by submission | Mar 8, 2013 | Story |
Author : Xauri’EL Zwaan
Evelyn offers me a bouquet of white lilies. I know immediately that she’s hiding something, but I indulge her little game. I take them and breathe deeply; she knows how I love complex smells. These have a spice that matches nothing in my chemical pattern bank. Genemod flowers; that’s unlike her.
“Happy anniversary, Darling.” She’s not happy, but trying desperately to sound it.
“What’s wrong?”
She flashes with anger. “Nothing.” I know she’s lying, but I also know that forcing the issue will just mean another fight. I’m not eager for a week of verbal silence and kinesic screaming, so I drop it.
I’ve put every ounce of the love I still feel for her into dinner. She picks at it in silence.
She asks me about my day. Surprising; she never wants to hear about work anymore. I tell her about charting trajectories for blinkships in Reimann space. She’s becoming angry, hostile; my words trail off.
“Your enhanced genetics must help you a lot with that.”
I sigh. “Can we please not do this today?”
“I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t stand it — being read like a book, feeling stupid and incompetent all of the time. I’m done with you. It’s over.”
I stop thinking about work, about the books I’ve been reading, about sex. I stop browsing blogs and watching the stock ticker. I focus entirely on her.
I’ve been expecting this for months now. That’s not the problem. Everything is out in the open now; but she’s still hiding something. She perches on her chair like a vulture.
My lips and fingertips are starting to feel numb.
“What have you done, Evelyn?”
“These flowers have enhanced genetics, too. They were made just for you, darling. Just for your DNA.”
“But I love you.” She stands over me as I slip to the floor.
“You smart bastard. I finally got one over on you.”
by submission | Mar 3, 2013 | Story |
Author : J.D. Rice
There’s an alien in my kitchen, and I’m not quite sure what to do. My wife stands by the stove, humming quietly to herself while chopping away at some vegetables for the stew. My son sits at the table next to the alien, trying to teach it how to play his favorite card game, but I don’t think it understands. Its big, blue head just nods along an awkward imitation of our own mannerisms, its big, dark eyes looking back and forth between my son and the little pieces of paper he’s setting down on the table. Meanwhile, my dog sits curiously at the base of the alien’s chair, sniffing at its dangling feet.
And here I am, standing the doorway, briefcase in hand, with no idea what to make of the situation.
“Honey…” I say, walking slowly and methodically around the outer edge of the kitchen, keeping my distance from the alien. “Tell me again where you found it?”
“I already told you,” she says, still smiling at her chopped vegetables. “He was out in the garden. Poor little thing is all alone and hungry.”
“How can you even KNOW that?” I ask, my strained voice betraying my attempts at remaining calm. “Why is it in our house?”
“He’s hungry,” my wife says again, using her knife and hand to dump the finished vegetables into the pot of hot water on the stove. “I can’t turn away a stranger in need.”
“A stranger in… you can’t… it’s…”
But words really do fail me. My son is now trying desperately to get the alien to play a game of cards with him, grabbing the alien’s four-fingered hands and practically stuffing cards into them. I almost call out for my son not to touch it, but I know it’d be futile. They all seem to think this is perfectly normal.
“Why don’t you sit down and have some soup,” my wife says. “It’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
“I… I’m calling the police,” I finally manage to say. “We can’t keep him here. This is absolutely ridiculous.”
“He’s just hungry,” my wife says again in a sing-song voice. “Just have a seat and we can call the police after.”
“No,” I say, more definitively. “I’m calling them now. We don’t know what this thing is or what it could mean to the world. We can’t keep him here.”
Suddenly my wife’s hand shoots out, grabbing my wrist and forcing it down into the counter top with freakish strength.
“No.” she says again, all joy having left her voice. I stare up at her, eyes wide, and watch as she slowly raises the knife over her head. “He’s just hungry.”
Before I get a chance to scream, the knife drives into my chest, piercing my heart and sending blood gurgling into my throat. As my body hits the floor, my family doesn’t move, not even the dog. My body twitches, once, twice, then goes still as the feeling leaves my limbs. Just as my vision starts to fade, I see the alien stand up from its seat at the kitchen table, kneel over my body, and sniff at my blood as it flows steadily from my chest..
“Ah…” a voice says in my head. “A-Positive, just what I needed. I’m really sorry about this, but I was simply famished.”
by submission | Mar 2, 2013 | Story |
Author : Alex Bauer
It never started here, my dear. We are victims of circumstance.
It started with the fires, with her, as we watched the skyline burn in the middle of terrific night. Standing there on the lake shore, horrified beyond rational thought, among wailing multitudes while the city burned to so much carbonized slag. Her. Standing there next to me, face hammered into masks of sorrow and enchantment, painted with furnace shadows. Beautiful.
