by submission | Aug 22, 2018 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro
She sits at the console, the warm glow of beading sex sits at her lip and the sleeping monster it shifts and turns in her bed. Silently her fingers glide, swirling across the holographic keyboard that projects from sensors embedded into their tips.
The face that stares from her monitor is that of her lover, a man she has never once met. A man whose skin she’d not brushed against and whose scent is as unknown and alien as the shale plain that lays chill in the darkness beyond the blast shutters at her back. His name is Frank, though nobody knows that but she. In the world of electronic interplanetary sex, he is Blackbird 73-52.
Pinching the corners of her mouth she draws her thumb and index finger together, puckering her lip so as to absently chew at its bulge. The texture of flesh between her teeth and the faint hint of blood comforts as she reads his words.
Carnal words hastily typed, error-filled filth that deteriorates with the ever increasing beat of her breath. Words that wrap and pulse within her in ways that those of the monster never could, nor ever would.
The monster is her husband and she had two monster children. They aren’t monsters. But she has no other word to describe what it is they become. She sees monstrosity as they silently conspire, as they parade before her in flesh suits tailored perfect and stitched just so.
She knows they’ve shifted. The people they were last week is not who they are today. And then, they will change back. Life focusing and blurring, a fucked up iris in constant and perpetual flux.
Franks words taper to exclamation marks and the blood in her veins it quivers. In all the twenty-three months they have been communicating he has never changed. He the one constant in her life. A life where the corridor that backbones her living module grows doorways at will. Where things in photographs evaporate and memories are thought and not spoken.
Her reflection ghosts that of his image and she again sips from her lip. A truth is being hidden from this man she has told everything.
“You good?”, he types in words that have recovered their poise.
“Always”
“Been thinking about what you told me, the shifting”
“I know what I see”
“I looked into instances of similar cases… where people claim that things change or are substituted”
“I’m not a case”
“There are cases, sorry, reports that suggest that maybe these kinds of feelings…”
“It’s not a feeling”
“… that they can be triggered by historic trauma, sometimes. An event that has you subliminally alter your surroundings so as to remaster the event. To warp time, to protect yourself and those you love”
“From what?”
“From whatever it was that hurt you”
The ensuing silence lasts but a moment, just long enough for a fracture to appear. A crack in the shell that had calcified and entombed a long forgotten memory.
“It was a cage under a house that smelled like wet concrete”
“Come, live with me. The children too”
“I cant”
“It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s a cage built around a cage. Meet me. This thing we have created here can live and breathe in the real world too”
“I can’t. You’ll shift, you’ll change. You won’t want to but you will. I know this. Frank… I’m one of them too”, she laments as her infant son slides open the door and the hallway light warps her reflection on the screen, bubbling and splitting it in two.
by submission | Aug 21, 2018 | Story |
Author: William Gray
These bite marks on my forearm. Just below the crease of my elbow.
They’ve always been there, even as a child growing up on the colonies of Ganymede.
Their pattern is unique. All slim, clean lines with the exception of one wide, jagged rip exactly where the brachial artery carries oxygenated blood to my hand.
I’m not sure how long the wormhole tossed me about. My guess? Somewhere between a day and a millennium. The time was mostly darkness, with a periodic fitful nightmare, the same one every time.
Hot yellow teeth melting into my flesh.
#
The wormhole hiccuped me out near a planet that, so far, has been a pleasure to explore. Oxygen is plentiful. Sunlight peeks through a canopy of gigantic palm leaves high above. A cool, dry breeze weaves its way through the fabric of my expedition suit as I explore the new terrain.
I have not yet encountered any humanoid life forms. Numerous rodent-like species prey upon each other in a bid for survival, but they leave me alone. The insects are harmless. No reptilian forms. I have seen giant birds flying above, similar to depictions of Earth’s ancient Pterodactyls, but I am yet to see one up close.
With its extensive family of moons, eclipses on this planet are common. Partials happen almost daily. However, considering how dark it’s getting, today’s might be full totality.
As the eclipse resolves and light returns, the air feels heavy. I work harder to breathe, as if atmospheric oxygen levels are dropping.
A haggard old man approaches. His kyphotic spine is bent to a right angle. His beard is braided into individual strands which are woven into larger braids, hanging low, creating a curtain that hides his apparent nakedness. He ambulates with both hands on a gnarled wooden staff. As he gets closer, the heavy air turns salty.
He is in a hurry, as if he must accomplish something before what life he has left is spent. He winces and struggles forward, as if pushing past the excruciating pain of severe arthritis.
As he stands right in front of me, I start to wretch. It smells like someone pissed on a pile of rotten sardines.
He flashes a smile, a mouthful of brown-yellowed teeth. One in front is a single fang, thick and serrated. It spikes down over his lower lip, into his beard, embedding itself into the nest of braids.
He crouches down, takes a final breath, and somehow finds the energy to pounce on me like a tiger.
As he is a frail old man, I didn’t think I was in any danger. I did not anticipate this at all. I have no time to retrieve my weapon before his teeth sink into my neck.
The jagged hot incisor plunges into my carotid, boiling the blood coursing within.
