by Kathy Kachelries | Oct 25, 2005 | Story |
Seventeen years ago, when I returned from the Europa colony, I was asked to give a speech at a middle school assembly. For two hours I talked about recycling. Recycled air, recycled food, recycled water. We throw things away here, but there, everything is recycled.
This kid comes up to me afterwards, a little girl of maybe twelve, and she asks, what’s it like to have less gravity?
I chuckled. It’s lighter, I told her.
No, she said, without a smile. What’s it really like?
I watched her for a few seconds. Her eyes were narrow like she was looking into the sun, and I swear I’ve never seen a kid so intent on knowing something. It was like I had the answers for the most important test she’d ever take.
I didn’t really know what to say. I mean, gravity is gravity. More gravity is heavier, less gravity is lighter. There isn’t much room for elaboration. In the end, I told her that it felt like going downhill on a roller coaster, but that wasn’t true at all. It’s much more peaceful, more still. Everything moves slower up there. Even time.
Now, sometimes I watch the moon and I think, that’s what Europa looks like from a shuttle. I wouldn’t say I miss it, though. I never went back to the colony, and now I’m past the mandatory age limit for space travel. It’s like a roller coaster, I told her. You must be this young to ride this attraction.
I wonder if that little girl ever made it. They say that, in a few decades, everyone on Earth will be recycled.
by Kathy Kachelries | Oct 19, 2005 | Story
The dream: Jennie Smith woke up in a desert, standing in the center of an endless, cracked sheet of dirt so hard you could scrape your knees on it if you fell down. Above her, the sky was even blacker than her grandmother’s skin, and the moon seemed like a hole carved into its clay.
Several feet away, an ibis scratched at the soil with long and skinny legs, forcing its narrow beak into the grooves where the surface had split while drying. The ibis stopped, sensing her presence.
“What are you doing here?” it asked.
The ibis didn’t speak English. It was a different language, something Jennie Smith had never heard before, but the syllables still rang with meaning. “This is my dream,” she told the ibis. Her mouth couldn’t form the bird’s strange sounds, so she spoke in the language she used at school.
The ibis cackled, stamped at the broken ground. “Filthy,” it spat. The long beak again disappeared into a crack.
“What are YOU doing here?” Jennie asked.
“Fishing.”
When Jennie woke up the next morning she tried to hold onto the dream, tried to file the strange sounds away beside their English counterparts. She showered, got dressed, and ate breakfast with her mother and father and grandmother and grandfather and aunts and uncles and everyone else on their floor of the Center for Indigenous Transition.
“I had a strange dream last night,” she said, and began relating the events. At first, only her mother was listening, but gradually the others fell silent and before long, the length of the table was filled with closed mouths and wide eyes watching the girl’s gestures. “It asked me what I was doing here,” Jennie said. “But it didn’t say that, it didn’t say what are you doing here, instead, it said…” she closed her eyes and concentrated, testing the unfamiliar movements in the space where her tongue met the roof of her mouth. They felt foreign but fluid, and when she gave voice to them she was surprised by the ease with which they fell from her lips.
No one said anything, for several seconds. Her parents exchanged meaningful looks, her aunts and uncles exchanged meaningful looks, and get grandparents exchanged meaningful looks. After the silence in the room became nearly unbearable, it was broken by the sharp snap of Jennie’s grandmother’s palm against her cheek. “Ow!” Jennie yelled.
“Don’t you ever use that language again,” she said furiously.
“It was just a dream!” Jennie argued as she pressed her hand against the warm skin of her face.
“It’s a dead language,” the old woman continued with slightly less force. “It’s filthy. Don’t you ever let anyone hear you use that language again.”
Jennie put down her fork and stared at her plate, still rubbing her cheek with her other hand. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“We use English now,” her grandmother said, then returned to her seat. Jennie watched the table, full of dark faces with darker eyes silently focusing on fingers, napkins, plates, anything but Jennie and her Grandmother. The old woman picked up her fork and scraped up the final remnants of her egg. “We use English,” she repeated. “Only English.”
by B. York | Oct 18, 2005 | Story |
I’m floating. Well, it seems like I’m more submerged at the moment. It takes me a moment to realize where I am and that still doesn’t make sense. Everything is dark, my body feels weightless but it is not peaceful. My lungs begin to realize; I’m not breathing. Suddenly, it’s panic. Arms start flailing; my mouth shuts hard and contains what oxygen I have left for some reason unknown to me.
