by submission | Aug 21, 2018 | Story |
Author: William Gray
These bite marks on my forearm. Just below the crease of my elbow.
They’ve always been there, even as a child growing up on the colonies of Ganymede.
Their pattern is unique. All slim, clean lines with the exception of one wide, jagged rip exactly where the brachial artery carries oxygenated blood to my hand.
I’m not sure how long the wormhole tossed me about. My guess? Somewhere between a day and a millennium. The time was mostly darkness, with a periodic fitful nightmare, the same one every time.
Hot yellow teeth melting into my flesh.
#
The wormhole hiccuped me out near a planet that, so far, has been a pleasure to explore. Oxygen is plentiful. Sunlight peeks through a canopy of gigantic palm leaves high above. A cool, dry breeze weaves its way through the fabric of my expedition suit as I explore the new terrain.
I have not yet encountered any humanoid life forms. Numerous rodent-like species prey upon each other in a bid for survival, but they leave me alone. The insects are harmless. No reptilian forms. I have seen giant birds flying above, similar to depictions of Earth’s ancient Pterodactyls, but I am yet to see one up close.
With its extensive family of moons, eclipses on this planet are common. Partials happen almost daily. However, considering how dark it’s getting, today’s might be full totality.
As the eclipse resolves and light returns, the air feels heavy. I work harder to breathe, as if atmospheric oxygen levels are dropping.
A haggard old man approaches. His kyphotic spine is bent to a right angle. His beard is braided into individual strands which are woven into larger braids, hanging low, creating a curtain that hides his apparent nakedness. He ambulates with both hands on a gnarled wooden staff. As he gets closer, the heavy air turns salty.
He is in a hurry, as if he must accomplish something before what life he has left is spent. He winces and struggles forward, as if pushing past the excruciating pain of severe arthritis.
As he stands right in front of me, I start to wretch. It smells like someone pissed on a pile of rotten sardines.
He flashes a smile, a mouthful of brown-yellowed teeth. One in front is a single fang, thick and serrated. It spikes down over his lower lip, into his beard, embedding itself into the nest of braids.
He crouches down, takes a final breath, and somehow finds the energy to pounce on me like a tiger.
As he is a frail old man, I didn’t think I was in any danger. I did not anticipate this at all. I have no time to retrieve my weapon before his teeth sink into my neck.
The jagged hot incisor plunges into my carotid, boiling the blood coursing within.
#
These bite marks on my neck. Just above the clavicle, where tendons bind it to the top of my sternum.
They’ve always been there, even as a child growing up on the colonies of Ganymede.
Their pattern is unique. All slim, clean lines with the exception of one wide, jagged rip, exactly where the carotid artery carries oxygenated blood to my brain.
I’m not sure how long the wormhole jostled me about. My guess? A couple hundred minutes or a couple hundred centuries. The time was mostly darkness, with a periodic fitful nightmare, the same one every time.
Hot yellow teeth melting into my flesh.
by submission | Aug 18, 2018 | Story |
Author: David Henson
I wake up sweating, check the alarm clock. Three fifty-nine? Too light. I fumble for my watch. Almost 10.
“What’s wrong with the a/c, Daniel?” Jean says sleepily.
***
I come back from Kyle and Lisa’s across the street. “They don’t have power either. And there’s no Sunday paper. Must be out across town.”
“I tried to call Lorraine, but there’s no service,” Jean says.
“I guess everything’s gone down.”
I find an old transistor radio and change batteries. It hisses across the dial. How widespread is this?
“Let’s drive around and see what’s going on,” Jean says.
I shove up the garage door, get in the car and turn the key. Nothing. Jean tries her car. More nothing. We go outside and stare into the sky.
“Our cars won’t start,” Kyle yells.
***
Jean holds her phone in one hand, the hissing radio in the other. “I’m so worried about Lorraine. Why would this happen now when she’s due any day?”
“Randolph will look after her. They probably don’t even have an outage in Ridgefield,” I say, trying to ignore the radio.
“Maybe we could ride our bikes there.”
“A hundred miles? We’d never make it in this heat.”
Her face glistening, Jean goes to the kitchen sink, holds a dishcloth under the faucet and lets the water run. The flow quickly trickles to a stop.
“Guess the water company’s lost power, too,” I say, wondering why its standby generators aren’t working.
We sweat out the day, constantly trying the phone, the cars, and the radio. We finally give up around midnight.
