by submission | Mar 26, 2025 | Story |
Author: David C. Nutt
I had been working on lucid dreaming off and on for about a year. I never believed the goofier ends of the equation- alternate realities, astral projection, and all that other New Age hooey. All I wanted to do was control my own dream space. Maybe have my own “Grand Theft Auto” style adventure or at the very least, an orgy or two. Jah, that would be cool. Unfortunately, none of the exercises and methods to get me to that “enlightened head space” I saw on You Tube was working.
Finally, I had a breakthrough; I was in control of my own dreams, constructing fantastic dreamscapes for my sheer enjoyment and pleasure. Then, after an amazing encounter with a woman I saw in a commercial and had serious lust for as an adolescent, I saw the light. At first, I thought it was my dream version of the sun. It was white and shimmering like a reflection on water but only on clouds. I flew up to it and was sucked in, and after a minor panic attack, blacked out.
When I awoke, I was in a huge bowl-shaped depression surrounded by green grass and wildflowers. It was heartbreakingly beautiful. I had an overwhelming sense of peace, and instantly understood my life and all my idiotic shortcomings and pettiness. I understood everything and I was eager to learn more, to better myself.
Suddenly, two angelic beings crested the hilltop and looked down on me. One shook his head. “We have another.” He said to no one in particular. The response came as a disembodied voice, filling the air and all around me in a rich baritone, one that made James Earl Jones sound like a toddler by comparison.
“Check his paperwork.” Was all the voice said.
One of the Angelic beings glided down to me, its face a beatific vision that made my heart burst with emotions too deep for words. It stopped in front of me smiling. I began to weep. It sighed, and a perfectly warmed perfumed breeze wafted over my body.
“Name?” was all it said.
Between sobs and sniffles I said “Huh?”
“NAME.” It said more forcefully, but still warm and perfumed
“Ummmm…Pennington, Michael James Pennington.”
The being sighed again and looked back to his companion. “We have another illegal. No Celestial name.”
“Check if the thing has a sigil. Sometimes they have sigils.” The other being said.
The being in front of me turned its angelic face towards me again. I started crying again. It rolled its eyes.
“Do you have a sigil?”
While sniffing I said “Wha-What’s that?”
The angelic being looked back at its companion. “He doesn’t have one.”
Somehow, I knew where this was going. “Wait. I want to stay. I want to learn, I want to make my life better. I want to bring this knowledge back to my family and friends. I-“
There was a crack of thunder, and I sunk to my knees.
“You shouldn’t be here.” The angelic being said. “You violated protocols, snuck in. Broke the rules. In fact, I find your very presence here offensive.”
And without ceremony I was flushed from that beautiful place like so much waste water.
Since then I’ve met others who had this experience. Some managed to stay longer, but all of us were eventually kicked out. We formed a group. We’ve hired some adepts who promised they can lead us back, help us make the crossing. We all bought authentic sigils. It wasn’t cheap but if you want to go to the promised land, you gotta pay.
by submission | Feb 21, 2025 | Story |
Author: David Barber
Mr Wells having already written a popular scientific romance about time travel, publishers seemed to think my own literary efforts on the subject suffered by comparison. They also warned my title would be a hindrance to commercial success.
One editor commented that making the protagonist a woman was even less believable than her escapades, conceding however that it might be amusing for a corseted heroine to bustle (!) through time, observing fanciful female fashions of the future.
Perhaps I do not possess the fluency of Mr Wells, which is why I considered submitting a paper to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society instead, but being unwilling to reveal the means and mechanism behind my invention — imagine the disastrous consequences of such public knowledge — in the end I refrained.
Eventually, long after my adventures in time, and in a vain attempt to make sense of it all, I penned the brief memoir you hold in your hand.
For the first foray of my temporal engine, I had planned to return to the years when my dear parents were alive. How I longed to see them again and hear them praise their daughter’s cleverness, yet the paradoxes risked by tinkering with the past stayed my hand.
So it was that on a cold November morning in 1897, I set off into the future.
Imagine a railway journey with new sights and mysteries at every stop, yet a journey without end, a blur of years where my attention was snagged by one wonder after another.
There were adventures in cities that glowed like valve radios, hot with the smell of science; I fled artificial men who wanted my body for its parts; increasingly I glimpsed events I could not understand and peoples whose fate did not concern me.
