by submission | May 12, 2014 | Story |
Author : Kirstie Olley
My name is Leila and I used to be the queen bee at school. If I curled my hair, all the girls curled their hair. If I cut one side short and left the other long, everyone did. If I shaved the Queen of Hearts into the short side of my hair, my class became a deck of cards.
Then Dad got promoted. The generous pay rise was off-set by a massive move. We relocated, and I changed schools.
I thought I’d just swan in, gorgeous as always and charm everyone, but they all stared at me like I was a freak.
At first I thought it was the Queen of Hearts still shaved into the side of my head, so I let my hair grow out, but they didn’t stop avoiding me.
I noticed everyone at school was bald. So hair must be out here, I’d heard of the trend before, so I shaved my head, waxed off every hair I could find. They stopped staring but no one talked to me.
Everyone was pale too, so my Californian tan stuck out. I begged Dad non-stop for a week, total ‘are we there yet?’ style torture until he agreed to pay for a procedure that bleaches the tan out of your skin.
He was still nervous when he took me to the cosmetic surgeon.
“This procedure isn’t unusual, particularly out here. People just want to fit in, not just teenagers, but children and adults too,” the nurse assured dad, her eyes on his ever-jiggling leg as he sat beside me. “And it’s not permanent either.”
Dad’s lips twitched in a way that said he knew that was more a plus for the surgeons than for the patients.
The next day at school I swanned in with my lovely new pale skin, my scalp freshly shaved, but still, no one talked with me.
I don’t think you really get it. This is agony for me. Sure it can’t be easy being the outsider all the time, but imagine if you’d had a taste of being not just in, but being the trend setter.
I spent the next week in my room. I didn’t go to school. I couldn’t.
Then the internet gave me the solution. There were other procedures.
It took longer to convince Dad of these ones. These ones were permanent. He thinks I don’t know, but he looked into getting transferred back to California, but his bosses refused. I even heard him discuss with Susan quitting and finding another job, but in this economy, with unemployment rates so high, they agreed it was too risky.
It’s a weird sensation going under general anaesthetic, the creeping in vagueness, the world misting away.
My recovery took months, but now the bruising is gone and the scarring is hidden.
I look perfect: silvery pale, hairless, my features elongated, my big dark eyes, my nose so small and flat it’s barely there.
Finally I’ll fit in with everyone else on this planet.
END
by submission | May 11, 2014 | Story |
Author : Tyler Hawkins
I only just missed you this time. Five millennia in the timescale of the cosmos is a needle in a haystack and then some. I was only 5 thousand years away from you but it seemed like it very well could have been any of the other times I arrived before the Milky Way collides with Andromeda. We were long gone, I was surprised to find. The stars looked identical to when I left, it was so reassuring. But the Earth didn’t. Pity, I had higher hopes for humanity.
Not really any of my concern though, the Earth will be there for us. I have the tools to reach you, just not the luck. Time travel was so new for us, but it was agony waiting for every minor breakthrough we had perfecting it. I needed more accuracy, but by the time we could have hit that small window where you lived your life, I would have been long gone so I had to risk it. I’ve been traveling for 2 years now, with each jump I use more energy. With each unsuccessful jump I age that much more, my machines wear that much more and I become that much more desperate.
Even if I deplete the stars, even if I destroy these machines and my body, I will reach you. 20 years now, so many parts have failed, machine and body alike. Each jump now uses more than a whole star, but lucky for me the universe has billions and we only need one. I think back to the closest I’ve ever been to you, and realize it was before all this started. When I was born, it was only 150 years since you had died. I met you through your writing, I loved you through your photographs and I will find you across the universe.
by submission | May 9, 2014 | Story |
Author : Roger Dale Trexler
They found it. In the most impossible spot, in the most unlikely location, they found it.
And the scientists were baffled.
On the edge of explored space, Henry Frisk stared out the porthole of the survey ship. The nearby star was just close enough that its light shone on the insanely improbable object. It reflected for parsecs. It was easy to find because it shone so brightly.
A hand touched his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” the intruder said. He turned to look Trudi Maines in the eyes. Her beautiful blue eyes that shone brightly, but not nearly as brightly as it did.
“It’s all right,” he said, smiling. “It just fascinates me, that’s all.”
“Me, too,” she said. “Have they found out anything?”
He shook his head. “Not a thing,” he told her.
“Why do you suppose they did it?” she asked.
He chuckled lightly. “What?”
