by Hari Navarro | Jan 31, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The wood spits and its sputum climbs the back of the heath. Fragments of flame igniting as massing armies upon spent char.
“Is this the end, Frances?”, I ask as the orange caress weeps upon her skin and she tightens the muscles at the base of her back.
“Do we… really care. Any more?”, offers said Frances as I correct my balance and dig the stubs of my legs into the tops of her thighs.
“I want to say yes, but no. I really don’t think that we do. I know that we don’t”… wait now, see there as her long many times broken fingers grip down and claw into the sheepskin hide that splays beneath of our bodies. So beautiful.
“These bastards would have us think that for all the evil and the distrust and the putrid slight of hand that… that…”
“…they are at their very core,,, only are but good.”
“Yes. But their faults are colossal and their desire to make amends so very fleeting.”
“Let me lick the salt’en beads from the cusp of the side of your nose and trace your form with the tip of my tongue as I would with fingers had they not been torn all the way back to my shoulders. Savour every instant as I believe our time here is just about done.”
“I think this also… I just wish there was more about them to love”, she mouths and her fingers trace the seared sinew that appears as time patinaed wood at my chest.
“I loved the smell of vernix caseosa.”
“I loved potatoes doused in balsamic vinegar.”
“We were sent here… to… evolve as they should have. A test group with which to compare and not a thing more.”
“We were thrown here. Nobody cares about the data we have amassed. There is no truth nor guidance to be mined from us now erring on the right side of right if the greedy always sit at the same end of the lop-sided bench. We amount to not more than insects balancing at the end of an unseen leaf.”
“Some believe this world to be flat and some do not. And some of those who do not believe believe instead this spherical plain was created out of nothing by a god that lives on a cloud…”
“End them. Really, just stop them all this instant… I cannot stomach them… “.
“Ok… I will dearest… you whom dragged what was left of me from the wreckage and yet loved me never ever less than completely… I’ll give them a hundred more years but this is their very last chance.”
“You do spoil them so… I love them too.”
by submission | Jan 30, 2022 | Story |
Author: Steven French
I like to think these woods are the remnants of a great forest, where ancient kings hunted and outlaws sought refuge. But at best you could lose yourself, or someone else, among the trees for maybe five minutes. Still, that was all I needed one morning in early May.
What I called ‘The Loss and Despair Twins’ still lingered, so I went out for a walk, along the edge of the woods. As I passed a gaggle of teenagers one of them called out “Hey! How you doing? Hold up, we just wanna talk to you!” Picking up the pace, I turned off the path and pushed my way through some bushes. I could hear the kids behind me and as their shouts and laughter came closer, I rounded a thick grove of trees and came upon an old cottage, solidly built, with roses twined above the porch. I stood for a moment, not quite believing that it was really there, but then hearing the teenagers crashing through the undergrowth behind me I ran to the door and all but fell inside.
Sunlight spilled through one of the windows, illuminating a beautiful table and two chairs. Opposite them, across a clean stone floor, was a bed, already made up. Standing there, I could hear the voices outside and I waited for the teens to come bursting through the door. But after a fruitless to and fro, they left and for a while I remained inside the cottage, feeling more at peace than I had for months.
Almost as soon as I’d stepped outside, however, the Twins returned to gnaw at me, although maybe not as fiercely as before. So, a few days later, I found myself walking up through the trees again. Half expecting to find the place occupied, or used for a party, I pushed the door open to find, instead of empty bottles and cans, just a few leaves that had blown in across the floor. The table and chairs seemed older than I remembered but still, sitting down cautiously, I felt a wave of calm wash over me. Looking across at the bed, the blanket looked a bit worn and the pillows just a bit shabby. But if anything it seemed more lived in and homely. Slowly I relaxed and when I opened my eyes again, the sunlight through the window had definitely shifted and I rushed out, roughly pulling the door closed behind me.
The sense of well-being lasted a couple of weeks but when I next visited the cottage, it seemed even more run down. When I pushed on the door, the wood screeched across the step and there was a puddle in the middle of the floor and looking up, I could see a fair-sized hole in the roof. The bed was still comfy however, even though dust rose in a hazy cloud when I sat down.
