by submission | Jun 7, 2019 | Story |
Author: Sebastien Lacasse
They washed up sometime in the middle of the night, people said. Swollen as rags with seawater and all aglow beneath milky starlight, their bodies glistened as they crawled onto the wet sand and plopped down once free of the surf. The creatures came in every irregular shape imaginable, each one stretching a few inches, coated in thick mucus.
Anna discovered the first early that morning. The sea spray salted her eyelashes until her eyes burned. She came running down from the tall grass, leaving her parents behind in a wake of small footsteps. They trailed after her, invisible snakes winding a curved path to the sea’s edge.
The first one resembled a jellyfish. The second, some sort of eel bent into the shape of a puffy cloud. Anna crouched by one, eyeing the other thousands of glistening creatures from her peripheral.
She poked at it with a stick, watching how its skin sunk with the slightest pressure. Anna turned it over onto its back. No legs or arms. No mouth. It sat on the sand in its grim, grey-tinged silence.
“Anna! What are you doing?” her mother said.
“Nothing!” she lied.
But Anna reached out one sandy finger to touch the thing, just to see if she was, indeed, dealing with nothing. Her skin met its cold, wet flesh and everything flashed an opaque, blinding white.
She swam in this whiteness for a time, looking about for her parents, for the beach, for anything familiar to her. Anna called out to the void, but the whiteness soaked up the sound. Utterly alone she swam on, bound up by the nothingness around her, made free by it too.
A dim color, like a drop of ink on paper, appeared somewhere in the vastness. A faint blue dot that swelled until it was the size of an ocean, until it was the ocean. Peach-colored sand flowed beneath her and met with the ocean again. The little cloud creatures—or maybe jellyfish creatures, she hadn’t decided yet—appeared like stars with the waning of the sun.
Anna stood up, though the world looked different now. Her feet dug deeper into the sand than before, her back stood longer and straighter. Her whole posture was more sure of itself, a new confidence in the leaner, taller body she possessed now.
Sand squashed under purposeful feet behind her. The sound of her parents coming to her side.
“Anna, you’re—” her mother caught those remaining words with a hand over her mouth.
Anna looked down at her body, too long now to really belong to her. Touching the creature pulled her through time like some tugboat of the soul. The future tied a tether to her navel and brought her here to this moment, but her parents still had the smooth faces of youth.
Anna’s father, a man with wide stone hands, took his daughter by the shoulders and looked her up and down. His eyes washed over her from head to toe, then their tide shifted to the sand and the small, grey fish lying there.
It glistened like wet diamonds, taunting them to prod it, to touch it again. He would read later about the futurefish, how they washed up unannounced on shores across the world. He would read how they made strange things happen when touched and that it was best to stay away until their effects could be better understood.
Then he would look at his daughter—all of four years old, but in a body thirty years older—and wonder why he insisted on going to the beach that morning.
by submission | Jun 6, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Your grandfather kept the luck locked away, says my father. It’s Martian, or at least it was found here. No, don’t touch.
The storm rocks the rover, our headlights lost in the swirling dust. We won’t be going anywhere. My father, down from Phobos. The father always away working while I grew up, who never talked about his childhood before.
And this is the firearm your grandfather brought out from Earth. Only has one bullet now. You spin the chamber then pull the trigger.
Certain that the storm dusting half the world would swallow him anyway, with his air getting too thick to breathe, Cal burrowed out of his stalled rover to save Mars the trouble. And tripped over a shiny pretzel of metal uncovered by the wind.
Cal was my grandfather. There’s a picture of him and his first wife, clutching their lucky charm, grinning like fools. A mining rig had loomed from the dust just as he panted his last. What were the odds? It was the beginning of flukes and relentless good fortune for anyone it touched.
Click. No, don’t flinch. Somewhere in the worlds of chance, the hammer strikes an empty chamber, and that world is this one.
No one bet against that winning streak. Soon folk began to ask to touch the luck. Can’t hurt, they’d say. Prospectors. Childless couples. Folk with sick kids.
My grandfather said the artefact was no more intended for luck than a CD twirling in the wind scared off birds. Whatever that meant.