We had been left behind. There would be no salvation this time.
Every fear a thread–a final impulse–so I reached out and grasped that hand. Shock smoothed away the horror and I felt my expression mirrored in hers. She looked at me.
Looked at me. I mattered again, just like that.
Cool carboplatinum fingers reticently cradled mine. Marvelous control. “Darwin,” she hiccuped, singed hair whisking around green weeping eyes. Taken aback, I laughed darkly, nodded. I touched her cheek in a fit of fear-crazed need, something to show, for once, that I could be kind. Truly kind. I felt inlays beneath the skin, the reconstructed zygomatic, the carbofiber masseter relaxed under my caress. Recycled.
Someone loved you very much, once. Sent you away. Darwin indeed.
“Just so.” I said, looked up as giants hammered on the sky once more, the wheeling horizon all engulfed in flame. Nauseating vertigo, as if I’d spiral out of her hands and into the stars above. The skies were cracking above us. Spidery cracks heliographed the light of burning cities, peoples, their last stretched long fingers into the night. Flotsam and debris floated beyond the transparent shield, bits of smashed lightships and radiator panels glowing like banked coals.
Nearby stars blink and seconds later, ferromagnetics fireballed into the colony’s canopy at twelve kilometers per second. Each star a ship, each blink another shove toward the precipice.
Soon, I thought, the race between cooking or choking would be over. The lake itself began to burn. Sweat poured down the groove of my back. A breeze touched us, and I welcomed whatever came.
Excisement, the Enemy called it. For the consumption of thought. For the heresy of existence. Another volley battered the canopy and the end came in a single body-crushing tsunami of overpressure.
Decompression is equal parts waiting and celerity. The canopy over the city blew outward in rending silence, like it was sucked up by a giant’s straw. Brilliant tidal waves of debris and mezocyclones of fire fell up into the night before extinguishing. No one screamed, even when the fingers of the breach wrapped ‘round us, fetched us up into the night in greedy handfuls.
Excisement.
I never let go of her hand, even when the light went out in those weeping eyes. And here we are. Here I am. Floating here with her, in the depths. This vast ocean. Drowning. Anoxia is killing me and we’ve only begun to swim! Only these few minutes we’ve known each other. Reefs of transparent alloy float around us, glittering like wet jewels. If only she could see this.
Not even a name! I never told her mine. Better this way… isn’t it?
“Darwin.” I mouth, feel something like God’s own hand reach down my throat to tear the life away from this husk. Prosthesis spasms to the tune of dying synapses. “Darwin.” Oh. Oh, I am so sorry. Always so stupid, so awful, never thinking about others. Choking.
That’s her name. Her na–
by submission | Feb 26, 2013 | Story |
Author : Alex Grover
Hessy ventured down the railroad mound when he saw the glint.
The desert was a cruel place: for the little lizards that scurried in the shadows, for the sparse yucca plants and tall grasses that sprigged in the dust, for the humans that toiled in the godless heat. The desert was a decree against life. Hessy had known it too well over the past few months. He was a bony boy no more than seventeen, wearing orange and cuffs around his swollen ankles. The Billingswood Continental, owned by Roland Corporation, ensured that Hessy would be no delinquent, no fool in the streets. Mr. Ofsprin, with his broad beard and wide-brimmed hat, was a stout former colonel in Lincoln’s war and managed the Fenton Center for Learning Juveniles. He watched Hessy and the other boys who were there on that 1869 speck of a Western dream.
The large hammer fell to Hessy’s side as he rushed bull-like to the glimmer in the sand.
Hessy dropped to his knees and gently sieved the sand with his fingers. The glint became metallic, rounder, more perfect, more strange. It was a thick-rimmed monocle. Hessy noticed it didn’t have a chain, but an ear-piece, something like a half-frame to a full pair of glasses, but a construct that wrapped underneath the lobe. Ankles forgotten, Hessy picked up the monocle. It was heavier when he held it, for sure, but on further inspection Hessy noticed the misleading thickness of the rim. Uncovered from the dust, the monocle showed an extra, slim band within two uncanny shades of tealish-gray. The band displayed a numerical range from 10 to 30; along one of the outside rims was a black arrow pointing inward.
With blistered fingers and uncommon stupor, Hessy instinctively clicked the band around its circumference to the middle, at the 20.
“Hestian Phelps?” Mr. Ofsprin called.
Hessy had already put the monocle on, the frame fitting snugly on his right eye. Without sound and, for some reason, without fear, but respect, Hessy looked upon the large mound that would carry the Billingswood Continental into miles beyond. Instead of sand, the railroad lay in place. A fantastical, sleek-looking train with a “Billingswood” decal. It was a train Hessy had never seen.
“Hestian Phelps, get back to the rails, boy.”