I don’t know how long I dozed but when I woke, fat raindrops were hitting my face. Where there had been a bed, there were now just a few rotted pieces of wood and across the room the table and chairs were also broken. As I stepped out of the door, now hanging off its hinges, I felt Loss and Despair finally take their leave. Turning back, beyond the trees I could see only bracken and undergrowth. But squinting, I thought I could make out, in the play of sunlight and shadows, the faint outline of walls and windows. Slowly I raised my hand in thanks and turned for home.
by submission | Jan 29, 2022 | Story |
Author: Majoki
Thang Danang balanced the hypodermic on the tip of her index finger.
Reckless.
Irresponsible.
Crazy.
That’s what her cousin Luc had called her. He’d yelled that her visions of their family ancestors weren’t real, that she was hallucinating.
Thang had pointed to her great grandmother Binh sitting in her finest silk near the gene editing equipment in her lab. “Ask her if I’m hallucinating.”
Throwing up his hands, but trying to dial down his tone, Luc once again tried to explain.
“Thang, I think you’ve got melioidosis. It’s caused by the bacteria Burkholderia pseudomallei. You’re a scientist. A very good scientist. Look it up. It’s a soil bacteria found here in parts of Vietnam. You must have gotten some dirt in a cut or rubbed your eyes when your hands were dirty. Melioidosis can cause an inflammation of the brain and induce hallucinations. You’ve got a disease. A disease that can be treated.”
“I’m not sick,” Thang said.
“You are!” He motioned around the room. “We’re the only ones here and yet you keep insisting our long dead ancestors are with us.”
“They are.”
“They are not, Thang!” Luc raised his voice again. “And they are not directing you to try this crazy experiment. It is wrong and it is dangerous. And you are sick!”
Luc was adamant.
But Thang was certain. The certainty of her ancestors convinced her. For days they’d been appearing in her lab, exhorting her to listen to them. To believe in their dao duc, their virtue and integrity. Her many, many ancestors had come to provide her with the power to protect all her family past, present and future.
And Thang believed the world was her family. As a geneticist, she knew at the mitochondrial level we are all one. And at the behest of her ancestors she was ready to instigate a change at the cellular level that would bring humankind even closer together.
So many of her ancestors had been taken by violence and war, or by the dislocation, crime, disease and famine that war fosters. They were begging her to end humanity’s endless cycles of violence. And Thang could.
In the hypo balanced on her finger was the enzyme she’d developed over years and had methodically tested on a variety of mammals. These were lab animals that displayed overly aggressive and belligerent behavior. Thang’s enzyme radically altered that behavior. Eliminated it. At the genetic level.
Thang had a cure for violence. For war. Her ancestors were sure of it and told her so. Only Luc stood in her way. He was a neurologist. A good scientist, too, and Thang respected him. But, he said she was sick. Out of her mind.
Wild.
Thang looked from Luc to her long gone great grandmother. The living and the dead. The present and the past. She clasped the hypo. Who did she owe more to?
Wild Thang knew the only answer.
The future.
Luc was too slow to react, as she plunged the hypo into the meat of her thigh and depressed the plunger.
by submission | Jan 28, 2022 | Story |
Author: Tara Mukund
“Imagine a giant slice of cake. Multilayered galore. Now replace all the baked matter with Earthen substance – rock, soil, water, and most importantly, humans. There’s your Anthropocene. Now, what if the Anthropocene were anthropomorphic?”
The TV blares at me as I stand transfixed in front of it. A human-esque Anthropocene? Isn’t that essentially a really (and I mean really) scary faux-human who wants to kill me?
A circular blob, somewhat resembling the Earth, floats onto my TV. It features a rotten version of the globes I’ve seen all my life. There’s a ring of eyes circling the Earth’s axis of rotation.
I think I get it. Anthropocene. Anthropo-cene – scene – seen – vision – eyes.
The eyes start to shift furiously. Each individual one lasts for a second, then cuts to another eye. The new one is sometimes entirely different, other times similar. Many of the eyes remind me of cartoons. I’m pretty confident that I just saw a solitary Sesame Street Cookie Monster eye flash by – b-eye. I also think I saw an Ai-Da eye, but that could just be me projecting.
Why shift? It’s almost impossible to focus, it destroys the personability of the supposed anthropomorphic character before me.
Oh! Anthropomorphic. That’s it. Anthropo-morphic – morphing – metamorphosis – transformation – shift.
Huh, it’s an epoch, humanized.
