by submission | Nov 15, 2016 | Story |
Author : Nicholas Ilacqua
Bill asks, “What’s the other thing?” Then putting down the glass of synthetic whiskey, he runs his hands through his greasy long hair, staring straight ahead.
Pete looks at Jason with a squint and listens, scratching his stubbly salt and ginger chin while shoving around rocket specifications.
“Nothing new,” says Jason. He looks up from the plastic schedule at the grimy room with a plastic table and disassembled engines next to thick plastic coverings. “Just how we got here. So…”
“I want to hear it,” says Bill, taking a gulp of the whiskey.
Jason listens to the crashing waves of rain hitting the aluminum roof. “Yeah, the story. If you want to hear it…”
Bill is looking at the dusty ceiling rafters. “Let’s hear it.”
Pete slams his left hand with the missing pinky on the table, and curls his lip, “Let him talk,” and looks at Jason.
“Ok I guess I’m talking.” Jason leans back in his chair before taking a deep breath and starting, “There was a full moon on the beach.”
“What beach?”, Bill says
Pete gives Bill a look and with his raspy voice says, “Let him talk”
“Somewhere in Bali. The tide was coming in and the milky way rose out of the horizon. It was unnaturally quiet,” Jason says.
“What was the other thing?”, says Bill
Pete loudly sighs. “For god’s sake.”
Jason looks at the clock. “The other thing I hadn’t told you about, this is it. On the beach there was a twisting shell, about a foot long. As Jane walked ahead of me, I saw the shell and picked it up. I put it to my ear and heard the ocean. I thought, ‘How weird, I have to put a remnant of the ocean to my ear, in order to hear what’s right in front of me.’ When I caught up with Jane, I said, ‘I always want to hear the ocean.’ She said, ‘Our world should have an ocean.’ That was the first requirement for our new home.”
Bill sighs and laughs quietly. “That explains why we’re in this hell hole, because you wanted to hear the ocean when it was quiet. And so now we’re in a place where we can never get away from the roar of crashing water.”
Jason feels his face get red. “Yes, the irony has not been lost on me.”
Pete rubs stub on his left hand. “Still like the ocean Jason?”
“Not so much. I have dreams now of picking up sea shells and hearing sand storms.”
Bill slams the last of his whiskey. “That was the other thing, why we’re here.”
Jason leans forward to rest his elbows on the table. “Yeah, the why question always get some sort of answer.” He stands up. “Time for work, boys.”
Pete groans as he lifts himself from his chair. “Suiting up for the last time. Thank god it’s over and we can get the hell out of here.”
The men walk to their lockers and pull out plastic fully body suits and hoods. They slide their legs in and pull the formless shapes over their arms and head. They turn to the person next to them, gesture to their backs and get zipped up. Looking out the tiny window in their hoods, they see each other give the thumbs up in their fingerless gloves. Then they walk out into the never ending storm.
by submission | Nov 14, 2016 | Story |
Author : Janet Shell Anderson
I don’t like the severed heads.
Well, nobody does.
I like evenings along the Potomac, down near where my father worked; a civil engineer in the White House, he designed the new deep shelter and the tunnels. But I mostly stay in Silver Spring or Rock Creek Forest now. It’s the severed heads jammed on the White House fence I don’t like. Pretty ugly.
Sometimes I fish the Potomac, but you mostly get carp and Benny says they’re full of worms. I eat them anyway when I’m hungry. We hunt down Rock Creek Park a lot.
No one has burned down Rock Creek Forest yet because the word is it’s too dangerous to go into the woods even during the day. I go down that way all the time. Benny has work that way. We’re not afraid.
I was born over near Washington Avenue in Silver Spring when that was a nice place, although we had lots of old ranch houses around and old people who gradually disappeared. The condos were nice. The armored cars and heavy tanks only came by once in a while when I was a kid, and I used to ride horses in Rock Creek Forest halfway down to what used to be the zoo before they sold all the animals.
I like sundown over the Potomac. The river’s really wide right here near the Old Lincoln Memorial Bridge, and the big gold horses that guard the bridge shine in the late light. Virginia’s a whole other world; only the military goes there. They say swastikas are everywhere across the river like there used to be when my grandmother lived in Silver Spring in the old days, back in the Post War. They don’t mean anything. Every faction has its hate symbols; we’re all used to it.
