by submission | Jul 18, 2025 | Story |
Author: Rachel Geman
“So, yes, I can go? Mom! Hello!” Lara looked at Kate expectantly.
“Where?” Kate asked.
“Upstate. The mushroom hunt. You promised. Everyone is going. You SAID I could go.”
Kate fiddled with the slime-covered handle of the lilac mug. A second ago she could have sworn it was corporate branded.
“YOU said I could go.”
Giving in felt pre-ordained
“You said I could GO!” Lara softened. “Please, it would make me so happy.”
Kate relented.
** ** **
“She wants to read the line three different ways to decide. That ok?”
“Long as no overtime, and please don’t let her steal the mug.”
** ** **
That weekend Kate took a friend’s advice to travel as well. A metallic taste reminded her of pregnancy. Kate arrived at “Tandem” at twilight to bike with the last group. At a market during an unplanned rest—one rider’s inflammation level was in zone orange—Kate selected a water box and some protein. She wondered whether Lara was hydrating and whether Kate’s own adventurousness would make Lara more careful in subconscious preservation of parent-child balance.
At dark, the bikers had to decide: continue, make camp, or split the bike four and four. Kate feared choices.
“I’m so very sorry in a way that our words cannot express, but the time to choose is now.”
Who said that? Kate demanded, heart pounding, before the night swallowed her.
** ** **
She woke up to the strong sun, among a group of four, re-closing her eyes as a couple described a diner to the man who needed the rest. The voices deepened. With all the new elements, was there a balloon that was the opposite of Helium?
“We’ll get more work done.”
“I’d love some air.”
“Someone needs to monitor these clients, we’re down a person.”
Four, Kate, mentally corrected, they were down four people. The metal was back.
** ** **
“He mined the profits. Company’s in receivership. We have orders to stand by. Diner?”
“We’ll get more work done with delivery.”
“True, though I’d love some air.”
“As long as the diner, fine.”
“Someone needs to monitor these clients, we’re down a person.”
** ** **
The foursome arrived at a fruit and bug stand in front of a field of gleaming corn. No one was around. A loud rustling made Kate’s throat tighten. Two people emerged from the field, one swatting flies, his hands propeller like, the other still even in forward movement, her hands by her sides. Lara.
“Lara?” CRISIS, Kate thought, there was a crisis, and Lara had come to find her. But that was not how things worked, was it, the child finding the lost mother?
Lara remained inert. Kate feared the worst, travel with a strange man, trauma-based inversion.
“Mayday. Cut it,” she heard, then her phone beeped. A video call, Lara, fluid and relaxed. And far away. “Mom, you look weird!”
Kate looked from the phone to the Lara right in front of her, confused. Her vision blurred, then nothing but a sea of metal and buzzing.
** ** **
During the children’s pandemic, some spent their life savings for even one year in the virtual machine. A baby who died at one would be two. Lara died at 11. Kate, wealthy enough, selected the indefinite option.
A former child model with an extensive digital footprint, Lara was ripe for desperate copying by the Loss Prevention department as company assets disappeared
Kate was offered three children as a settlement, but opted to die a quick death in a freak biking accident when Lara was 16.
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 Julian Miles | Jul 14, 2025 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
Water drums upon my helmet, makes a low hissing as it streams over the audio pickups, and fills the air with splashing sounds as it cascades from my armour to fall inside and outside my impromptu shelter.
There’s a rhythm to this. It’s complex, but my sis used to be a drummer. I can pick it out – or trick myself into the comfortable illusion. Either is good: my breathing has slowed and heartbeat is steady.
Refuge this isn’t. It’s a hide. Beyond the deadening provided by the water, I can still hear comrades and strangers dying while our armoured offensive burns amidst the ruins of what used to be a capitol city.
Am I going to venture out? Only if the water stops. I think I glimpsed a fire blanket on a wall further down the hallway: should have thought to grab it. In my defence, I was moving as fast as possible in near-mindless terror at the time.
General Astaren said it better than I ever could:
“The rumours you’ve heard about the Ressen using giant flying creatures are nothing but- Jezuz fucking Christ! A dragon!”
His transmission crackled and stopped a few seconds later; seconds we spent listening to several hundred soldiers suffering fiery deaths.
While we stared at each other in a mix of disbelief and panic, what came for them crossed the intervening kilometre and hit us. The minutes after that arrival will disfigure my dreams forever.
The water trails off to a trickle that thuds down on my left shoulder.
“Fuck my life.”
I chose it, but still. The posters had promised a short, glorious war followed by victory parades and eternal partying. So far, the only accurate words from that description have been ‘short’ and ‘war’.
These things look like dragons: four legs, two wings, long tail, long neck, wide head. Their scales are mirror-bright and impervious to everything we’ve thrown at them. Their ‘firebreathing’ seems to be some form of plasma. Whatever the science involved, the effect is bright and devastating.
Their flying is as far from clumsy as nobody expects from two-hundred-metre-long reptiles. They can manage bursts of Mach 2, can hover briefly, and combine the two abilities in dazzling displays that remind me of the gravity well antics my grandfather used to do for a living at the family fairground.
“Bingo One? That you, Greg?”
The f-!
“Bingo Med? Charlie, you made it?”
“Most of me. Lost an arm, but the MedOp backpack I always complained about turned out to be quicker than death. I feel great, but tomorrow’s going to be no fun.”
“I like your optimism. Where are you?”
“Huddled in a shower in flat 218. You?”
I chuckle.
“You remembered that old joke too? I’m in same, somewhere on the third floor. Did your water just stop?”
“A few minutes ago. I’m thinking we need to move.”
An idea occurs: I run a quick allies scan.
“Just got scanned. Tell me it was you.”
“Yup. You’re right below me.”
I point my ‘urban entry facilitator’ at the floor and fire the last round, then tumble through the hole.
Charlie gives me a thumbs up.
“Tidy landing. Shall we get down to fucking off?”
After pulling her to her feet, I take a moment to run an extra tensioner round her torso to secure the MedOp pack against her ruined upper right side.
“I didn’t even feel that.”
“Another pain for tomorrow.”
“Down to the sewers and go left?”
“Good plan.”
She thumps my chestplate.
“Let’s move.”
Hope those scaly fuckers can’t dig as well as they can fly.
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.”