The TV continues to screech.
“Our state-of-the-art Morcene™ model shifts through every single artificial eye ever placed in the public eye. A perfect blend of anthropomorphism and human creation!”
Public eye. I – eye – chuckle, wondering how the narrator stopped themselves from doing the same. Somehow I’ve wound up fixated, watching an advert for a twisted Library – L-eye-brary – of Babel.
Why so many eyes, though? They could’ve placed a pair of eyes solely on the front. But then again, how would we define ‘front’? As much as we make the Earth anthropomorphic, it’s not going to stop spinning, just as much as it isn’t going to start sprouting tufts of hair on its supposed ‘back’. Makes sense.
I squint at the TV as the eyes spin. They don’t come in pairs, almost out for lonely walks (shifts?). I try to count the number of eyes – multiple times, I must add – and arrive at a reasonable estimate of 20-22.
Oh, it’s our time, our epoch. If each epoch were a globe, the eerie – eye-rie – orb would be ours: the Anthropocene.
“A library of all the eyes comes with your Morcene™! Who wouldn’t want to collect every eye ever? In stores today!”
I wouldn’t want the fiery – f-eye-ry – gaze of the Eye of Sauron anywhere near me, that’s for sure.
The eye-Earth-orb fades away.
I stare at the TV waiting for a PSA to conclude this joke – explaining how we’re destroying our planet, so much so that there’s an entire epoch whose name boils down to ‘age of human impact’. I wait, and I wait, but it doesn’t come.
The Morcene™. It’s real. Up till that point, I probably could’ve been the creator of this sardonic yet serious advert – eye jokes and all. We had the name ‘Anthropocene’, and now we have the model, primped and ready-for-purchase. And yet, we have no large-scale, transnational measures to counteract the harm we’ve done to our planet.
＊＊＊
I chuckle again at the memory of the Pillsbury Doughboy’s lone eye finding itself on my TV screen as I stand in line at my local Costco.
My Morcene™? My anthropomorphic Anthropocene? My humanized epoch? It’s now propped on my bedside table. Whether it’s supposed to be a reminder to act, or an object to chuckle at, even I couldn’t say.
by submission | Jan 27, 2022 | Story |
Author: Donna J. W. Munro
“The most intelligent creature wasn’t some begging dog or the hump crazy dolphins,” Randal said to Sophie as they walked the perimeter of the bowl valley waste they guarded. “It’s crows.”
In the distance, a crow laughed at the sky and landed on a gnarled branch that grew from the cracked-up river wash, dry now for fifty years.
Sophie nodded. She’d heard it before. She shifted the rifle further back on her shoulders and glanced through the binoculars to where the crow hopped from the branch onto the ground, picking through pebbles.
“Why, if crows ran the world, we’d probably all be better off,” Randal said, probably for the millionth time.
Not a lot to do out in the wastes of Ohio. Maybe in Manitoba there were green things that grew, but here there was just grit and wind to guard. Still, Sophie didn’t complain. They had it worse down south, living underground because of heat. The interfilms whispered about cannibalism in the caves.
If Randal wasn’t such an idiot, he might have tried to eat her when she’d stumbled across the ragged mountains begging for water from his evaptank. He took her in. Made her his little sister. Back in the old world, they’d have called Randal an imbecile or a retard or some other awful thing. But in this world, he thrived. Things made sense to him and he became the protector of this bit of land.
He collected up living things and protected them in his hill cabin, a buried fortress of shipping containers lined with the flotsam of the old world. No one came here because… there was nothing here. But Randal managed to find the occasional rabbit, worms, a stray cat, and even some little green things he sheltered and grew inside the hill. He’d found her. Any other guy might have mauled her, raped her, killed her for meat. Randal didn’t eat meat. He couldn’t hurt a fly. And the raping? He wasn’t interested in it.
Just a big strong kid with a good heart here at the end of the world.
“Randal, why do you like crows so much?”
He smiled rolling the shovel he carried across the ridge of his shoulder.
“I dream about crows all the time. When I do, the evaptank gets more water and we find plots of fat earthworms to eat. They bring me good luck. Beside you, they’re the only things left around here that talk. Caw-Caw!”
Sophie nodded, pulling her feathery, black skirt up to step over a branch.
