Tag: edition23

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Phaëthon – Part One by Tyler Whetstone

Sunlight glinted golden off the sides of ARMORER as it drifted out of the shadow of the planet. Crossing over the sunset line to the dayside, the sensors registered an anomaly in their view of the atmosphere—a colorless spot blooming directly under ARMORER’s orbit as dark as the nightside. Even from a height of 1,600 kilometers, even against storm clouds so thick the atmosphere was typically opaque, the gray shadow was overwhelming. Immediately, instruments began whirring to life—optical and near-infrared spectrometers, gas chromatographs and Doppler radar all probing the shadow—even as it began to register a flickering glow from inside, massive surges of electric current flashing out toward the edges that stood out electric blue against the orange atmosphere of the long twilight.

Another system engaged, switches snapping into place and disks spinning in their drives, silent this far from the bulk of the atmosphere. The orbiter’s computer detected a signal from planetside and began scanning the surface for corresponding signals its latest data suggested would be just under the shadow’s eastern edge.

ARC-1 gave no response.

ARC-3 was responsive but inoperable.

ARC-4 gave no response.

The system kept trying.

Commander Adam Townsend clutched his handkerchief, wiping the sweat from his hands again. Outside, the clouds glowed golden, bursting against the walls, driven by a sudden thermal updraft. The heat was starting to find its way inside, and Townsend sighed as he checked the readings one more time.

He fought to catch his breath as he dropped into the rolling desk chair—this far into the lander, the air scrubbers were still perfectly functional, but the warmth was getting to him. As he dabbed the back of his neck with his handkerchief, he wondered if dehydration was starting to set in. The lights overhead were cold, sterile, and minimal, so the warning lights blinking red on every display he’d staggered past in the corridor had been overwhelming, like a strobe, and threatened vertigo like he hadn’t felt since initial descent from orbit.

Readings were still coming in from the primary systems of ARMORER, the Automatic Remote Maintenance Orbiter for Rapid Emergency Response. Its brains stayed above the corrosive storm clouds, though it kept half a dozen of its drones under a blastproof shell planetside for quick dispatch that wouldn’t have been needed in thinner atmospheres. It cycled through its drones a second time.

ARC-5 was responsive but inoperable.

ARC-6 was responsive but inoperable.

ARC-8 was on the move, but its signal was unsteady and moving in the wrong direction, drifting lazily southward in a way ARMORER was having trouble reorienting.

High above, ARMORER engaged drones still held in reserve for orbital repairs and shunted them into their launch ports as its targeting computer started plotting a trajectory. Another bright electrical flare forced a correction to the calculations—straight down was not a safe option. Any possibility of reaching the target would require at least another full orbital transit, making the full journey around the planet almost twice.

Twin flashes of rocket fire flared silently as two drones raced out of ARMORER’s underbelly and skimmed off eastward over the cloud cover. Switching modes, ARMORER sent a data burst out into higher orbit, signaling the drone deployment to the manned control capsule.

The trajectory of the drones from orbit traced a path around the planet on-screen, but the altitude readings were discouraging. As they approached the longitude of the lander’s location, they would still have more than half the distance to the ground to fall. They skirted the continental ridge and continued tracing all the way around the planet. As they reached the lander on the second pass, a countdown finally appeared, showing estimated time to destination: 148 minutes.

With his breath back, Townsend finally registered that he’d never turned off his music after the impact that shook the lander. With a belated wave of his hand through the projected displays, the upbeat melody cut out. Now, he could hear the distant buzzing of alarm displays echoing through the central transit shaft. The quiet at the command desk in his quarters seemed oppressive, and the alarms were drowned out by the gentle puffing sighs of the air scrubbers, the knocking of the hydraulic cooling systems, and the slight rattle of the bolts that held both to the walls.

Another alert bloomed on the display, coded to the airlock to the evacuation craft.

“Yeah, I know,” Townsend muttered to himself, dismissing a notice reading:

WARNING! RAPID TEMPERATURE INCREASE DETECTED.

Already, the air was starting to feel thick with heat. Over the next 148 minutes, it was only going to get hotter.

***

“I’m just saying, I’ve never understood why anyone would name a mission Icarus,” Landon Diggs had said, back in 2164. “It’s like all the universities that name their sports teams the Trojans.”

Off a blank look from his roommate, Diggs rolled his eyes and finished, “Even though the Trojans lost the war.”

“Then you’re reading the story wrong,” Townsend said, smiling the same way his classmates would recognize from the football field when he gloated over a touchdown. “Icarus was anything but a failure.”

“He flew too close to the sun, lost his wings, and crashed into the sea. What would you call it?”

“He’d have been a failure if he hadn’t gotten off the ground. If anything, he was too successful—he flew so high, no one could have anticipated what would happen.”

“Either way,” Diggs said, taking a pamphlet for something called Project Bellona, “he still crashed and burned.”

Townsend took the same pamphlet, giving both sides a cursory glance. “No. Either way, he went out in a blaze of glory.”

A tone sounded over the loudspeakers—the stage at one end of the hall would soon be showing a brief video announcement outlining the two major missions that were planned for launch in the coming decade. Both would require volunteers on the ground floor, people whose names would join the ranks of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space; Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon; and Elena Ferreira, the first woman to reach the surface of Mars. All interested cadets were to make their way to the rotunda at the north end of the hall.