As I plunged onwards through time, the endless Ages overwhelmed me, yet having come so far it seemed an admission of weakness to turn back. I witnessed the planet grow empty, then full again, continents scurrying to new geographies, the Earth nudged further from a ripening sun.
At some point I was adopted by fellow temponauts, odd folk with too few digits, overly many teeth, and eyes that blinked sideways like elevator doors. They had spotted the wake left by my temporal engine and invited me to join them.
Their sentient device hurled us onwards so rapidly that the dials of my own crude contraption kept spinning through zero. My imagination had failed me and I had not built for deep time.
Halting at last on an Earth grown spavined and bleak as Mars, they spoke in whispers, like tourists in a cathedral. This was their destination, something they called the Last Singularity, beyond which even their clever physics refused to work. Our journey had come to an end. The Powers who ruled here allowed no interference.
Afterwards, my companions dropped me off the instant I set out, though my cumbersome engine was abandoned somewhere uptime. They were sad for their little friend and warned I would find life made no sense now, my mayfly days lost in the vastness of time. In their experience, Eternity did this to simple souls.
And so it has proved. I did not have the heart to rebuild my invention, nor have I invited ridicule by speaking of it and the marvels I saw.
Wisely, I never spied upon my own brief future and discover it one day at a time, as we all do.
by submission | Sep 3, 2017 | Story |
Author : Janet Shell Anderson
I’m just a kid on my own. The question I have is, should I try to save the man who killed my Dad?
It’s just after dawn; the river’s still, silver, silken, the banks, shadowy. A heron yaps. I’m sitting across from the Three Sisters rocks. Ivan claimed three nuns died out there a long time ago. Now Ivan’s gone, probably buried in the walls near Meridian Park, with the other Disappeared, where 16th Street drops down to the Potomac.
I haven’t seen my brothers, David and Jonathan, in weeks. It’s midsummer, hot; the river smells like mud and fish. I‘m hungry. I stole some jerky, but I’ve eaten it all. My Dad worked down at 1600 Pennsylvania. I stay strictly out of there. My father should have too. He was killed. He knew too much.
People disappear in Rockville, Gaithersburg, Damascus, into camps. Half the city’s empty; there’s no traffic. Sometimes I hear artillery across the river.
A few days ago I was in upper Rock Creek, hunting, working my way into a dense thicket of small spruce, holly, mountain laurel, sweetbriar, when I smelled cigarette smoke and heard voices. I hunched down. Near the creek, two men appeared, hard looking, in camo, bio-armored, weaponed up, scary. Though I could see them, I made sure they could not see me.
“We’re taking out the Old Man,” one said.
“What the hell?” He was young, dark, looked startled, tossed a cigarette into the dirt road.
“Thursday at three hundred hours,” the first continued, a man with flat eyes, expressionless. “You’re in the detail. Word is, he’s gone too far. Meet at the Three Sisters on the river at two hundred hours. You know the drill. We’ll be at 1600 in fifteen minutes. On the roof. Then in the Residence.”
“They say the Old Man never sleeps.”
“What difference does that make?” I saw his eyes narrow, heard a drone overhead.
“Right.”
“Max doesn’t trust you, said you’d go down there to the Secret Service and warn them.”
“Who gave the order?” the younger man asked.
I knew the way you do somehow he shouldn’t have asked that. The first man turned casually, weapon in his hand, it hissed in the way they do, fired. The young one fell; the older spoke into his wristband as the drone approached. “You were right,” he said. “Couldn’t trust him.”
Afterwards, the woods were silent for a long time, even the grasshoppers in the meadow near the creek went still. Finally, I came out of the brush, and in the massive summer heat, the thick, humid air, bent over the dead man, looked. His eyes were open. He was young. A red and black ant climbed over his ear.
The forest behind me was a green silence.
Now it’s dawn. I stare at the small granite rocks in the river, The Three Sisters. I’ve heard it’s deep there, eighty feet. People drown.
My grandfather used to go see a poet housed in the insane asylum, Saint Elizabeth’s, not far from here. The poet wasn’t insane. He was a traitor. My Dad met him too, quoted some of his work.
“An ant’s a centaur in his dragon world. Pull down thy vanity, I say. Pull down thy vanity.” I’m not sure if that’s right, but that’s what I remember.
I watch the silver water slide past the rocks, the Three Sisters, see the white glitter of the rising sun, the line of it all the way to Virginia.
What should I do?
