by submission | Sep 3, 2014 | Story |
Author : Jedd Cole
This kind of epilogue ends with a beginning, just as Homo sapiens began with an ending in the dark garden of forevers past. They believe it is AD 2476. They march through empty space with their idols under their arms. Earth burns behind them along with the little unnamed ones–the poor and the needy. Being unnamed, they are soon forgotten. The small unsponsored flotilla presses on towards the people’s recourse: a cold red rock, the shell of an empty colony, and other idols.
[#]
Heléna bends over with arms outstretched, holding her little daughter far away from herself in a corner of the compartment where the mob has been herded and penned. The child empties her bladder onto the hard metal floor. The stream makes unpleasant smacking sounds and splashes onto Heléna’s shoes. Twenty feet away, people pretend not to watch with their faces.
Heléna thinks about what happens when the royal are made refugees. She remembers with unidentified feelings the flat she and her daughter fled in such a hurry, leaving everything behind to save their lives so they could pee in the corner of a starship compartment. Cargo ship. It has never tasted human flesh before, nor does it wish to. Two months ago it was full of tiger nuts out of Valencia. No one will be interested in tiger nuts anymore. All the little wrinkled tubers were left behind.
Heléna’s husband used to eat them plain. He was also left behind.
There is a preacher in the midst a while later, speaking soft and confident words to the people. He meets Heléna’s stare. They talk about the disaster and where they used to live and what it is to be lonely among so many people. It turns out the preacher had owned a house just a few kilometers from Heléna’s flat. He tilts his head towards her and asks if she has been saved. She looks around and says yes with some confidence.
Heléna loses sight of her daughter among the thousand people in the compartment and never sees her again. She thinks about Baal and Moloch and passing children through the fire. She and the preacher are making plans for their future together when she gives birth to a new child three days before the ship reaches Mars. They name him Esperanto, speaking strange things to him.
Their new home will become ancient.
Heléna writes a story about the flight from the old place, and how everyone was saved, especially from the large countries. She writes from the carefully airtight hovel. Esperanto plays in the hydroponic garden. The preacher works in the chapel made of red dirt. He dies several years later of complications from AIDS.
[#]
Esperanto keeps Heléna with him in his pocket. She’s been dead for twenty years. She dwells in the paper, the story about the old place, the earth that perished. He contributes to the making of a new old world here. Planeta rojo.
Heléna had written of the burden of the removed generation.
Esperanto speaks strange things to his daughter, whose mother he does not know. There’s a former preacher’s son who lives in the hovels a block away and with whom Esperanto’s daughter plays for eternal segments of time.
Forever comes and goes. Esperanto thinks about what happens when refugees are made royalty. He turns it into a thesis, and the thesis will burn some people alive, including, eventually, himself.
Before that happens, he becomes their leader in the dark. Renovations are made. Rages aimed. Governors deposed, but not for good. The seeds of change wrinkle in the sun atop fallow Martian soil, where new men have proclaimed old things, and triumphed over the mere words of scribes.
[#]
Esperanto has died, his daughter has been lost, and new ones have been born in the interim to continue the unspoken religion. The epilogue remains an unwavering line that begins with Heléna’s manuscript and shoots into space along the route of the ancient fleeing ships. The fresh, sprouting heads write their own stories. The people proclaim themselves Genesis, the beginning of creation, and they cover the red planet with origins and fables. By inertia, the descendants of Heléna, Esperanto, and their daughters become the writers, builders, priests of the new old, of Baals, of Molochs, of fires. Children passing through them, most unnamed.
by submission | Aug 31, 2014 | Story |
Author : Sarah Vernetti
“Am I comfortable? No, Amelia, not particularly. I feel like I’ve washed out to sea. Maybe I’ll return. Or maybe I’ll end up in some far off land fifty years from now, only to be discovered by a child and be featured on the evening news. So, no, I’m not comfortable.”
He struggled to catch his breath. His hands gripped the arm rests with such force that his knuckles looked like they might burst through his skin.
I sighed. How was I supposed to respond? I never did understand his brand of metaphorical nonsense. If only that website hadn’t insisted that we meet.
Things went well at first, but there were always additional demands, more requests, further attempts at forming some kind of bond. But I needed my space.
“Goodbye, Pete. See you on Mars,” I said as I closed the door to the space vessel. I leaned over the control panel, ignoring his muffled voice. I entered the launch code, sending him into oblivion with only my newest invention and his own histrionics to keep him company.
The capsule shot upwards with such force that I was thrown back against the guardrail, peeling paint finding its way into the palms of my hands. Right through the fate line. Pete would have appreciated that detail.
Once the rumbling stopped and the smoke cleared from the room, I grabbed my phone. Under relationship status, I toggled over to “single.” It was all too easy.
by submission | Aug 30, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
Loku heard them before he saw them. The strange sound came to him as he slept beneath the Aynt tree. He and Sheka had eaten their fill of the ripe, rich fruit and fallen asleep beneath its teal-colored leaves. He was not one to fear things he did not understand, but this odd sound sent a shiver of apprehension through him. Still, he stood and stepped out from under the tree.
He looked up into the auburn sky and saw the source of the sound.
He gasped.
A hundred feet above him, floating effortlessly through the air, a dozen creatures he had never seen before swirled in a circular pattern.
At first, he wanted to scream in fear and run like the others of his tribe. But, as he watched, the creatures flew off to the north. He watched them go.
He heard movement behind him and turned to see Sheka, her eyes wide with fear, standing beside him.
“What are they?” she asked shakily.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I’ve never seen them before.”