Around 3:30 a.m., I slip out of bed, towel off sweat, and go to the picture window in the living room. There’s an eerie red glow in the sky. I notice movement across the street. Kyle and Lisa? Someone —something — else? I need to keep my imagination in check. I lean closer to the window, hear a noise behind me, and whirl around.
“Too hot to sleep.” Jean goes to the window. “I see Kyle and Lisa can’t either. Daniel … this couldn’t be some sort of … invasion? That’s crazy, right?”
I hear shouting outside. Sounds like Kyle and Lisa arguing. “More likely the heat wave caused it. Or hackers. Probably hackers.”
“But the cars. How could hackers do that?”
“Well, most are connected to the internet nowadays. Not older models though.” I realize that’s a clue. “When it’s light, I’ll bike to the overpass. Bet I see a few cars.” I take my wife’s hand. “Let’s try to get a couple hours sleep.”
***
I lie awake in pools of sweat. At 3:59, the alarm clock glows red. “Jean,” I whisper with relief. She doesn’t respond so I slip quietly out of the bedroom and turn on a 24-hour news channel. A woman talks only, and cheerfully, about the heat wave. Not a word about the outage. I tune a local station on the radio. More happy talk about the heat. Drenched with sweat, I go outside hoping for a breeze, but it’s dead calm and already a scorcher. I make out Lisa in the predawn glow. She seems to be digging. “Beautiful day,” she says.
I stagger back inside. Warm air pours from the vents.
Jean’s at the thermostat. “Won’t this go any higher?”
“Why in the world would you … Have you checked on Lorraine?”
“You should forget about your daughter,” Jean says. She looks at her watch. “And Randolph, too.” She comes toward me. There’s not a drop of sweat on her.
by submission | Aug 17, 2018 | Story |
Author: Mark Joseph Kevlock
Solinsky sat upon the mountaintop and watched his hometown die. As the sun set at his back, the farthest outskirts of the city fell into shadow first. Solinsky had his telescope trained there, upon the edge of town. He gasped to see the first of them fall.
A young boy and his father both collapsed, there in a backyard. An old woman fell dead crossing the street. Lovers on a front porch glider intertwined in an unnatural embrace.
They all needed the sun to live. The rays gave them energy, vitality, existence. The instant the sunlight ceased to touch their skin, they all fell away dead.
The curtain of descending shadow widened to encompass a local bar, a pool hall, a diner. Bodies collapsed. The tomb grew wider. Solinsky could not look away.
Cars struck curbs. One took out a fire hydrant. No shower of water could awaken these corpses. From end to end, citizens succumbed. No one, not even pets, survived the coming of night.
The sun had been their only fuel, it seemed.
Solinsky wept. Then he put down his telescope to go take a closer look at the tragedy. He hopped in his car and raced down the dark side of the mountain, toward what little light was left.
They couldn’t help it. Oh, they just couldn’t stop themselves from dying. Maybe if they had been built differently… But they weren’t. They were as God had made them.
With Saul Solinsky’s aid.
He ran down the center of Maple Street — the only place still touched by the life-giving rays. A little girl — a stranger — ran to greet him. Solinsky held her tight against his chest. The light passed over them. She died. He read no accusation in her final expression, just… discontinuation. Shut off from the good things of life before she’d begun.
“This isn’t right!” Solinsky screamed. “I did the best I could! How could I remember everything? It was so long ago! So long…”
The town was only bodies now, littering the streets. Solinsky turned away. Already the sweepers came: gigantic mechanical arms descending from flying saucers, lifting the corpses clear like bowling pins to be reset in an alley. By the time Solinsky got back to his mountaintop factory, all ten thousand models had been assembled again in endless rows before him. He performed some quick calculations in his head. Then he sighed. There was nothing to do except put them back… and try again tomorrow.
by submission | Aug 16, 2018 | Story |
Author: Abigail Hughes
Sure, he’s not exactly the same. There are small differences. Some easy tidbits that I picked up on.
Like, he’s right-handed.
Ian was left.
And this morning he asked if I wanted to take a week off. Save up for a get-away.
The Ian I married would rather plan for the future than blow a grand on a trip.
Dr. West told me, should I notice any serious changes, to alert him immediately.
But it’s nothing drastic. They’re tiny things.
Like, he did the funniest thing last night.
We were sitting in bed, dozing in front of the TV, and he asked me if I still loved him.
Isn’t that silly?
He was serious, too! Completely stone-faced. Eyes fixed on the television.
There was a commercial on for Hair Gel.
Two men were going to town slicking the stuff on their scalps.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Love you!?” I asked, chuckling so hard, so breathlessly, that I began to cry. “Honey, I’m in over my head in debt because I love you so much!”