#
These bite marks on my neck. Just above the clavicle, where tendons bind it to the top of my sternum.
They’ve always been there, even as a child growing up on the colonies of Ganymede.
Their pattern is unique. All slim, clean lines with the exception of one wide, jagged rip, exactly where the carotid artery carries oxygenated blood to my brain.
I’m not sure how long the wormhole jostled me about. My guess? A couple hundred minutes or a couple hundred centuries. The time was mostly darkness, with a periodic fitful nightmare, the same one every time.
Hot yellow teeth melting into my flesh.
by Julian Miles | Aug 20, 2018 | Story |
Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer
The snow is so fine it sometimes drifts about for hours before finally settling. The result is a mist that makes everything vague before fallen snow obscures it completely. This being acid snow, obscuring may become erasure when thawing drenches everything in acid.
On organics, the snow is quicker to harm. Every member of our group has snowburn – blotches where snow melted on contact and scarred the skin. You’ve got to be well covered to survive out there. Even the toughest organics have a lifespan measured in days, which drops to hours if any snow is allowed to melt on whatever it is.
Every lair has a sluice, where those coming in are rinsed thoroughly as soon after entry as sensible. Filtering the water used is a continuing nightmare, as we can’t let it contaminate our potable supplies and even the vapours are noxious to varying degrees.
“Rack and ruin, rain and burn, will we see another turn?”
It’s a well-known rhyme, used to keep those who pedal the generator in time. Everyone gets to pedal, it’s a rule. Electricity allows us to keep the luxuries going, like educators for the kids and the special lights that keep the plant vats growing.
Vegetables: beans, okra, cucumber, melon, and more. We have nineteen varieties. That gives us trading rights with every group for ten miles. We even get trekkers that come from the haven over at Lewes and the forts at Southampton. They’re hardened types, grown from ex-military cliques. I’d call them strange, but we’re all a little ‘off’ these days. Good thing is, with the end of natural fresh water and everything wet falling from the skies liable to melt your face, the bandit problem just petered out. You can’t raid to live anymore.
“I’d question if we’re actually living.”
That’s Ethel. She’s looking over my shoulder, getting a feel for this writing thing. Someone has to, and she’s inherited her mother’s knack for words. All she needs to do is take the plunge and write something from what she feels, rather than what she sees. It’s a factual existence, these days. No room for whimsy when the planet’s out to purge you.
Which brings me to her question. We’re working very hard to live. So hard that anything not directly associated with it has been let go. Me writing is a gift from having lost my legs in a bad fall. I needed something to do, so I’m writing a guide to everything we do, so we don’t lose any of the ways we’ve worked so hard to perfect – and continue to refine.
“You and Kaden Leader are the same. Keep insisting that we’ll eventually be able to not work at surviving all the time. I still don’t understand what we’ll do with – what do you call it?”
“Free time.”
“That. What do you do with it?”
“Anything you want. Do something for fun. Relax.”
“Not sure I’d like that.”
“You’ll be surprised.”
She thinks on that, then grins.
“When it happens, I’ll cope. Like we always have to.”
I laugh for so long she wanders off in disgust, not understanding just how funny the idea of people having to cope with free time is.
Which is unfair. I can remember people, long dead, who’d agree with her. They had the same problem, even back when we had non-lethal snow and leisure time.
by Stephen R. Smith | Aug 19, 2018 | Story |
Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer
I look out the viewport to the crushing void of space.
It doesn’t feel real. I don’t feel connected to any of this, out here alone amidst all this nothing.
“Put all the weight on the balls of your feet and press them into the floor,” advice from an old teacher. “It’s impossible not to remain present when you’re focused on feeling the floor. It will help center you in the moment.”
I shift my weight forward, but instead of the floor, I’m pulled back into a distant memory.
Shadow coloured stones crushed and scattered under sneakers. Our passage unheard, we had slipped silently across the rooftop expanse to its eastern face. Lumbering ventilation units dotted the rooftop at intervals, drinking heat from the spaces below to exhale in great humid sighs. These were the only sounds to disturb the pre-morning air. There were no bird songs, no passing craft, no murmuring undercurrent of peripheral lives.
It was the silence before the break of day.
The two of us sat, silent, legs dangling into space from the parapet, the last of the previous night’s beer in hand, each of us absently slaking the thirst neither of us felt anymore.
It’s not the night’s antics that made this moment memorable, indeed I don’t remember anymore what we did that night. I barely remember the rising of the sun itself, though I’m sure as always it was worth the wait.
The memory, rather, is of two unlikely friends sharing the last moment we’d know together, in silence, waiting for the sun to rise and give us permission to leave one another, to go to our separate futures.
It is those few moments, that shared time of solitude so exquisitely inscribed upon which I now reflect. A time remarkable in its clarity, plucked from a sea of murky memories, of happenings that have long since faded from view.
I blink and she’s gone, as the rooftop is gone, replaced with the gnawing emptiness.
What I wouldn’t give for one more morning like that, for one more rising of any sun.
by submission | Aug 18, 2018 | Story |
Author: David Henson
I wake up sweating, check the alarm clock. Three fifty-nine? Too light. I fumble for my watch. Almost 10.