He looked off to the north. The creatures were shrinking on the horizon.
“It’s a sign,” Sheka said. “There’ll be a bad harvest. We must tell the others!”
She started off, but Loku grabbed her and pulled her to him. She was shaking, but his embrace comforted her.
“It’s all right,” he said. “They seemed harmless.”
Below them, in the valley, he could hear the sound of the drums. The villagers had seen the strange creatures, too, and they were afraid. Morkin would, undoubtedly, be stirring up fear amongst the others. He would want to hunt down the creatures and kill them, or maybe sacrifice Lima, the dark witch of the woods, who got the blame for everything that happened in the village whether she was directly related to it or not.
More sounds came and Loku saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of the strange creatures fill the sky.
He slunked back under the tree and held Sheka closely. Maybe Lima was to blame, after all.
Several miles away, Torrence Anderson stood on the rocky bluff and watched as they released the last of the birds. It was a personal triumph for him. He had fought long and hard for the cloning of the birds. He’d cut through a million miles of red tape to make it happen and, now, he was seeing his dream come back to life.
He stood on the cliff and watched as the birds—eagles, sparrows, robins, a hundred other species—flew overhead. They were so beautiful, those birds. He wondered why mankind had polluted their natural habitats, killed off the woodlands and marshes in favor of the cities of steel and glass. The atmosphere had become toxic, and most of the wildlife on Earth had died.
But, he had seen hope in the stars. They had found this planet and Anderson had pleaded his case to the world leaders. “We can clean our atmosphere,” he told them. “Bring back the wildlife. But, it will take generations for the world to heal itself.
“In the meantime,” he said, smiling, “we found a world where the birds can flourish. It’s a perfect sanctuary for them.”
He was given the go ahead to clone two thousand birds. If the experiment went well, he would get to clone more birds, and other animals as well.
He stood on the rocky bluff and watched as a majestic eagle soared overhead.
In the distance, he heard the soft sound of drumming, but he paid the natives no nevermind as he gazed skyward.
by submission | Aug 29, 2014 | Story |
Author : Gerard Hutchings
When they arrived, they offered to restore the earth’s atmosphere, removing pollutants, reducing greenhouse gases, restoring ozone. In exchange they just wanted to settle on Mars. How could we refuse? After three years they had terraformed Mars and built many habitations.
Next they offered to take all our homeless, poor and terminally ill and those of their families who wanted to go with them. They settled them on Mars. They also wanted the asteroid belt and would throw in cleaning up our waterways and oceans. They removed the asteroid debris, built five planetoids and filled the interior with life and more habitations. These they offered to the overpopulated and crowded.
As part of the resettlement people were taught the culture and values of our visitors. All those off earth seemed to be living happy and content lives. They lived side by side with the beauty of nature, enjoyed a healthier lifestyle with less disease and illness, and had jobs that were exciting and relied on their imagination and real skills. The aliens imparted their knowledge freely to all those they resettled.
Slowly other planets and moons were colonized by the people of earth and eventually the changes were also made to earth. The high rises disappeared and there was more wildlife and vegetation. No animals or insects ever attacked humans again. It was this more than anything else that made people wonder if some form of technology was employed to also sedate mankind. For some reason the rich and powerful had not been able to hold onto their old ways. Perhaps because those who they relied on had simply left themselves.
The big project now was building interstellar ships similar to those of the aliens. We would travel away from Sol together to bring the same benefits to other systems and their inhabitants.
As we set forth with our alien friends I still wonder, have we lost our individuality. It certainly doesn’t feel like that, although we no longer seem capable of doing wrong by others. Perhaps we have just regained the humanity we should have had all along.
by submission | Aug 28, 2014 | Story |
Author : John Plunkett
The girls were dressed in simple skirts and blouses of homespun wool from their father’s sheep. They spoke brightly to one another, rejoicing in a day of swimming and play at the small pond just over the hill from their father’s house.
A young, naked boy darted from tree to tree, his eyes focused on the group of girls walking down the path. He was filthy, covered in dirt, dead leaves, and a greasy smear of dried blood and hair around his mouth.
The youngest girl stopped suddenly, pointing into the trees and asking in a loud voice, “What’s that?”
The other girls looked, but seeing only the trees they shushed their sister and gently forced her to continue down the path.
The boy continued to follow them, but allowed more space between himself and his prey. It would hardly do to let them escape.
The girls arrived at the small pond, a place where the creek turned sharply and had carved out a deep hollow in the soft dirt between the trees. Having been to the little pond many times before, the oldest girls led the rush into the water, leaving woolen garments in small, neat piles on various rocks, tree stumps, and low branches near the water.
Laughing and playing in the water, the girls didn’t see the boy watching from the undergrowth until he burst out of the trees, running and jumping from shore into the cold water.
Shocked and uncertain at the boy’s sudden appearance, the girls didn’t start to move until after he landed in the water, and even then the oldest girls moved toward him at first, unafraid of such a young boy.
When they saw his skin change to a dark gray color, and his arms and legs shrink down into fins and a tail, then they reversed course, swimming hard for the shore they believed would bring safety.
Once he was in the water, the boy knew they were his for the taking. He flicked his powerful tail, opened his mouthful of long, sharp teeth and grabbed the closest girl by her leg, pulling her under the surface and toward his new lair at the bottom.
Very subdued, the girls walked home, already mourning their oldest sister, who had given her life so they might live. Many of them kept their eyes on the trees around them, watching for any threat.
A young, clean naked boy followed at a discreet distance, watching the girls, and waiting for an opportunity.
