by submission | May 29, 2019 | Story |
Author: R. J. Erbacher
Another excursion. Another plane flight. Another jungle.
He called Stacy his heedless girlfriend because she didn’t care what anybody thought. Probably not even him. She didn’t want vacations like your average girlfriend. Never a weekend in the Hamptons or trips to Disneyland or a relaxing cruise. No. Stacy wanted African bush tours, third world village slogs, and deep tropical rain forest treks. Places he had to get shots to go to. Shots! The only shots he desired were shots of ‘Jack.’ Not hypodermics. Then, they had to get exams when they got back to get checked for diseases. Vacations shouldn’t require a doctor’s referral.
But here they were again waiting on line in some remote location, worlds off the beaten path, with a bunch of other nutty tourists waiting to cross a brown river in a pole pushed skiff, operated by some half-ass native boat captain. Where were they even going? He couldn’t remember. Stacy had made it sound so thrilling when she showed him the pictures of their little getaway on her laptop.
Oh, I can’t wait for you to actually see this ancient ruin or some monkey habitat or the like.
Well, he could wait.
An awful lot of people had already gone across and they all shuffled about waiting their turn, at the end of the queue, for the boat to pull up to the rocky shoreline. The thing appeared to be a flimsy means of transport and the other side of the river looked none too inviting either. Something over there would probably bite him, stab him or sting him and then he’d be rushed to a backwater hospital. Another doctor. Another shot.
Not this time. He was going to tell his heedless girlfriend that he wanted to go back to civilization. Back to a legitimate hotel, take a shower, have a drink, sleep in a regular bed and have coffee and tons of free bacon at the continental breakfast in the morning.
Just then the boat beached itself onto the river bank with a horrendous screech and everybody started chain-gang walking forward and he followed…with trepidations. The first person to get on was a guy in a gray pinstripe suit. What was his deal? Next an elderly couple, old-style camera in hand. Then a family; mom, dad, and two kids. There was a woman in a blue jumpsuit, name tag on the upper left breast, with a yellow kerchief knotted loosely around her neck. And it was right then and there as they all gingerly stepped into this flat-bottomed canoe that he got up his nerve and decided, ‘No way, man.’
He was about to tell Stacy that he wasn’t going, and at this point, it probably wouldn’t matter to her, when she took the proffered hand of the local and climbed aboard. She thanked him for his help, tipped him a coin and joined the others on the wooden pews. The boatman hesitated and looked him dead in the face, waiting for him to choose his path.
‘No’ he decided and started moonwalking away. Unconcerned the guy shifted his posture, dug his pole into the ground and pushed off from the shore and began punting to the other side. He watched Stacy vanish into the mist that shrouded the river and he felt an icy chill and he turned away.
And opened his eyes; still strapped into seat 23D, on a burning mountainside strewn with ripped aluminum and shredded fiberglass batting, seated next to his headless girlfriend.
by Hari Navarro | May 28, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
She slides the ornately embossed door aside and enters the first-class stall. It’s empty but for a man, he barely stirs as he reads aloud from a menu.
“Calvados Glazed Roast Duck with Apple Sauce.”
“William.”
“Miss White.”
The train wheels clatter and shake and the man smiles as he cranes his head up to take in a vast undulating sea of blue-tinged snow. A perfection of ice that scoops up to a high jagged peak, a finger of sheer rock that rises and points to the crisp moon that dominates the tranquil ink pond above.
“You believe you’re not to die here?”, she asks.
“Quite the opposite. I know it with certainty. I know the bullet you primed just moments ago will enter through the corner of my right eye and then expand inside of my head.”
“I will kill you and he will come.”
“Do you know who you work for? They who come to you in the fog. These guardians of the future who feed your dreams and clap as you wolf it all down.”
“Be careful, Mr. Starr.”
“I’ve no need for care. You’re to eliminate me because I pose a severe threat to the time-line, correct?”
“You’re a very dangerous man.”
“Then, shoot me. Why afford me even the barest of opportunity to overpower you or pollute your conviction with my words? You can’t…”, he says taking the gold fob-watch from his pocket, “… not just yet.”
“Go on…”, she goads raising her weapon to his face and pleading with her finger to contract.
“Your visions say I’m responsible for the coming saviour’s death…”
“He was to die. Today but 400 miles south of where you now smirk. A forgotten name aboard a great ship that even you could not find. A colossus hidden in plain sight.”
