by submission | Jul 17, 2025 | Story |
Author: Colin Jeffrey
“Your order will be ready eleven months ago next Tuesday,” the drive-in automat informed me. “And your bill will be minus eighty-four dollars, less tax.”
I put the car in reverse, drove home backwards. When I got there, I put the newspaper back into the door slot and switched off all the lights.
As I backed into the living room, my wife unwaved me goodbye and went back to bed.
I unsmiled at her retreating figure and unbuttoned my overcoat. I walked backwards down the hallway, remembering what it would feel like later that evening when I’d arrive home tired and hungry.
Outside, my neighbour was un-mowing his lawn, his mower carefully disgorging and replanting clippings.
Mrs. Clavicle across the road looked away from me and unwaved as she carried last week’s garbage up from her bins, scolding the dogs that hadn’t arrived yet.
I shimmied backwards to my car and rolled onto the street. By the time I reached the city, the traffic had untangled itself. Accidents reversed in an elegant dance: bumpers undented, panels unscratched, horns untooted.
I saw my destination in the rearview mirror – I had unremembered it from an ad I hadn’t seen: The Ministry of Temporality. A tall glass building, lights blinking out next to advertising signs that turned off.
I reversed my car into the parking lot next door. The valet handed me back my keys.
As I backed in through the ministry’s doors, the desk clerk was already unstamping paperwork I hadn’t filled out.
“We’ll be unfulfilling your request in approximately forty-two minutes ago,” she told me. “Please unwrite your details on this form.”
As I sat on a chair in the foyer, a door closed to my left and a man in a white lab coat walked in, holding a chalkboard. As I watched, he erased the empty board and words appeared:
Hello Mister Fleagle, I am Doctor Happenstance – you are caught in a time anomaly.
I unnodded my head. He erased again:
I can help you if you come to my lab.
Another erasure:
Please unfollow me out of the corridor to your right.
I did as asked and found myself in a room full of complicated machinery.
Doctor Happenstance unhooked me from some unattached cables, then untwisted dials, flipped off switches, and unadjusted some settings. The room distorted. A coppery smell filled the air. My vision blurred. When it cleared, I looked up at the clock. The second-hand was moving clockwise.
“How do you feel now, Mister Fleagle?” asked the Doctor.
“Much better, thanks,” I said, relieved to be moving forward in time. “What happened?”
“It’s a little difficult to explain,” he said, “but it seems a rift has opened between our universe and another.” He frowned. “And bits of time are – to put it simply – out of sorts.”
“Will it ever return to normal?” I asked.
“That we don’t know,” he said. “But we’re working on it. That’s why we created this ministry.”
When I arrived home, the lights were already on for the evening.
“Hi honey,” my wife said. “Everything okay?”
“It is now,” I said, grinning. “In fact, I feel like celebrating.” I put my arms around her waist. “Let’s go out for dinner.”
“Ok, great!” she replied.
“Can you phone the restaurant while I have a quick shower?” I asked.
“Sure thing.”
As I towel dried my hair on the way to our bedroom, my wife was just hanging up the phone.
“How did you go?”
“Great,” she said, smiling. “We’ve got a booking for nine-thirty two weeks ago next Wednesday.”
by submission | Jul 16, 2025 | Story |
Author: Colin Jeffrey
As the steam-powered Queen Victoria chugged its way across the palace forecourt, the sound of a volley of cannon shots rang out through a public address system.
A troop of mechanical horses paraded noisily in front of the queen, boilers whistling, gears grinding. Mannequins attired in military garb rode upon them.
“Preeee…sent arms!” yelled the recording of a sergeant major to a platoon of animated dummies ranged across the parade ground.
“Ooooorder…arms!” the recording continued.
Just then, one of the machine-driven horses exploded, spraying hydraulic oil and boiling water all over the John Brown mannequin mounted upon it. The horse and dummy crashed noisily to the ground.
“Oh, no, no, no!” screamed Jacamo Smith through his megaphone. “Stop!”
As Jacamo leapt from his director’s chair, he swept his hand across an array of switches, turning them all off. He threw his megaphone on the ground, strode out onto the parade ground. “Just once,” he said through gritted teeth, shaking his fist at the cloudless sky. “Just once, I would like to have everything make it through a whole procession!”
Jacamo surveyed the remnants of John Brown’s horse, its brass and steel innards spread across the ground. He knelt beside the mangled automaton, his face softening. “Oh dear, old boy,” he murmured, patting what remained of its flank. “I’m sorry I yelled. A momentary setback is all.” He snapped his fingers, and a clanking gaggle of retrieval automata gathered up the pieces of Brown and his horse, and whisked them off to the workshop.