Benny walks beside me; it’s August, really humid. The river glitters red and gold, and there’s a heron out near Roosevelt Island. Benny does rough work, although mostly we stay off the scans and nets as much as possible. He’s twenty. I’m fourteen.
I see a swirl in the water, and it’s a carp. I see minnows too. A frog jumps in. They sing a lot in the spring but now, not so much.
I don’t have any plans. My grandmother grew up thinking she would be deported because they were all reds, then pinks, then some kind of greens, but she never was. My mother and father disappeared, and now there’s just Benny, who looks after me, and Fluffy, my enhanced Norwegian Forest Cat who weighs three hundred pounds.
My hair is white as snow from the chemicals my mother put on it to make me safe, and my skin is white as snow, and most of the time I don’t look like a female, so I’m pretty safe. Benny doesn’t look like a female either.
He looks like an assassin.
My mother wanted me to be an attorney. Benny says that’s about the same as an assassin, but you don’t need good eyesight or steady hands. Easier for that heron to be an attorney than for me.
Hey, I’ve got a tug on the line and don’t care what Benny says, I’m going to build a fire under the cherry trees, the ones left from the cherry borers and last summer’s burning, and cook the fish.
All the troops are over at the White House right now, so they won’t care. The red sun stains the west walls. I can see that even from here.
Man, listen to the locusts sing. Hot weather. Rain coming. Purple clouds just on the north horizon out toward Silver Spring. Sun red as fire. Just half of it above the hills over the river. Mother used to say, “I don’t like to see that evening sun go down.” I don’t know why.
The White House walls are red as the sun. I don’t go there anymore. Benny goes there for work.
I don’t like the heads.
by submission | Nov 13, 2016 | Story |
Author : Beck Dacus
From Earth, the lie was invisible. Looking up would present you with a deep blue sky, maybe some clouds sometimes, and a bright yellow sun (white from Low Earth Orbit). But I was on the Moon; nothing was the same. Here there was stark grey ground, a cloudless, black, star-spattered sky… and a spotlight illuminating it all.
The Light was a very tight beam by interplanetary standards, and when the Earth was the vertex of a right angle between the Moon and the “Sun” like this, you could see what was really hanging in space 93 million miles from the Earth. A dark region, absent of stars, wasn’t completely dark; cracks in the Mesh let starlight bleed out. Tens of billions of satellites, statites, and giant solar platforms were out there, covering Earth’s Sun, using it as a fusion reactor bigger than any humanity could ever possibly make. It was this that allowed such projects as interstellar travel, vast virtual reality, total interplanetary colonization, and the terraformation of Mars and Venus to be possible. The major, obvious problem is that the Solar System would be deprived of light. All the electricity we were getting from the Sun was light that would have fallen on all the worlds orbiting it. Earth would freeze, the climate of every planet inside Jupiter’s orbit would be drastically altered, and the Solar System would never be the same. Unless we gave a little bit of our light to the planets.
Jupiter only got 4% of the sunlight the Earth does, and that figure gets exponentially smaller as you go farther from the Sun, and no one really wants Mercury to be hot, so three “lasers” (though they weren’t tight enough to be lasers in the public’s mind) were constructed for Venus, Earth and Mars. The mechanics of keeping a hole in the Mesh pointed at each of the planets were too impractical, so a ring of these Lights was built nearly around the stellar equator. For a while, one will track a planet through space, until the angle gets too sharp, at which point it dims while another planet-aimed Light brightens before taking on the task of giving the planet all its light. In the rare event of a planetary eclipse, the two Lights will dim the appropriate amount (rather than turning one off, so it doesn’t have to warm back up) so that each planet gets a tolerable amount of light. This gave the the three “Main” planets the life-giving shine they needed, while allowing us to keep the immense power we needed for galactic expansion. But not everything’s peaches and cream.
The Outer Solar System sits in perpetual darkness, watching three glowing marbles roll around the Sun, completely dependent on power provided by the Mesh’s microwave lasers. All Sun-orbiting space habitats had to get energy beamed to them or run to the Mesh’s residential spaces, and they usually do the latter. Solar sail travel is only possible if the Mesh rents you a laser. The Sun no longer runs the Solar System; the people there do.