“What’s wrong with the a/c, Daniel?” Jean says sleepily.
***
I come back from Kyle and Lisa’s across the street. “They don’t have power either. And there’s no Sunday paper. Must be out across town.”
“I tried to call Lorraine, but there’s no service,” Jean says.
“I guess everything’s gone down.”
I find an old transistor radio and change batteries. It hisses across the dial. How widespread is this?
“Let’s drive around and see what’s going on,” Jean says.
I shove up the garage door, get in the car and turn the key. Nothing. Jean tries her car. More nothing. We go outside and stare into the sky.
“Our cars won’t start,” Kyle yells.
***
Jean holds her phone in one hand, the hissing radio in the other. “I’m so worried about Lorraine. Why would this happen now when she’s due any day?”
“Randolph will look after her. They probably don’t even have an outage in Ridgefield,” I say, trying to ignore the radio.
“Maybe we could ride our bikes there.”
“A hundred miles? We’d never make it in this heat.”
Her face glistening, Jean goes to the kitchen sink, holds a dishcloth under the faucet and lets the water run. The flow quickly trickles to a stop.
“Guess the water company’s lost power, too,” I say, wondering why its standby generators aren’t working.
We sweat out the day, constantly trying the phone, the cars, and the radio. We finally give up around midnight.
Around 3:30 a.m., I slip out of bed, towel off sweat, and go to the picture window in the living room. There’s an eerie red glow in the sky. I notice movement across the street. Kyle and Lisa? Someone —something — else? I need to keep my imagination in check. I lean closer to the window, hear a noise behind me, and whirl around.
“Too hot to sleep.” Jean goes to the window. “I see Kyle and Lisa can’t either. Daniel … this couldn’t be some sort of … invasion? That’s crazy, right?”
I hear shouting outside. Sounds like Kyle and Lisa arguing. “More likely the heat wave caused it. Or hackers. Probably hackers.”
“But the cars. How could hackers do that?”
“Well, most are connected to the internet nowadays. Not older models though.” I realize that’s a clue. “When it’s light, I’ll bike to the overpass. Bet I see a few cars.” I take my wife’s hand. “Let’s try to get a couple hours sleep.”
***
I lie awake in pools of sweat. At 3:59, the alarm clock glows red. “Jean,” I whisper with relief. She doesn’t respond so I slip quietly out of the bedroom and turn on a 24-hour news channel. A woman talks only, and cheerfully, about the heat wave. Not a word about the outage. I tune a local station on the radio. More happy talk about the heat. Drenched with sweat, I go outside hoping for a breeze, but it’s dead calm and already a scorcher. I make out Lisa in the predawn glow. She seems to be digging. “Beautiful day,” she says.
I stagger back inside. Warm air pours from the vents.
Jean’s at the thermostat. “Won’t this go any higher?”
“Why in the world would you … Have you checked on Lorraine?”
“You should forget about your daughter,” Jean says. She looks at her watch. “And Randolph, too.” She comes toward me. There’s not a drop of sweat on her.
by submission | Aug 17, 2018 | Story |
Author: Mark Joseph Kevlock
Solinsky sat upon the mountaintop and watched his hometown die. As the sun set at his back, the farthest outskirts of the city fell into shadow first. Solinsky had his telescope trained there, upon the edge of town. He gasped to see the first of them fall.
A young boy and his father both collapsed, there in a backyard. An old woman fell dead crossing the street. Lovers on a front porch glider intertwined in an unnatural embrace.
They all needed the sun to live. The rays gave them energy, vitality, existence. The instant the sunlight ceased to touch their skin, they all fell away dead.
The curtain of descending shadow widened to encompass a local bar, a pool hall, a diner. Bodies collapsed. The tomb grew wider. Solinsky could not look away.
Cars struck curbs. One took out a fire hydrant. No shower of water could awaken these corpses. From end to end, citizens succumbed. No one, not even pets, survived the coming of night.
The sun had been their only fuel, it seemed.
Solinsky wept. Then he put down his telescope to go take a closer look at the tragedy. He hopped in his car and raced down the dark side of the mountain, toward what little light was left.
They couldn’t help it. Oh, they just couldn’t stop themselves from dying. Maybe if they had been built differently… But they weren’t. They were as God had made them.
With Saul Solinsky’s aid.
He ran down the center of Maple Street — the only place still touched by the life-giving rays. A little girl — a stranger — ran to greet him. Solinsky held her tight against his chest. The light passed over them. She died. He read no accusation in her final expression, just… discontinuation. Shut off from the good things of life before she’d begun.
“This isn’t right!” Solinsky screamed. “I did the best I could! How could I remember everything? It was so long ago! So long…”
The town was only bodies now, littering the streets. Solinsky turned away. Already the sweepers came: gigantic mechanical arms descending from flying saucers, lifting the corpses clear like bowling pins to be reset in an alley. By the time Solinsky got back to his mountaintop factory, all ten thousand models had been assembled again in endless rows before him. He performed some quick calculations in his head. Then he sighed. There was nothing to do except put them back… and try again tomorrow.