He stood up, looked out across the silent parade ground. The mechanical Queen Victoria stood majestically in the afternoon light, her polished brass parts gleaming. He glanced at his pocket watch. “Oh my, they’ll be here at any moment,” he said to the ranks of staring dummies. “And we have to be prepared.”
Jacamo adjusted the lapels on a regal-looking mannequin. “Sergeant Major,” he said, saluting. “Please ensure the men are presented at their very finest.”
As he approached Queen Victoria, he ran a loving hand along her wooden superstructure. “Apologies, ma’am, just a little more pressure,” he whispered, finessing a valve. Steam hissed reassuringly.
He turned back to the courtyard, where wind stirred the air, blowing around torn epaulettes and fragments of discarded promenade plans. A soldier mannequin fell forward in the breeze, landing on its face with a hollow clunk.
Jacamo ignored the fallen dummy, clapped his hands three times in rapid succession. “On your best form everyone!” he said. “They’ll write stories about today!”
He strode in front of the platoons of assembled figures, hands clasped behind his back, addressing them in a grand voice.
“I know the council has doubts,” he said. “They laugh at me behind closed doors. But when they witness this, when they see what I have built, they will know the magnificence of Jacamo!” He paused, his voice now barely a whisper. “Then they will release me from this place.”
Suddenly, steam valves hissed, a swaying mannequin creaked.
He turned on his heel to face the timber Queen Victoria and nodded reverently. “Yes, ma’am. It shall be done.”
In the sky, the two suns dimmed briefly as a large cloud crossed their faces and long, late afternoon shadows extended across the arena. The seemingly endless desert stretched away in all directions, the parade ground and its buildings a tiny island in a vast ocean of sand.
Jacamo looked out from his domain, his eyes focused on the distance. “They are coming. I heard their voices in the fog this morning,” he said. “They’ll be here any time now.”
by submission | Jul 15, 2025 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Carpenter counted out loud while trying to carefully step over the swollen bodies. In the clunky hazmat suit his boot came down on the neck of a child.
Swynton jerked away from the sight, but there was really nowhere to turn from the reality of hundreds of bloated bodies washed up on Galveston’s beaches. Carpenter had asked her to accompany him into what the local officials had dubbed the Containment Zone. Police and Coast Guard vessels just offshore were still busy trying to corral the corpses that had yet to wash back in with the tide.
Based on what she was seeing, hundreds and hundreds looked to have perished. The days-long heat dome had spiked yesterday, the grid failed, and multitudes flocked to Galveston’s beaches in a mad rush to cool off in the Gulf waters. But there was no relief in the sea. Only tragedy.
The warmest ocean temperatures ever recorded combined with the searing air temps overwhelmed most beach-goers. Heat exhaustion and heat stroke robbed them of strength and/or consciousness, and they simply drowned in the steamy, still waters.
Carpenter stopped counting and removed his boot from the child’s neck. “Sorry. This is just a shit situation. Nobody…no body…deserves this.”
“It’s horrific.”
“Yes. And it’ll get worse. The county coroner’s office called me in. I’m getting called in a lot more places for these kind of tragedies, to collect data, analyze it, and model the scope of the problem. Officials have started calling me the heat death guy. But nothing I’m doing is stopping what’s happening.”
“So, why am I here?”
“Because I could get you past the police tape. Because you’re a local and you need to see this. Because you’re a media influencer and someone needs to tell this story in a way that’s visceral, that’s viral.”
“Won’t the sheer number of dead here say it all?”
“Numbers, statistics. We’ve heard them all for decades as climate catastrophes kill more and more each year.” Carpenter knelt down and gingerly brushed his sandy boot print off the child’s neck. “So, get out your phone, Swynton, and do your viral media thing because data doesn’t always change beliefs, but corpses, lots of corpses, do.”
by submission | Jul 13, 2025 | Story |
Author: Bronte Lemaire
“Oxygen level is at 1%. Please follow the emergency protocol.”
Sarah sighed and let her head fall against the window. The stars flowed gently over her cheeks and created extra pinpricks of light between her freckles. She felt me staring and I looked away, pretending to find interest in a rusty screw in a panel. I watched her smile in the corner of my eye before looking back to the moon we were circling.
“Any last confessions?” she asked.
I clicked my tongue. “Nothing worthy of note.”
She just rolled her eyes and scooted closer, letting our knees touch. The soft whirring of dying machinery and our breathing was the only sound held in the spaceship. It was all outdated and had been left to decay by the space colony, never thinking the emergency spacecraft would ever be in use. Humans and their inability to see their own mortality is a powerful thing, and a useful thing to know when you never believed in your own invincibility.
Sneaking on was easier than breathing. Now quite literally.
“Think they’re looking for us?” I asked, gesturing to the chunk of metal floating to our left.