“They….whomever they were….put a perfectly round hundred mile wide sphere of gold—pure gold—in the middle of an asteroid belt….why do you think they did it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You have to have a theory? You’re the authority on extraterrestrial life.”
Frisk let out a laugh. “That’s like saying someone is an authority on God,” he said. “It just isn’t possible.”
He looked into Trudi’s troubled eyes. “Listen,” he said. He turned and pointed. “Whoever made that, whoever took the time and made that, wanted it found. They wanted us to find it.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“Because,” He said. “It has a message.”
“A message?”
He nodded. “Carved in the gold.”
“Carved in the gold?” Trudi backed away a step. “I don’t understand?”
Frisk let out another chuckle. “No one does,” he said. “All the great minds of Earth have pondered it. They are as dumbfounded as I am.”
He paused, then added: “But, I do have a theory.”
“I knew you would,” Trudi said. She took a step forward again.
There was a long silence between them as they stared out at the glistening ball of gold. “All right,” she said. “Tell me.”
He nodded. “Imagine,” he said. “Imagine those ancient astronauts that everyone says helped build the pyramids and Easter Island and gave the Mayans their advanced science. Imagine that they saw mankind’s bloodlust. Imagine how simple, how petty we looked to them.”
He turned to her. “That’s why the left. They knew that we were unworthy of their assistance. They weren’t like us. They were civilized.”
Trudi let out a disappointed gasp of air. “But what about U.F.O.s?” she asked. “What about alien abductions?”
He shook his head. “Who knows? Maybe they were just checking in, hoping we had changed?”
“And we didn’t?”
Frisk shook his head again. “It’s our nature.” He chuckled again and pointed out at the golden sphere. “That sphere,” he said. “They put it here because they knew we would find it. They knew we would find it, and they wanted to see what we would do with it.”
He turned to her. “It’s pure gold. The purest gold ever known to man.”
“It must we worth…..”
“Its worth is incalculable,” he told her. “And that’s why they put a message on it.”
“What does the message say?” she asked.
He shook his head again. “They haven’t translated it yet.” He drew a deep breath. “But, I know what it’ll say.”
“What?”
“That money isn’t everything….Love is.”
He turned to her. “I love you, Trudi,” he said. “I always have….and I always will.”
Then, he bent forward and kissed her in the golden light of the orb.
by submission | May 8, 2014 | Story |
Author : cchatfield
It took only a moment of eye contact for the stranger to change his evaluation from “boy” to “young man.” It was a useless habit leftover from before the outbreak: assuming a young body meant innocence or an unblemished mind.
Even the smallest child, a girl of four or five, glared at him with wary eyes until her father gruffly assured the children that the stranger posed no threat of infection. It took the better part of the first day he spent in the cramped (but, more importantly, warm and well-stocked) farmhouse with the rugged family of survivors before childish curiosity won over.
But even after the younger ones were sitting on his lap, enthralled by his leather gloves and the maze of hidden pockets sewn into his jacket, the young man would only scowl at him in passing, not letting the stranger’s presence interrupt the work of survival.
Nonetheless, the stranger knew that more often than not the young man was listening intently through the wall to the stories being told of journeys through deserted cities populated by nothing more than drafty winds and punctured buildings.
Of course, the children more interested in any survivors he’d stumbled upon. Stories with happy endings that to them, with humanity on the verge of extinction, had become just that. Stories. He obliged with tales of families and friends, communities and hermits living idyllic lives in empty mansions or on tropical islands. Always last, and always in a quiet voice, he told them of a mad scientist he’d met just before finding the farm. A forgotten genius who’d done the impossible. Found a cure. The children would gape at him, unable to imagine a life without infection.
Three children, one young man, and two adults, including the stranger. Pooling resources, they would have more than enough lethal dosages.
The mother had succumbed to the disease, lacking whatever immune fortification the children seemed to have inherited from their father. But even that, the stranger knew, would not be enough to protect them from the new wave of infection he’d seen crashing towards them on the wings of birds and insects.
The children’s father agreed to the plan with bitter resignation. He’d known the day would come. It was his decision to tell his eldest son and he asked the stranger to be present.
After, the young man’s eyes softened for just a moment as he searched their faces. “But…but what about the…” he gestured helplessly, unable to ask.
Gently, the stranger placed a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Stories are for children.”
by Clint Wilson | May 6, 2014 | Story |
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
The goons in their black suits and sunglasses hold me above the chasm by my ankles. Then I hear their commander’s bullfrog voice.
“Drop him.”