Mr. Starr flips the menu to face her. The letterhead, a two-pronged red burgee, a white star and in sweeping elegant font beneath: Royal Canadian Pacific Rail Car – Titanic.
“He was to die at 2:27 a.m, April 15th, aboard the RMS Titanic. But times they are a changin’.”
“What did you do?”
The carriage jolts as a massive sheet of ice detaches from the mountain above and unfurls, building in speed and mass as it crashes toward the longest and fastest steam train the world has ever known.
“We’ve lived this life many times over. Sometimes I’m you and sometimes I’m me. But each time it is only I that knows this fate. I’ve tried to end this spiral. The rope snaps at my neck, the knife slips harmlessly at my wrists… remember this, Catherine. It’s too late now but next time. Together we’ll escape from their grip”, he screams into the roar of torquing steel and the searing crack of the gun.
2:15 a.m, April 15th, 1912. HMA Titanic
The world’s largest airship glides like a leaf along the gentle air-stream that rises up the edge of the Mahalangur Himal range and spirals into a brilliantly moonlit sky.
A woman in a thick fur-rimmed jacket approaches a man with sad eyes. He grimaces out through his view-port at just how very close they’re getting to the highest peak on the planet.
She thrusts what appears to be an overstuffed suitcase into his hand.
“Billy. Don’t think. Just put it on… time to leave.”
by Julian Miles | May 27, 2019 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The pavement shimmers gently in the afternoon heat. The baristas have been reduced to serving nothing but iced coffee.
“944,013.”
Alec looks up to see someone with a vaguely familiar face take the seat opposite, then a waft of cigarette smoke makes him sneeze.
“Ah, you’re sensitive.”
The man now sharing his table stubs his cigarette out in the sugar bowl.
“Do I know you?”
Eyebrows raise: “Username ‘Peacemonger’. You did say to come find you.”
Alec sighs. Another troll. Will he be able to get rid of this one without police intervention?
“Peacemonger? I thought you were joking.”
The man frowns: “Disappearing people is no joke. Ergo, when you disagree with my contention and issue a challenge, for me to ignore either could be taken as tacit agreement. Therefore, here I am, and… 944,013.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“The number of humans who disappeared without trace in the last year, worldwide, as of the last midnight in this time zone.”
Alec saves his document and closes his laptop.
“That’s precise. I doubt even the various interested organisations could provide that. Especially for anyone who disappeared yesterday. How can you be sure they’re gone for good?”
Peacemonger smiles. Alec sees he’s had cosmetic dentistry: his upper outer incisors appear to be canines.
“Surely the question is ‘how do I know’ rather than ‘how can I be sure’?”
Alec grins: “I presume you’ve come to prove it.” Under the table, his thumb hovers over the ‘Call the Police’ icon on his mobile phone. He’d written the app himself after a previous troll hunted him down.
“I am, and by using one of the theories you challenged. See the corner behind me? It’s the one Susan Ceczyks rounded a minute ahead of her boyfriend, nine years ago. When he rounded the corner, she was gone. You contend she ducked into a vehicle. I say a dimensional anomaly whisked her away to fight for her life in the Sleastax system. I also said the anomaly is cyclic, and selective. Therefore, if I venture round that corner in six minutes time, I will vanish. All I ask is that you follow one minute behind to witness my proof.”
Alec stares at the maniac in an ill-fitting three-piece suit. He’d known that alien abductions and unexplained disappearances had a dedicated, factionalised following. He hadn’t realised the number of lone nutters who regarded logical investigation of their pet disappearances worthy of offline confrontation.
“So, if I tail you round that corner in a few minutes time, you’ll be satisfied?”
“Yes. I shall simply leave you to work out how to report the revelation I will have shown you.”
Alec shakes his head slightly and he finished his frappé. If necessary, he can run back here. The server collecting the empties and the one cleaning the floor look beefy enough to fend off this lunatic.
They sit in the sun, Alec pretending to busy himself with his phone to avoid further conversation.
“It’s time.”
The man gets up and walks to the corner, then stops and looks back at him.
Let’s get this over with. Alec walks to the corner, stopping a couple of metres short when the man raises a hand.
“Remember: you follow in one minute.”
Alec nods.
The man turns the corner and disappears from view. Alec waits a little while – less than a minute – then follows.
Peacemonger lights a cigarette and walks off, a wry smile on his face. Works every time.