“What if I told you that you were the only person left on earth, Randal, and that the crows are taking care of you as best they can. They make up all those stories about other places. Other people. To keep you happy. For old time sake. What if I told you that you are their special pet?”
Randal twisted his mouth as he did when he thought deeper than his pool allowed. “There’s worse things, right Sophie? I’d rather be a crow’s pet than some monster eating babies like they say on the interfilms. But wait… what you say can’t be true, because you’re here. You are a person like me. Don’t be so silly, Sophie.”
She smiled and leaned in toward him, pecking him on the cheek.
“Right, right, Randal. Even so, you’re right. Let’s get back and eat. I bet the rabbits are hungry, too.”
He laughed and as he walked away, muttering happily about the rabbits and the plants in his burrow under the hill, Sophie walked a few steps behind. Parts of her broke off, black and feathery, and flew away, messengers carrying back word of Randal’s needs to the kingdom of crows. The flock of Sophie would keep him alive for as long as they could, for old times’ sake, but after him the whole world would be made up of crows.
by submission | Jan 26, 2022 | Story |
Author: Rick Tobin
“Outrageous! Don’t you dare degrade my mother, you monster! She will never love you.” Pearl pushed her finger at Jake Rosetter’s dark, greasy, pockmarked forehead only half-visible behind his helmet’s face shield in the ready room near exit hatches for scheduled spacewalk repairs. He leaned back hard against blue steel lockers before slamming shut his cabinet.
“Back off, Tindal! What would you know? You haven’t seen her for twenty years. You’ve only got memories. We’ll make our own.” Rosetter yanked his underwear-lining zipper, quickly concealing a slender, four-inch wide, narrow ceramic ingot sealed within dull-gray metal welded to his thin aluminum safety lanyard. His necklace matched dented lieutenant bars on his spacesuit hanging on the adjacent wall. He finished dressing, pushing arms past inner suit linings, exposing silvery warmth gloves emerging through sleeves of his orange work suit.
“I don’t care what kind of pull you have with the Captain. You can’t take her out there. She never liked space. She never entered the void. She lived on Titan, discovering critical methane pools for your struggling Earth, dedicating her life for billions facing death from Earth’s glaciation, but they never knew her sacrifices. How dare you dishonor her legacy playing this damnable charade of passion? It’s not just heresy…it’s insanity.” Pearl pulled Rosetter’s arm as he reached for his outer space suit, delaying his exit.
“Claws off, civi! You know the punishment for grabbing elites?” With that, he pushed Pearl out of arm’s reach. “I won’t press charges, but you touch me again and even your mother’s love won’t protect you…not on this cargo ship.” He stiffened as he pulled the lower half of his exit suit off the mag hangar to a final dressing bench. Soiled outer sleeves and two repaired puncture marks portrayed dangers from off-world ship maintenance where micrometeorites rocketed around Saturn’s gravity. Rosetter pushed Pearl back further against adjacent lockers, hard enough to bang the petite black laborer’s head against metal frames. She came charging back.
“She forfeited her life for your kind, and this is your gratitude—imaginary love, keeping her DNA over your heart? After she died with her team caught in that Sotra volcanic ice blow, her shredded remains were congealed into that pendant. It’s our respect for lost miners. Her shield of dignity was sealed in Pallas City’s temple of high honor. You stole her essence to defile her in your disgusting indulgence.”
“Excuse me if I don’t get it. You’re a Titanese worshipper, as she was, so her soul is somewhere else in some heavenly dimension? Isn’t that what you call it?”
Pearl squinted, pulling her lips back in a snarl. “So what?”
“Cargo engs have no progeny to remember us. We have no legacy. We’re sterile as my suit. That’s the price we rejects from Earth’s declining gene pool pay to preserve their dwindling herd. All I’ll ever have for company in my brief life is one reconstituted clone made from some departed’s cells, but she’ll only survive for two years. I picked your mother for her honesty and loyalty, not some frivolous empty-headed celebrity.”
“I forbid it.”
“You’ll never see us together. The rule is “Never where they lived.” My one-time companion will only know me within this ship’s cramped quarters. I will honor your mother’s memory, as no one else can. Ghosting is reparation for those dying young while traversing deadly radiation belts. Maybe cloning isn’t ethical to you, but it’s legal. It’s the only love I’ll ever have. You had hers once. Now let me have mine.”