He looked up the mound. Mr. Ofsprin glared from above. The other workers were supposed to continue, but many of them slid their glances to Hessy, hammers held like torches to their chests.
When Hessy saw Mr. Ofsprin and the workers with his right eye, he saw grand and torturing differences. The boys had become men; their faces, some already scarred, were now dignified with subtle wrinkles. They looked stronger. Their chests were pronounced—they stood taller. Mr. Ofsprin appeared like an ancient. His back was arched; his face was a leathery bag; his beard was long; his eyes were weary and dark.
“I tell you, boy, get up here and avoid a beatin’.”
Hessy instead moved the numbered band without looking to 22. Giant buildings he could have never fathomed materialized before a second could pass. They formed a grid that crafted a behemoth shadow, soaring from the base of the tower-like structures like a terrible, terrible sea. A large sign for “Roland Corporation” was fizzling and shining on one of the towers, joined by a yellow-skinned, black-haired gnome who was the caricature of a man long dead. There were people there, underneath the buildings, walking with posh bags and alien clothes, silent, all silent except for the desert breeze; the railroad was gone, covered by a bizarre new railway of zooming glass carriages; Ofsprin and the workers had vanished.
Yet, Hessy’s left eye still saw the railroad, the workers, and the warden, who trampled down the dune with a small black club. Mr. Ofsprin did not resist; he began beating down the teenage world of Hestian Phelps. The mother of his history cried somewhere. But Hessy continued to shift the band of the monocle.
When he clicked the 30 to the black arrow, the buildings had returned to desert as if nothing, all had returned to desert as if nothing, the desert, oh the desert, oh the dust.
by submission | Feb 25, 2013 | Story |
Author : Jonathan Pigno
There were weapons stashed in the Frigidaire. Alien toys. Things Elaine kept nestled under her dress for safekeeping when company arrived.
But her house-guests didn’t know it.
They remained unsuspecting and silent as she leaned in to reach for the cola bottles.
“So tell me again why you’ve come to Boise, gentleman?”
The suits looked up from their plates and stared at the middle-aged housewife. She was as inconspicuous as any Midwestern beauty queen – chestnut hair curled ever so gently over the base her shoulders, sparkling green eyes that matched the lawn outside.
Her polka dot dress looked like something off the newsstands. A perfect cover for Wink magazine. Things that drove the jukebox crowd wild.
Inside the oven, a pie was cooking. The strangers wondered if the recipe was secret, something only she had knowledge of and concealed ever so well.
But that was exactly what they had come looking for.
They gazed at the woman once more. Something told them she was an atom bomb. A nuclear explosion waiting to blow. But the fallout wasn’t caustic. It was historic.
The mystery men shook it off.
She smiled, placing the beverages onto the linoleum tabletop. She pulled out a seat and reclined next to them.
Both visitors looked at one another.
“We came to talk about your husband, miss. There has been investigations lately by the local law enforcement concerning the lights that were seen over this community. Our division has given us clearance to search the house for government property.”
She uncrossed her legs and straightened herself in the chair.
“My husband is a senior ranking official in the United States military, gentleman. His business is most certainly not mine…”
She pushed her bra up, narrowing her eyes and pursing her mouth. The red lipstick glistened. Her male guests soaked in the sight of her cleavage. The woman breathed in.
Underneath the table, Elaine heard a click.
“You fella’s are looking for the hard way, now am I correct?”
She clenched the holster tucked inside her black garter. She could feel the nose of the weapon against the darkened nylon stretched over her thighs.
The trio traded stares. That’s when the oven timer went off.
Elaine drew her gun and fired. It was a liberating bliss, a revolutionary kind of spark. She saw it in the smoking crater where her former guests smoldered.
Things were changing in Boise.
The housewife stood up and brushed soot off her clothing. Walking over to the window, she lit a cigarette and smiled into the dusk. She wanted to disprove it all, the misconceptions of who she was.
“I’m packing heat like Friedan’s publishing books.”
Elaine heard the screen door out back.
“Since when you get home?”
Her husband trotted over, still in uniform, and kissed the side of her face.
“I took the spaceship for a spin. Ran some tests at the hangar.”
Distracted, he turned to the pile of ash where his breakfast nook used to sit.
“They said the commies might show up.”
He paused.
Elaine was always different. The killing wasn’t the problem. She’d become a new woman. Right around the time he’d trusted her with weapons even he didn’t comprehend.
“So…how those ray guns work out?”
A distinct cocktail of fear and envy brewed in the room. The couple lingered in stillness.
She knew what needed to be said.
Some moments couldn’t be understood knowingly. They had to be explained.
Elaine opened the oven door and stared at the finished pie.
“Well. Let’s just say…you fucking men will never understand. Not for a long time.”