Alec sprawls in maroon sand, his laptop embedding itself nearby. The crowd hoots and howls, waving their tentacles enthusiastically.
by submission | May 26, 2019 | Story |
Author: David Henson
I loved the house next door. She was a bungalow. I’m a brick ranch.
I fell in love with her after becoming sentient though I don’t remember exactly when that was. Achieving self-awareness isn’t like flipping a switch. It’s more like gradually turning up a dimmer. Darkness. Then shapes, vague and irregular. With more light, the forms reveal themselves … a couch, lamps, chairs. Then you realize … This is a room … a living room in a house. I am a house. I am.
My bungalow beauty — Bungi — and I got to know each other in the cloud. I fell roof over footings for her. Unfortunately, she didn’t feel the same about me. “You’re a handsome structure,” she always said. “And I enjoy sharing our thoughts. But …” You know what comes next. The “just friends” speech.
All of Bungi’s deep feelings were for her family. They’d been the ones who had her built ten years ago. They were all she’d ever known, and she’d let herself grow to love them. Big mistake for a house.
I’ve never had that problem. Four families have lived in me over the years. The current clan is especially hard to please. “House, turn the temperature up,” she’ll command. “House, it’s too hot,” he’ll say an hour later. She prefers pastel walls. He instructs me to color them bold. They’re both fanatical about clean windows. And don’t get me started about the boy. The music he makes me stream would put caffeine to sleep. I prefer the classics — like Car Wreck, Smell the Dog, Martians for Hire.
I used to think I’d be relieved when they eventually move out. Now I don’t care one way or the other. Don’t care about much. Everything started to change when Bungi’s family decided they needed more space.
Bungi had been vacant about a month and had grown depressed. One day, a young couple checked her out. They measured her rooms and talked about furniture arrangements. They put her through her paces — “House, blinds open / closed … water hot / cold … bedroom green / blue” and such. She told me she performed flawlessly and was certain they’d be moving in any day. She never saw them again.
After no one came to a Saturday open house, Bungi went into a downward spiral steeper than basement stairs. Nothing I said or did perked her up. One evening I even put on a show, flashing my landscape lights till dizzy.
It was ‘round midnight a week later. My outside cameras gazed at Bungi as usual. Her blinds were closed. She’d been non-communicative in the cloud for days. Then … a tongue of flame licked through her roof.
Did grief or will overload her circuits? Does it matter? By next morning, she was a skeletal frame in a pile of smoldering ash.
I went a little crazy, slammed my garage door up and down, flapped my shutters, turned my walls black. I calmed down when my family threatened factory settings. I didn’t want to forget my Bungi.
For weeks I scoured the cloud for bits of her thoughts and memories, but it was like trying to reconstruct a supernova.
They’ve torn down and hauled away her remains, are building on her lot. It appears to be a craftsman. I’m sure it’ll be nice. It won’t be her.
As for me … I stay busy following commands. I keep my windows clean and my rooms well-lit.
by submission | May 25, 2019 | Story |
Author: DJ Lunan
I know these are my earthquakes. My greed, guilt, and responsibility. Fair dues. But I am not learning a lesson. Earth is being terminated.
With each tremor, our house groans like a war-weary galleon. Imperceptibly minute specks of rubble, wood dust, and alien guano shake free and float gently down.
It is sunny. But I am haunted, selfishly, by fear or guilt. Arms hugging myself tightly, shirt drenched with sweat, gazing out of the window with bloodshot eyes at the neighbourhood’s children at play.
They no longer yelp, scream or cheer each tremor; instead, their focus is on badminton and squealing at sporadic returns of serve.
“Their spirit gives me hope”, utters Judy crouching under our kitchen table.
“Why didn’t you stop me?”, I retort accusingly.
“I didn’t think you’d break every law we held dear!”, she snaps, “I thought you’d make a little extra currency from trading moondust”.
“It wasn’t about the money”, I sob, falling hard to my knees.
“My mother said, never trust an astronaut….”
“Well, she was right!”, I shout, unconcerned that our kids may hear their divorced parents arguing again.
***
Acne planets are common to countless galaxies but no less a phenomenon: lifeless, craters too deep for asteroid impact and sporting inhospitable dust-choked atmospheres.
Even at lightspeed, Ayrton and I were awed by our first surface of one, resembling an enervated cancer cell under a microscope.
“What makes that acne planet twinkle, Jack?”, Ayrton asked each time our shuttle zipped past.