Ill-fortune struck just once. Cal’s first wife was my grandmother. They married young back then. She tried cutting the pretzel in half so kin in distant Pickering could share the luck. A once-in-a-million suit failure.
The luck got locked away after that, and while he lived, my grandfather never let his family touch it, though it still oozed good fortune.
Word spread and a woman from State turned up. Oh, we would get a finders fee. Soon after, the Weeping Plague tore through the colonies and she never came back. Some places had it bad, we heard.
One sol, neighbours crowded our dome, their faces hard. Life here was too much for some. They demanded a share in the luck.
Cal went and fetched the heirloom chest and surprised them with the gun. One of them even moved to stop him before the trigger clicked. Then again. And again. There was a circle on his forehead where the barrel pressed.
That’s the luck, Cal said. You think it’ll let you come in here and take it? Mars knows how to kill folk.
He’s cursing us, one breathed.
Cal’s wife, my grandmother, her unbreakable faceplate cracking. Couldn’t they see? He hadn’t found the luck, it found him.
My father, the only child of Cal’s first marriage, was the first colonist to join NASA. His life was the Phobos Project. Just luck, his step-brothers shrugged.
See it in their faces, he says bitterly. The stupidity of those who always get what they want. You don’t have to be like them.
They will have noticed the heirloom chest was gone. My father wants me to toss the luck back. He thinks he’s letting me choose.
Luck is a word the bitter teach to the ignorant.
Stalled by a dust storm out of nowhere. What were the odds? But we should have known the family would find us. Just luck. Waiting for things to clear before they come knocking.
The twist of shiny metal is surprisingly heavy in my hands.
Let’s see what the luck wants.
by submission | Jun 5, 2019 | Story |
Author: Scott Porter
It was a harsh but beautiful land. Larry stood on the ridge overlooking Homestead Valley. All around him were the bare, fantastically weathered shapes of the Gyrating Mountains. But on the slopes below, vineyards were showing early clusters of grapes, and across the sweep of the valley floor, fields of barley and wheat shimmered in the sun. His irrigation systems had played a part in making all this possible. This year the settlement would not only survive, it would put down roots and prosper.
Someone screamed behind him. “Hookbeaks!” It was Tamara, his beautiful wife. A great, leather-winged beast was swooping down upon her. She swung a rake and sent it tumbling across the yard. Bright flashes erupted all around. Hookbeaks were not the worst thing this planet had. Everyone kept a blaster handy.
Larry drew his and fired in one smooth, well-practiced motion. A hit. “Wait a minute,” he said, looking at the blaster. “How do we charge these things? I mean, this model needs ten-kilowatt hours to charge, and we don’t even have a power station yet. This doesn’t make sense.”
*****
“Good work, Engineer Cooke. You got the reactor’s cooling system back online just in time.”
“Just doing my job, sir.” Larry knew a space station captain was a busy man and didn’t have time for chit-chat. He excused himself and started back for his quarters. Thirty-six hours he had been working. His beautiful wife Tamara, and their two girls would be waiting for him. He passed a portal window that showed a thousand stars etched on the blackness of space, with the sun—from this vantage point of the asteroid belt—only a little larger than the rest. He walked on, but something was bothering him. He pictured the station in his mind. Wait a minute. The station’s spin was oriented to the ecliptic plane. If he was walking on the outer ring, the sun should be below his feet. How could it be in the portal window?
*****
Pod C109 dinged. Jolene punched it up on her screen. Cooke, Larry was rejecting his simulation again. She logged it and authorized the AI to create a new sim for him. Not that he deserved it, the crank.
Jolene hated being on watch. It was only one month out of twelve, but it was so lonely being a podkeeper. She longed to get back to her pod, and her own sweet, simulated life.
The sleeper ship was only ten years into its thousand-year journey. The travelers’ bodies were in fine shape, their physical decay nearly at a standstill. But their minds, even slowed down so the dreams of one REM cycle stretched for weeks, were more delicate things.
