by submission | Feb 6, 2018 | Story |
Author: Jeff Mauser
They peered through the small site-port of their shuttle in astonishment. Their small ship had been designed for docking purposes only, not for landing on a planet. The sky was becoming dark, the Blue Giant sun was setting, following the Red Dwarf that set an hour ship’s time earlier. The sunset had been astonishing with the last rays of the Red Dwarf mingling with the Blue Giant giving the multicolored vibrating vegetation shadows of blue, red and purple.
When the darkness outside was complete, they left the window returning to their specific duties. Polya looked over the power supply and rations. She tried calling Command again, nothing.
A red flash from the site-port surprised her. She turned in time to see another bright red flash fill the spaceship. This one immediately followed by pounding of the ships shell. “Aaquil, analyze.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Aaquil, tapping the screens, repeated what was displayed. “Traces of ozone, the flashes could be lightening, sir. The buffeting of the ship is from a liquid composed of 76.7% nitrogen and 22.15% oxygen with 1.15% unknown elements.” Turning to face his captain, “I would hazard a guess that it’s 100% water. Rain. Sir”
Polya watched the rain come down in sheets, with an occasional flash of red lightning. “Aaquil, turn on the outside mic, let’s hear what this new world sounds like.”
“Yes, Captain.”
A loud lonely wail filled the ship. “Reminds me of the wailing winds on Mars, my home in the Valles Marineris. Do they have winds on Titan, sir?”
She turned and smiled at her officer. They had been together nine months ship time. “With Titan’s thick atmosphere the winds are strong but never very fast. You feel its deep vibrations, as much as you hear it. She chuckled. “I’d had a choice to stay on Titan and become a xenobotanist or an Astronaut and leave. A friend dared my boyfriend to go to the outer dome during a storm. He was afraid. I wasn’t. The friend and I made love under the dome during that methane snow storm. It was my first time. The throbbing vibration of the dome got me excited, not him. That’s when I knew I wanted to be an Astronaut. Good thing too, there was quite a scandal, my family was happy to see me go.”
The rain stopped. Polya watched the sky turn olive green with clouds of pastel orange. The Red Dwarf was rising.
“The outside atmosphere is breathable,” Aaquil says joining her at the window. The Red Dwarf now at full zenith and the Blue Giant rising they could make out the shape and color of the large meadow in front of them. The ship was filled with the soft sounds of sighs as they watched swaying plants reflect a rainbow of color. They had never seen a meadow or heard a breeze. They were witnessing a magic moment. They reached for and held each other’s hand.
Up till then, their relationship had been strictly Captain and Officer. Polya was startled and tried to pull away, Aaquil wouldn’t let her.
He looked down and then into her eyes, “I have failed you, my captain. We can’t leave. A large outcropping has taken out the left rear stabilizer.”
She took his other hand, “No Aaquil, just the opposite. You managed to steer us through the wormhole. I knew then we would never be able to go home. I have dreamed of living on a world without a dome. Now we will.”
With trepidation and excitement, embracing each other tightly they watched the sunset on their new home.
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.”