Without hesitation strong fingers release their respective grips in unison and suddenly I am plummeting past stone cliffs toward a pile of jagged boulders heaped upon unforgiving rubble far below. I clench my eyes shut, but at the last instant open them out of sheer curiosity, just as my grimacing face greets the boulders at maximum velocity.
As anyone who has experienced likewise or similar misfortune will surely tell you, this last moment comes with the veracity of a freight train. There is a tremendous clang throughout you and your entire world, a clang that smacks your soul clean out of your body, followed by an immediate, “Oh no!” No matter what you do, or how you crash, there will always be that, “Oh no!” there to greet you an instant after the clang. The pain is enormous beyond your wildest fears, but thankfully it fades to nothingness in under a second.
I come to in the chair. My restraints still hold me tight. One of the black suited gorillas slaps me across the mouth. I hear the bullfrog voice behind me.
“Had enough yet?”
I say nothing in return.
The voice shouts, “Again!”
In an instant I am transported to a tiny pedestal. I freeze. I am balanced on a ten-inch-square platform atop a metal pole. I am naked, smeared in animal blood and bits of entrails, and I shiver in fear. A mere four feet below the lagoon surrounds me, infested with at least fifty giant snapping crocodiles.
The bullfrog voice resonates behind me, “Knock him in.”
I dare to crane my neck around. Behind me, some twenty yards out of reach, stands a hut on stilts. The men in suits all have sizeable projectile-launching tubes balanced upon their shoulders. “Fire!” comes the order.
Half a dozen old fashioned medicine balls careen my way. The first one misses my head by inches. The second one hits me square in the back. I fly forward off the pedestal and land face first with a splash. Surprisingly none of the beasts approach me at first. But quickly a massive specimen takes interest and makes his way boldly in my direction.
I kneel down in the shallow water and bow my head in resignation but it does nothing to alter the creature’s progress. In another moment the huge jaws chomp down on my head and upper torso. Giant razor sharp teeth dig into my face and it snaps my neck as it begins to roll me over and over. Water fills my lungs as we slip beneath the surface. The “Oh no!” in this case happened early, and then several more times along the way.
Suddenly I come to in my restraints again. Again a backhand crosses my face. Again the bullfrog voice prods, “Are you willing to talk yet?”
And once again I say nothing.
“Again!”
Suddenly I am transported to a warehouse. I hang in a harness from the ceiling. Below me are thousands of sharp metal spikes pointing upward. I feel the rope above me begin to slip.
by Stephen R. Smith | May 5, 2014 | Story |
The first inkling I had that something was up was when Dinah’s was out of bumble-berry pie. It don’t seem like much, but nobody in Clyville eats bumble-berry pie but me, and there’s always a pie made when I come in after work.
Dinah said I’d eaten the entire thing that afternoon with a half dozen cups of coffee. Thing is, I was stacking pallets at the warehouse until seven pm without a break, so I know it weren’t me what ate the pie.
I had to settle for cherry. It was ok, I guess.
On Tuesday I went to pickup my truck from Lou’s. He’d put a new water pump in it, and said it would be ready anytime after lunch. I got there at three, and Lou says “How’s she running?” I’m a little confused, and I ask him “You tell me, is she ready to go?”
Lou just stands there, slack jawed and says “You picked it up two hours ago, aren’t you back to pay for that pump?”
Somebody picked up my truck, stole it, and had the balls to leave me to pay the bill. Lou was beside himself. He figured I was pulling his leg at first, and he got mad for a bit and then just got all quiet. I paid him. Wasn’t his fault, and he did fix the truck like he said he would.
Now I’ve got no pie, and no truck. The week’s not looking good at all.
On Thursday, I show up for work only to be sent home. I’d apparently worked eight hours on the night shift, and they’ve got safety rules that say I’ve got to sleep for eight hours before I can work again. I’m not sure what the hell’s going on by now, but at least the bastard that stole my truck’s starting to pull his own weight.
On Saturday, I wake up to the cold blade of an axe against my throat. Blinking against the morning light, there’s something familiar about the silhouette at the other end of the handle.
“You’ve got a nice life here in Clyville,” the voice rings a bell, “too bad you can’t stay and enjoy it.”
He couldn’t kill me, I understand that now. After all, he’s me.
No matter, I’ve put that behind me and I’ll stay here in Strewson for as long as I can. I expect he’ll get bored and come find me again. When he does, I’ll move on, but until then, can you cut me another slice of that bumble-berry pie? And top up my coffee? It really is delicious.