So, the AI had the perfect life-dream for everyone, tailored to each person’s experience, and government-approved for all aspects of social adjustment and personal satisfaction. Of course, there were always a few who were hard to please. Who couldn’t just go with it.
The AI’s answer came back. Rejected? The AI was giving up on him? Cutting him loose? Poor Mr. Cooke! A thousand years trapped with his own thoughts!
“Life stinks.” That was the message on the bulletin board as Larry ran past. The sewage treatment plant was failing again. The city never updated anything. No cities did. Everyone was just waiting to abandon earth. And he would be home late again. And Tammy would gripe at him again.
Real life is just too realistic. For everybody . . . almost. In the quiet and dark of the pod, Larry’s face broke into a slow-slow-motion smile.
by Hari Navarro | Jun 4, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
She loves him and he loves her. But here on the stagnant, barely lapping, crust edge of the great acid sea, love is something suppressed. A meaningless and functionless thing to be stuffed away as far as possible from the hearts that ache in their chests.
This an ancient society in which all are expected to provide, to mine deep into the earth for the fingers of god – the morsels they suckle for moisture and fibre, the mash they roll in their mouths.
Her family are miners, exalted providers of food and the special stones with which they build their homes and protect themselves from the sear of the orb, which perpetually burns in the sky.
His father, on the other hand, was a dreamer. A quiet soul who told tales of a great world, another realm that lived and thrived deep beneath their toes. He hated the tight grip of this world, staring deep into the orb, begging for answers as it tore the sight from his head. They found his desiccated body, his face melted away as, in his madness, he’d crawled and drunk from the sea.
She and he both can think of nothing more than to, also, escape from this place. Lost in each other’s arms. He dancing about her and she feigning interest until he falls at her side and nips at her bare neck with his teeth. Laying atop he’d hook her in and together they’d forget about just how acidic and cruel this world of theirs can be.
Today they again ran away over the igneous dunes, farther than they’d ever before dared. And she, again, tastes him as their tongues intertwine and she calls this bitter secretion her love.
They startle, a crackle and a loud sonic snap as beams of brilliantly charged energy jag out like flint spears from their sun.
They run, making for an outcrop that rises out from the peak of the shale surge. Boulders stack atop boulders and they navigate through their maze until there, at its core, a hole.
A hole and the first peeking rungs of a ladder.
Now, you should understand that to them a ladder is a fantastical thing. They’d never seen one, yet they realised at once its function. And, as we all know, there has never been a ladder built that did not lead somewhere. Such enticing things they can be.
Without so much as a thought, they descend and they’re happy as the dim light fades to the blackest of pitch. Down and more down. Stopping only to loop their bodies around each other and through the ladder as they slept. And they dream at once of spinning in space, and they forget what is up and what’s down.
A speck of light appears and, quite suddenly, again they emerge from the hole. A soft rhythmic thump beckons and they take each other’s ripped and blistered hands and they step out into the sun.
But what hangs above them is the most strangest of orbs, its bright surface pitted and grey amid a vast sky, dark as coal and full with glittering flecks. And below it, sweeping out before them, a vast rolling blanket of water and even in this dim light, for they have never known anything but day, they know they are not where they began.
She kisses the smooth scales of his cheek and they step into the lap of the cool, cool sea and they chirp and they click as they stand on the roof of their world.
by Julian Miles | Jun 3, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
It really wasn’t clever. Every time that she went out, they followed her together.
On Tuesday morn when she went out, she carried a huge white bag. Not unusual when going to shop, but laden enough to sag. She sallied boldly round the mazes of the Schwarzenegger Memorial Mall, rushing here and browsing there, not really going anywhere at all.
Everywhere that Mary went, the men in grey went too. Barely pretending to browse or pause, waiting to see what she’d do. Her keen green eyes perused so much, but never lost track of her tail. A reflection here, a glance taken there, a peek through a garment rail. So that was how Mary’s day went by, from mall to plaza to café. Two extra shadows in her wake, mirthless all the way.
As evening stained the sky with dusk, some revellers entered the street. Bright party clothes and brighter smiles, each moving to their personal beat. They exhorted Mary to come and dance, to put down her bag and play. Mary just smiled and shook her head, but joined in with a gentle sway.
