been sponsoring this racer from Cordovia B. Shelled out half-a-year’s rations (not that it mattered to him) for her lancer’s tuning, training, the works. And his daughter had put down a grand on another dude. So he teleports into the box, fucking bummed beyond belief, and he sees Nadia doing that thing, with her knuckle—smiling, kind of, but in that sad way she had, you know? Like she was sorry she’d won. And the dude turns on me. What the fuck was I doing there? Who was I, really? Who the fuck was I? But I’m watching her do that thing, with her knuckle, and for a moment it’s like her dad doesn’t exist at all. Like it’s only her, and me, and we were in on the same joke, yeah? Like we’d won, and only we knew it. Anyway, I recorded an interview with Nadia a couple years back. It was meant to be for the show, but never aired. She was starring in one of her dad’s films, so she looked real sexy, real righteous. I mean, if I was from New Earth, I’d be convinced that we were sexy-ass ethical motherfuckers, if we were anything like her. Anyway, we get to the end of the interview, and at that point this song called “Sowing Season” is four or five spots down in the queue. And “Sowing Season”—that was our song back on Argo. Ours. Not romantic or anything, not at all. But ours. And she sees that it’s coming up, and she does that thing, with her knuckle. “I’m happy,” she was saying. “And I’m sorry for that. Happy?” And I was. We don’t see much of each other anymore; she’s in her trailer half the time, off shooting in one of this planet’s eight million fucking jungles. And I’ve stayed at the station, as you know. I needed an audience—I needed you, listeners—and Argo’s radio tower remained the best way for me to reach that audience. We both needed our audiences. That’s why we originally got together, and why we eventually fell apart. Anyway, after our interview, I returned to my bunk, and I thought of her, doing that thing, with her knuckle. The year was 2296, and we’d just sunk our roots into this fertile fucking Earth. So, yeah. This is “Sowing Season,” I guess. Enjoy.
by submission | Feb 1, 2018 | Story |
Author: Ken Carlson
I was scrambling around my apartment for my shoes. How does anyone lose his only decent shoes in a suburban studio apartment? That’s what Deanna would have asked before she walked out. How does anyone lose his shoes, lose his keys, lose his job, just lose all the time?
I tried to dress up a bit for Kelli. Kelli wouldn’t have cared. When you tell your sister you’re picking her up for dinner, you want to look nice. When your sister has to be signed out of her sanitarium for what might be her only time past the security gate in the next couple of months, well, I’m not sure how you want to look. In my car, I sped up to make up time.
Kelli’s my big sister. My parents weren’t much for reading bedtime stories or attending grade school band concerts. Kelli always made sure I had a good breakfast, and that my homework was done. When our folks died, she transferred home from college and did even more. I repaid her by going nowhere in my life and standing idly by while the State locked her up.
One morning she was driving into Pittsburgh for work; managing reading programs for underprivileged special needs kids around the city; a job she loved. That night state troopers found her wandering by the side of I-376; bruises and cuts all over her body; a stab wound in her thigh; wearing strange tattered clothes; filthy; malnourished from a drop of 30 pounds.
Doctors at the hospital wouldn’t believe me, or her frantic co-workers, when we argued this wasn’t Kelli’s regular state, a battered vagrant. She was Kelli McDonald, dammit! She had been fine yesterday; healthy, active, a leader in everything she did. The physical and emotional damage could have been attributed to an attack, but the layers of filth and decay to her body over the course of 24 hours was impossible. Her fingerprints proved it was her, but the rest…
Every time I visited Kelli, I could find bits and pieces of her trying to surface. As they wheeled her out to the lobby, her face showed elements of recognition, but not in a happy way.
I helped her into our parents’ Chevy and we drove past the trappings of which we’d been accustomed; the Eat n’Park we could only afford on special occasions, the Waffle House, cozily grubby for over sixty years.
She rarely spoke at all when we went out. To mix things I thought I would take her into the city, maybe drive past the ballpark and stadium. The radio was playing classic rock and I sprinkled in remarks about what we were doing when a song was a hit to try to get some reaction. Nothing.
We turned onto the highway toward the Fort Pitt Tunnel. Kelli shook her head slightly, focused her stare, and gave almost a wry smile.
“You think you’re ready for this?” she asked.
That was the longest sentence I’d heard from my sister in two years. I almost lost control of the car.
“Sh-sh,” Kelli said, “They’ll be here soon enough, and I’ll try to help you any way I can.”
As we headed into the tunnel, I was bewildered, mumbling questions. She spoke in a low, calm tone. “Just stay close. When we get out of the car, grab what you can from the trunk; a tire iron, maybe.”
Kelli’s eyes were dark and alert. She held her fists tight and whispered, “Watch out for their tentacles, swing as hard as you can, and go for the eyes.”
by submission | Jan 31, 2018 | Story |
Author: Mina
– “Mind if I sit here?”
– “Go ahead,” I mumble as I look up. Then do a double take. Hey, this guy is gorgeous. I look around the small café and I see that there is nowhere else to sit. Figures. This guy is sooo way out of my league, he can’t be trying to chat me up.
– “Maybe you can help me decide?”
– “Sorry, decide what?”
– “Decide on the fate of the world.”
OK, this guy is round the bend, loopy, nuts – or just really bad at chat-up lines?
– “The fate of the world over coffee?”
– “You see…,” he tells me.
– “See what?”
– “Well, it’s really hard to decide whether a whole planet should be decontaminated now, or if its peoples should be given some time to prove they can do better?”
– “By planet, I’m guessing you mean earth?”
– “Of course. I’ve been here almost a year and I can’t make up my mind. One moment I think you are an infestation that deserves to be eradicated because you’re all rotten to the core, like mindless, vicious rats running around a self-constructed cage.”
– “Hey, rats are supposed to be intelligent and quite affectionate!”
– “The next moment, I see an act of valour or selflessness so pure, it makes me want to give you another chance.”
I have officially joined the weird-O-s of this world because I find myself arguing back:
– “Look, you’re sounding very judg-y here. It isn’t all damned or saved by one shining action, there’s a lot of ordinary courage in between, you know?”
– “Please explain.”
– “OK, well look at me, I’m unemployed, my dog died, my boyfriend slept with my best friend and I’ve decided it would be better to be orphaned than put up with any more of my family’s bullshit. Yet today is a good day.”
– “How is it a good day?”
– “I’m sitting in a café with free heating, the radio played my favourite song on my way here, my remaining friends are throwing me a surprise birthday party tonight (and I plan to win an Oscar in acting surprised), the coffee’s good and a sexy guy is chatting me up.”
– “I’m not chatting you up.”
– “OK, well then, it’s a mostly good day. Anyway, real courage is getting from day to day, even when you want to curl up and die. You’ve got to believe that tomorrow will be better if you just make it through today with dignity. And maybe if enough people make it to tomorrow making just one good decision, maybe the gift of one small kindness, then the world will be a better place.”
– “Um, so you think I should go for a more micro-reality approach?”
– “Not sure what you mean there, but I suppose so. Hey, if I can believe that today could redeem the rest of my sorry existence, surely you can believe that humanity as a whole can redeem itself given time?”
– “Your logic is faulty but interesting. It is true that complete elimination is so… final. Certainly, waiting a bit could not hurt. Your idea of redemption through micro-reality choices is an intriguing possibility. Thank you.”
He gets up and leaves. I realise he left his wallet behind. I run after him and catch him as he pauses for a moment in front of Cosmic Coffee.
– “Oi, you forgot your wallet!”
– “It doesn’t matter, I don’t need it any more.”
He smiles and winks out of existence.