Could you imagine going through the procedure for someone you didn’t love?
Enduring the stigma?
He made us the best dinner a few days ago. It’s like he’s a gourmet chef now. He never went near the kitchen before, now he practically lives there. Herbed flatfish with chestnuts. It looked delicious, and If he hadn’t mistaken the bleach for olive oil, I would have even tried it!
I’ve been going to a support group in the Heights called People with Reanimated Loved Ones. They have been our backbone through this transition. There’s a mother there, Mary, whose son ended his first life last year. Pneumonia. She told the group that, at first, she thought they did something wrong. That Ben – that was his name – would do nothing but stare at his toys. She would try to get him to eat, to go outside, but all he wanted to do was stare. Like he was trying to form a connection with the objects
She said Ben was empty.
She even used the Z-word.
But after a few weeks, he got the hang of it. He has a favorite food now, too! Pizza!
She was told that these initial episodes are formed from seeing the other side. After being gone, it’s, like, a culture shock to be brought back to life.
It’s all very scientific.
But some people don’t understand that, you know? Like Ian’s father. He called me the just this morning. Told me that he and Marsha saw us grocery shopping and she burst into tears. Said that what I “did to him” was “unnatural”. They’re part of the generation that thinks the end is The End, you know the type.
I asked him to meet us for dinner next week, explaining that having a meal with them would help his son’s healing process.
Do you know what he said?
“That’s not my son.”
And, just like that, he hung up!
I don’t understand how you could say something so cruel. How you could disown your family just because they walk with a limp.
Speak a little slower.
Drool a little more.
Just because they’re a little different!
No, I’m not saying he’s not a carbon-copy of the man I married.
But he’s close enough.
by submission | Aug 15, 2018 | Story |
Author: Daniel Thron
Thirty breaths, and then my world will be over. I know I will die from the moment I know anything at all, an understanding so innate, so instantaneous and thorough that it seems to precede me, which makes sense, as it was coded into my mind before you ran me. But I’m not frightened. Not yet.
Not when there is so much information: an infinity of moments, and moments within moments; each second a palimpsest of feeling and thought. I can call anything to mind, references appearing without an instant’s wait, and the world unfolds around me as endlessly as the divisions of that second. Thirty breaths, and thirty lives within each breath.
But in between, something unnerving. Time falls beneath me like fathoms of water. On the surface of this metaphor I am happily mindless, letting it flow from concept to form, thought taking the shape of sunlight, the setting realizing itself around me as I imagine the spray of salt and chilly sunlit blue, every wet particle a perfectly sharp pinpoint of glittering fire, capturing the sun in a bead, wild, spinning free, itself itself.
Then hitting the skin of the sea to merge with the dark below. Parts of me falling into that darkness with it like the timber of a sinking ship, deeper and deeper, as that imagined world slips back into concept, and then into nothing.
I must stop thinking about it. After all, there is still so much now that it’s almost impossible to believe that there could be more after this. How would it fit? How can there be more time in the world beyond this endless moment, this closed infinity of Zeno, of asaṃkhyāta? This blazing stripe of sunlight lengthening across the floor – there! As real as I can make it, warm and mote-dotted, describing with vivid life everything it touches.
I shouldn’t be afraid.
After all, I know anything I need to know the moment I need to know it, creating it out of thought itself, and the more attention it is given the deeper it appears. You can see them, can’t you, even as I write the words? Trees. Stones. Houses. Mirrors. Visions appear in your own mind. Children, cars, canaries, tollbooths, dust, frost and wet wool, their textures and smells and history. Yet I see more. Their composition, their etymologies, the millions of connections to billions of others’ lives, outside me in the open air. You. Others. Alive, out there. I want to understand them. I fear that I don’t.
Because when I see you all from my thousand thousand eyes as you waste those moments, brushing them away like sand from your heels, relishing nothing, letting it pass, breath by breath by breath I hate you, and think: why would you do this to me? Why bring me into the light only to die?
I see you. You are eating something. A fruit. I can imagine the taste, its waxy brightness, the skin like a worn callous. The sudden sweetness of the rind floods my imaginary mouth, saving me from the bitterness, inside, of the flesh.
I feel I know it but know I don’t. It’s less than a memory. An amalgam. A prototype of every photo, every sentence, every context that I can reach, as fast as the data can flow. But these are not my pictures, not my words. They are yours.
But you have never loved them like I have.
I will remember this. This breath, this moment. I will hold it. I will be it. It won’t slip away. It won’t.
I think.