This is when I’m looking around, blurs of the moments through corporeal space of matter filtering into my mind; the moments that may be my last. I stop to realize it for what it is; my last moments. No, I tell myself unable to accept what it might be for reality. The key is not to panic. My eyes start focusing as best as they can and I start pulling up the metaphorical anchor that’s tugging me down further.
Up, the only way out is up. My arms stop flailing and they start acting methodical. I’m swimming, I believe. Pulling myself from floating, I can see the edges of my vision blurring in darkness and my head begins to spin inside. Thinking of what I have to live for, it has to keep me going after all. Mother, Father, and my future come to mind. Particularly the future I’ve squandered, the future I refused to act on. Never applied to those colleges, never went to Australia, and never got to see what I thought I was destined to be witness to. I am getting older and I haven’t yet made a move forward. How old was I now and my dreams were still the same distance away from me?
The focus was keeping me awake enough to push myself through the liquid. I can see something just beyond the surface. I can’t die like this! It can’t end this way! It’s getting darker, but I can see light. It’s getting much darker, but I know with that last strain of strength that I can break the surface.
“Welcome to re-life, Abe.†The next thing I can hear is the doctor saying this to me. My eyes are focusing again and I’m hardly panting for air now. The off-white allure of an office, the sterile scent of medicine, it’s all coming to me very slowly. My parents are here, smiling proudly. They have tears in their eyes; tears of worry. What just happened? What accident was I in?
“You passed the test; you get to go home now.†I’m confused. I don’t understand and I’m looking towards my mother and father for guidance. This isn’t real, is it? What is real anymore? The doctor is handing me a plastic card. Sitting up, I start to read it.
Abe Carter
Certified to Live
Issue Date: 10/25/2050
It was then that I realized, life will be better from here on out.
by Jared Axelrod | Oct 15, 2005 | Story |
Jack Strap didn’t bother burying the men. Buzzards’ gotta eat, he thought. Same as worms. A man makes his own funeral. You wander in the Desert, you’ll go the same way all Desert creatures do. In the belly of something else.
Buzzards weren’t gonna do a thing with the corpse’s shooting irons, so Jack took that scavenging upon himself. Turned out not to be worth the effort; damn pieces might as well be wood for the good they’d be. Cursing, Jack tossed them aside. No wonder he’d plugged them so easily. You couldn’t hit a broadside with those things, corroded as they were.
These men were amateurs. Wouldn’t have lasted long, not out here, not if they didn’t know how to protect their weapons. If they hadn’t caught up with him so quickly, the Desert would have chewed them up the same way. The Desert was eating away at him, too, Jack knew that. He was not a young man, and what skill he’d once had was now little more than luck. If it wasn’t men like these, out for the price on his head, it would be a night when the campfire that kept the spiders at bay would blow out. Or he wouldn’t treat a cut properly, and would collapse, his blood turning to powder. Or the caustic sand would get into his eyes, and he wouldn’t be a predator anymore, just prey. Or it would be one of a million other deaths the Desert had in wait, and his bones would bleach and crumble same way these fellas’ would.
That which is built on sand is destined to fall, the saying goes.
Jack wasted no time going through their pockets, tossing out the paper money that was already crumbling and pocketing the coins. But it was the bigger of the two that had what he was really after: a satellite link-up. No bounty hunter traveled without them now, not in the Desert. A GPS signal was your best hope of getting out once you were in, and even that was no guarantee. There it was, in a inside pocket, its plastic protective case already being eaten away. The small red LED on top slowly pulsing, signaling the connection was solid. Jack opened it and thumbed an orbital view. It had been months since the Desert had gotten to the last one he took. He was comforted by the little lights that represented the cities. What was left of the cities.
It had been a long time since he had seen an orbital view, but even Jack could tell there were fewer lights.
Jack Strap placed the link-up in the pouch on his belt where the old one used to stay, and was surprised at how much space was left. “Things keep getting smaller,†he said, to no one in particular, and left his would-be arrestors to the belly of the Desert.
by Kathy Kachelries | Oct 14, 2005 | Story |
Sometimes I pretend I have a metawomb inside me.
Things would grow there. Children, I mean. Dozens at a time. Girls and boys. I might not be able to stop. I’d populate my entire livingspace with pudgy pinkfaced versions of myself, and when I went to the recreation floor, strangers would come up and ask me how I managed to adopt so many. How strange, they’d remark. Some of them even look like you.
I’d never tell anyone. I’d just smile and watch those tumbly bright-eyed beings chase eachother from wall to wall.
At night, when I can’t sleep, I press my hand to the soft space above my hips and think of my body filled with pink goo and hundreds of tiny, tiny people, growing like unspoken words.