So Mary, revellers, and grey-suited men went down to the old shunting yard, where illicit pleasures and loud release could throw anyone off their guard. Amidst that colourful throng, Mary laughed and danced a little bit. Never letting go of the heavy bag, nor showing what was in it.
When twilight turned to night the partying turned serious: three hundred happy lawbreakers became ever more delirious. While at the edge of that gay throng, two suited figures stood stern. People thought they were security – they didn’t cause concern. Until their guns came out, and drones dropped from the skies. One of them had met the gaze of this Mary with blue eyes.
Agents stormed in and the crowd erupted, people running all over the place. But no-one managed to get by, everyone compared to her scanned face. The blue-eyed Mary smiled as she showed the white bag full of jewellery and cash, with a rumpled mess of discarded dress and nice shoes left atop the stash.
They searched high and they searched low, all night and on to midday. But all they found at the end of it all was that Mary had gotten away.
by submission | Jun 2, 2019 | Story |
Author: Robb White
The black hole first appeared in Aaron Jesperson’s upstairs room Thursday night and seemed nothing more than a fuzzy donut, a “wobbly thing,” according to Emma, when she went in to look for him. She found him in the kitchen swearing and holding his hand under the tap.
“Forgot to put your mug under the Keurig again? You’ll be leaving your keys in the fridge next,” Emma said.
She was short on pity, long on rebuke. Aaron gave her a baleful stare but worried she might be right this time. He’d only been retired a year and time hung heavy nowadays.
It was an hour later before Aaron entered the room and discovered what Emma was talking about.
Circular, soundlessly moving, it seemed to just hover there. The “donut thing” crinkled the air at shoulder height. At first, he thought it might be a trompe-l’oeil effect, light from the window hitting the back of the screen just right and producing this strange ripple—but, no, a second glance proved that wrong. It was there; it was no optical effect of light or shade. More disturbing, it moved of its own volition—a tiny shift to the right then back to its spot like a runner running in place.
Gently, cautiously like a child’s first attempt to pet a dog, he set the corner of a DVD case against the outer edge of the swirling eye. The DVD disappeared. Gone! Nowhere to be seen. Just not there anymore.
Aaron flushed with exhilaration.
More DVDs went into the tiny black hole with the same result. Each time, Aaron’s mind anticipated the thrill of the item being snatched—almost like dropping a moth into a voracious spider’s maw. No telltale sound in its wake—just the thing ceasing to exist. A pen, a plastic yellow backscratcher, a pocket dictionary, and a glass paperweight with a scorpion inside all went the same way.
But where, though?
The thought he might have been sucked into the donut and transmogrified into an eviscerated strand of human spaghetti made his knees buckle. His mind couldn’t fathom such a fate, and he remained in a stupor until the doorbell below gave its usual trill.
He left the room, gave a nervous backward glance, lest its ravening maw should send out invisible tentacles to lug him toward it from that distance. He peeked over the banister rail to see the top of Emma’s salt-and-pepper head greeting her older brother with a rambunctious hug and noisy smack of a kiss on the cheek.
Hugh openly despised Aaron and let him know it at every opportunity.
“I have something to show you, Hugh. You’ll get a kick out of it, trust me.”
Hugh sighed theatrically and headed up the stairs, his heavy tread increased the smile on Aaron’s face a millimeter with every step.
Minutes later, Emma called up the stairs for Hugh to come down for his coffee.
“He’s not here,” Aaron said, his beaming face appearing over the rail. At a trot, he came down the steps and took the cup from her and sipped.
Ah, perfect, made with heavy whipping cream and Brazilian chocolate.
Emma’s pout replaced the scowl. “He might have said something to me before he left.”
He smiled thinking about life’s wondrous strangeness, how the banal could become so magical, so monstrously eye-opening all at once. In the echo chamber of his memory, he heard once more the half-finished alto shriek from his brother-in-law’s throat climbing high like an aria’s single silver note in that split-second as Hugh stretched forth a contemptuous arm to touch infinity.
THE END