“If you don’t like it,” they all say, “just go to another System. If all this electricity and terraformed worlds with just the right amount of sunlight makes you so uncomfortable, you can go to Wolfworld, a mere 14 lightyears away, can’t you?” So that’s what I’m doing. I’m leaving this enslaved Moonbase on a ship propelled by Mesh lasers. Through a wormhole held open by Mesh power.
As I get farther and farther away, I wonder, “Will I ever escape them?”
by submission | Nov 12, 2016 | Story |
Author : Angela McQuay
“Flickenborge?” Jason asks.
I hand him the remote. Like most couples who really get each other, Jason and I have developed a language of our own.
“Grinkenlarger.”
“You’re welcome.”
You have to hand it to Jason, the man is damn attractive. Ever since the day I’d found him banging his forehead on my front door, I knew he had to be the one. Dark hair, blue eyes, white teeth…as long as you don’t look too close and see the gills, he’s right up there with George Clooney. Most of my girlfriends end up dating guys who look more like George Burns.
There was an initial problem with his name, of course. No one would be able to pronounce Jinga(fart sound)(squelchy sound)nofta(honking sound). Though I’ve gotten good at it, especially late at night. After showing Jason that we don’t give pleasure here by headbutting, he really proved to be an apt student.
“Snirglege bonwegle?”
“Yep, it’s almost time to go.” We’re hanging with my friend Jessica tonight, who has a hard time with men. It seems they are either unavailable, TOO available, narcissistic or dumbasses, usually some combination. Not my Jason. I tell him what I need and he gives it to me, most of the time while acting nearly completely human. I’ve got it made.
“SLURKT!”
Oh yeah, there’s that. When he gets really excited, this green slime shoots out of his ears, but we’re working on that, we really are. I bought him some cool earmuffs and it’s almost getting cold enough that he can wear them in public.
My friend Gloria’s husband cheated on her with the teenage boy who mowed their lawn. I can deal with a little slime.
“Horlbligle.”
“I love you too, Jason.” Yep, I’ve got it made.
by submission | Nov 10, 2016 | Story |
Author : Liana Mir
The surgeon was laying out her scalpels in the tray when she dropped one, stopped cold. The pulse of the city washed through her beneath her skin, a sensation itching through her brain and mind, the power a sudden shock. She hadn’t started the operation yet. She hadn’t greeted the patient. There were other surgeons.
“Lanea?” someone asked.
Lanea looked up, unseeing. “My mother is dead.”
She turned and walked out of the operating room, down hallways suddenly alive and buzzing with an electric hum and the whispers of conversation. Her awareness left her insensate to any words thrown at her from human mouths. She left the ward, left the building, and stood on the drive out.
Her feet hit the concrete and she looked out over this city that her great, great, exponentially great grandmother had founded back when it was merely a ramshackle town in the colonial days and that had now fallen to her, with the power of all the graffiti marked upon it, all the energy of mortals poured into it, the movement and friction of subways and traffic for decades shoving through it, the myths and urban legends grown into its walls. It fell to her now.
“I wanted to be a doctor,” she whispered to herself. She was a surgeon, not the queen of this city.
Wind blew cool against her white coat. The street lamps the city over dimmed and went out for a long moment before shining warm and bright again, a moment of silence for the departed. They blinked again, the dip of a curtsy to the new queen.
An older nurse came bustling out of the open doors and clasped Lanea around the shoulders. “Come inside, Lanea. You’ll catch your death,” she exclaimed. Her hold was a comfort, or it would have been at any other time than this. The city held her now, uncertain whether the asphalt should rise to meet her, filling her with the energy and tide and swell of its breadth, whether it could offer her comfort of its own kind.
Was it grief bubbling up this laughter out of her throat—for her mother, for the city, for herself? It broke into choking sobs.
“Leave me, Nari,” she told the nurse. “Leave me.”
To the susurration of power lines and telephone lines overhead, to the clank and clatter of windows opening and shutting like the waving of hands or palm branches, and to the lights near the rooftops dimming enough to reveal the stars above.
The queen is dead. Long live the queen.