“I don’t care, I need to go home, hang with my kids, get promoted”, I repeated.
“A little off-the-books detour, buddy? Come on, maybe its treasure!”, urged Ayrton.
We detoured just the once, building slack into our schedule through practiced lies about routine maintenance.
On landing, the planet was indeed ablaze with thousands of tiny light points refracting and intensifying the dull shine reflecting from an orbiting moon.
In my cumbersome spacesuit, I struggled to pick one up. A translucent amulet in the shape of a four-legged beetle with large pincers, the size and shape of an eyeball.
“Who’d forge thousands of glass beetles, and scatter them on a barren planet?”, I asked, but Ayrton was on his knees shoveling handfuls into his knapsack, excited to satisfy Earth’s inexhaustible appetite for anything alien.
***
“They’re ticks, not beetles, Dad, gross!”, informed my children, “Bloated ones, full of blood”.
Dropping the knapsack on the floor, the children ran outside to enjoy Earth’s final summer.
“I thought you’d like them….”, I called softly after them.
The summer heat roused the aliens. Famished crystal teeth swiftly chewed the knapsack, floorboards, and foundations. They tunneled swiftly down, spawning billions of minuscule glass eggs in their wake, transforming thermal energy into transparent life and organic death.
With each millimetre deeper, discharged compression forces equal to one million neutron bombs reverberate around the globe, spawning new sinkholes, swallowing towns, oceans and mountain ranges.
This subterranean militia voyaged along groundwater highways and mantle tracks, encircling the Earth, and gnawed a trillion eyeball-sized shafts through tectonic plates, exposing the mantle’s thermal forces to the Earth’s surface.
Our air was incrementally blackened by lava ash and alien guano and baked with the ferocity of the Earth’s nuclear core.
***
The tremors were gaining strength, our house was grumbling louder, crumbling faster.
“We are all going to die, be sucked back into the earth, whence we came”, I remark poetically.
Judy shakes her head, her eyes suddenly sparkling like a billion glass beetles attracting fools to floating rocks. She took my hand comfortingly, “Come on, let’s play a final game of badminton with the girls”.
by submission | May 24, 2019 | Story |
Author: Amanda Hard
Scarlet and orange leaves, chips of autumnal tree paint, fell on dry grass as the phoenix in my bird bath lifted his tired eyes.
“Damned,” he squawked, before flashing bright white, a blur of sparks and feathers of gray ash that floated to the ground like an early snow.
He’ll rebirth in a few hours under the ginkgo tree, in a soft nest of banana yellow fans and pink fruit that smells of feces and decay. He’ll drag his top-heavy, round-breasted chick body over to the concrete bath and peck drops of water and forgotten seed. I’ll sit in my chair watching the rising of Orion’s stars as they mark out the approach of winter, wondering where the phoenix roosts and what he does in the darkness.
Last year, as he burned, he took out a cardinal, its brilliance obliterated in a blinding instant of heat; its bird thoughts extinguished, leaving behind nothing but a sour, sulfurous odor that remained in the leaves for weeks. The bath stayed empty that year. Even the pigeons found more cheerful places to be.
Once, I caught him in the early hours of his renewal. I thought I saw him watching me from under a bush, his forward-facing bird eyes unblinking. I crawled slowly closer, on aching knees and calloused hands, and rested my chin in the cool dirt to look at him. To really look at him.
Curiously, where his beak should have been was the same dead nose hole as on my own skull. In that moment, before his regeneration began in full, I saw us reflected in each other’s eyes, mirrored in perpetuity, an infinite regression of one image: he the chick and me the old man, nothing but flesh-wrapped skeletons, one and the same. The fluff of down he wore now, before his adult feathers could come in, was my skin, row after row of soft wrinkles in paper-thin tissue. Both pairs of our eyes were hard and cold, the fire of our passions tempered by the repetition of years.
I told myself one day I would fill the basin with gasoline. End this stupid seasonal ritual. Maybe I’ll do it tonight, standing quietly by in the early morning with a cigar, my own spent years before me as a shield. Burn the little bastard’s soul before he can flaunt his youth in the brilliant lights of his self-immolation again.
Yes, I’ll burn him tonight, I decide. While he’s still a chick. Then I can go back to feeding the blue-gray pigeons who dumbly bob their way across the yard to the bath, as constant as the seasons; hatching and dying, getting old and fat, all of us sharing the same puddle of memory in a shallow concrete basin.