“They’ve got more things to worry about than two missing people,” Sarah countered, “We weren’t high on the menu anyway.”
I raised an eyebrow. “We were most definitely reserves though.”
“A light snack maybe.”
“Nah, have you seen my thighs? I’m a full course meal, thank you.”
She laughed, nearly hitting her head against the wall as it flew back. “True, true. I wouldn’t have minded having a slice if you were being served up.”
I grinned as she re-established herself, sneaking another proper look at her face as she checked the dashboard. “I’d be sure to save you the last bite.”
“Oxygen level is now under 1%. Please follow the emergency protocol.”
“God, shut up,” Sarah groaned, kicking a speaker in the wall half-heartedly.
The emergency protocol in question was reconnecting with the station and that was a no go. Even if we weren’t in danger of blending back into the screaming and starving and morally abandoned society that had formed over the past few months on the space station, the spot from the tiny ship was a far quieter and more peaceful place to die.
It suddenly became harder to look at each other, aided with the lack of oxygen flowing to our brains. But this was it, the last voyage. She took her hands in mine, both pairs scratched and scabbed but still warm.
“Any last confessions?” she whispered, her eyes like dripping blackholes, begging to suck me in.
I rested my forehead against hers as our hearts took their final beats, ready to take a bow for their final performance. I brushed the freckles on her left cheek that we once made look like the Lyra constellation with a pen we once found.
“I’m glad it was you.”
by submission | Jul 12, 2025 | Story |
Author: Colin Jeffrey
“The total value of your haul,” said Twopenny Armchair, eyeing the console, “is twelve point five dweebles.”
Kentish Town sighed. It wasn’t enough. It never was. But there was no haggling with Armchair – Town had two fewer fingers on his left hand to prove it. So he took the money, stuffed it in his pocket, and left.
Trudging into the street from the refundery, Town turned the coins over in his hand. Just enough for one crash, but no dinner. Again.
The nearest crash bar was across the street. Not the cleanest place, but it was close and they knew him. Not that it mattered; they’d sell him out quick if he was on a purge list.
Pencil Sketch was on the door, nodding to Town as he entered. Sketch had been a breaker once, but bouncing at the Crash Barn was easier. He still disassembled the odd miscreant, but at least he worked indoors now.
The place was half full. Some were jacked in, others sat at the after bar, vaping synthadone.
Town found an empty crash sack, dropped his dweebles into the slot, and a jack reeled from the ceiling. He flipped open his chest port, plugged in.
The world fell away.
He drifted in velvet black. The crashfield unfolded under a moonlit sky. Floating corridors lined with fog doors swung inward. Stars formed cryptic alphabets in the sky.
He was barefoot on moss. The air murmured memories.
“Town,” said a voice like a whispered thought.
He turned.
Chattel Mortgage stood in a suit of branches, her hair a halo of static.
“You’ve rusted,” she said.
“I didn’t choose this arc,” Town replied, though he wasn’t so sure.
“You didn’t not choose it.” Mortgage plucked a floating door, held it like a mirror. Town saw himself as a boy made of chocolate cake, mouth all cherries. “We all return to where the forgetting began.”
“What is this place?”
“Below the forms. A plane the Crashdrivers can’t scrub.”
“You know me?”
“More than you know.”
A chime echoed, like a bell struck too hard. The doors began closing, one by one, with the sound of fluttering pages.
Mortgage stepped back.
“Damn. A tracebot. Unplug before you’re archived.”
The corridor bent sideways.
Town fell upward into himself.
He gasped awake in the sack, heart pounding. The jack slithered away.
Sketch stood nearby. “Hard crash? You were only eight minutes.”
Town sat up. “Felt like a year.”
Sketch shrugged. “No refunds.”
Outside, the world was harsh, loud. The dream clung like talcum powder on his skin.
In his coat pocket, something rustled. A torn scrap of paper. On it, just one line: Ask the egg what it remembers.
Town knew where to go.
The crash memory sat in his head all the way to the flatlands. Past shuttered stalls and flickering ads, Town reached an oval booth. A Memory Egg.
He hadn’t seen this one since he was a boy, but he remembered. You’d pay a half-dweeble, and it’d spit out a cryptic “memory prediction.” Some crashers said they foretold truths. Most called them junk. The fad faded. They were scrapped.
Except one.
It opened with a woosh. He stepped inside. The walls glowed, the Egg whirred. Illuminated text floated in front of him:
WE REMEMBER WHAT YOU SOLD.
He frowned. “What did I sell?”
YOUR TRUTH.
A flap opened and a silver slip slid out. The egg shutdown.
Town stepped outside, read the words on the slip.
THEY BURIED IT. DIG DEEP.
In his chest, something shifted. Not a memory, just the shape of where one used to be.