“Blaze of glory of not, I’m pretty sure Daedalus was the success in that story,” Diggs said, passing another poster, this one for Project Heimdallr. “He kept his wings intact, and he was the one who made it off Crete alive.”

“Yeah, but how many heavy metal album covers has Daedalus been on?” Townsend smiled wide, launching into an air-guitar solo.

“My mistake,” Diggs replied with a laugh. “I can’t believe I almost forgot that the modern space program is based mainly on bad music that’s two centuries old.”

“Obviously, you haven’t seen the cover art for Brad Thatcher’s new single—melting wax wings and all.”

***

“Shit.” Mission Specialist Braeden Bayless started flipping through the incoming data, sitting up straighter as he realized what it indicated. Grabbing his handheld control pad for a secondary display, he started pulling up logs, searching for the last transmissions from what was now showing nonresponsive on the wall display.

“Is it Adam?” The crew module’s captain drifted near-weightlessly from the window over Bayless’s shoulder.”

“No—I mean, yeah, this has to be him, but he hasn’t actually transmitted anything back to us yet. It looks like he’s activated ARMORER.”

Captain Jordana Sviderskas pulled her thick hair back and tied it off in a hurry to keep it from obscuring her view of the displays. “Okay, so it’s, what, five minutes’ flight to the lander from the Armadillo?”

Bayless shook his head. The heavy armor-plated drone cache on the planet was that close to the lander, but it was also empty. “Sensor alarms deployed all the drones from the Armadillo between 1622 and 1745. They’ve been struggling to repair conduits in the array.”

“So redirect time—”

“No.” Bayless sighed. “He launched ARC-2 and 7 from orbit.”

“He couldn’t override any of the six drones planetside?”

“Three, Five, and Six won’t fly. I’m showing damage from particulate matter in the propulsion systems; they’re all down. And it’s looking like One collided with Five on the way to ground. it crashed into the surface and registered multiple system failures before ARMORER lost contact. Eight is flying, but something sheared off its navigation sensors, and we’re not able to correct its trajectory. It’s already three klicks off course.”

“And the bad news on Four?” Sviderskas wasn’t even done asking when Bayless’s eyes went wide.

He swiped a window off his tablet and watched as it cycled up onto the wall display, pointing. “I think that’s ARC-4.”

A video recording from a camera on the ground—apparently from ARC-8’s lost navigation arm—showed one of ARMORER’s drones hovering above one of the building-sized battery housings that stored energy harvested from the atmosphere. The background flickered and flashed like a dance floor as the drone spot-welded a rupture—until suddenly, the display was overwhelmed with light.

Slowed down to quarter speed, the whiteout seemed to go on forever, a jagged, forking arc of plasma glowing faintly purple across the screen. And then it was gone, and so was the drone.

Even as long as the flare seemed to last on the slowed playback, it seemed like not nearly enough time to have so utterly annihilated the device. But all that was left when the full picture came back was a slow shower of sparks and a sharply defined shadow scorched into the battery housing. Only one piece of shrapnel—no more than a few inches, melted oblong and smooth beyond all recognition—rocketed toward the ground just right of ARC-8’s camera.

“Can we get this video to Darwin?” she asked, feeling slightly shell-shocked and connecting the dots to the readings Townsend reported before going to survey the apparent damage.

“We can try, but there’s a bad dose of solar radiation. We’re having a hard time maintaining fidelity with any data stream more complex than audio.” His fingers were racing over the tablet again, though. “I’ll see what I can do. But I think you need to get the commander on the comms.”

Sviderskas hailed the landing craft, requesting a video call even as she forced the audio channel. “Icarus lander, do you copy?”

Only soft static came through her earpiece in reply, so after a few seconds, she tried again. “Commander Townsend, do you copy?”

Townsend pushed the wheeled desk chair over to the communications system and sighed as he saw himself in the camera feed. His hair had gotten too long.

Not that it was exceptionally long by any means, but, after more than a decade of keeping it razor-cropped with military precision, feeling any weight on his scalp made him feel uncomfortably disheveled. Scruff also crept down his face, spreading out in the patchy fuzz of his teenage self—the only part that still looked young on the cam.

Just as the beard crept down his neck, the hairline crept up his scalp, making his widow’s peak more pronounced. The color had changed from cornsilk blond to dull umber, the result of too much time indoors. It was thinner than he would have admitted back home, too. Given the sparse number of photos that still got sent back, maybe that’s why he hadn’t taken clippers to what, at only a few inches, felt like a shaggy mop.

He found himself fidgeting with it—after so many crew cuts, he was unable to find a natural part, pushing it one way, then the other, before giving up, giving it a loose scratch, and letting it do whatever the hell it wanted. Jordana could think whatever she wanted of his look; with the scent of ozone heavy in the purified air, he was just glad his hair hadn’t sparked with static.

“Commander Townsend,” he heard her repeat, “do you copy?”

As he finally opened the feed, Sviderskas seemed surprised to see it and sagged with relief as she looked back at him expectantly.

“I’m here,” he said.

“What’s the status of the escape vehicle?”

“The door is fused shut—you can see the scorch marks on the bottom where the lightning reformed to go to ground. The bigger problem is the door on this side—there are holes burned right through it.”

The captain swore, in Greek, as she always did. “Darwin is working with Moscow and Kyoto on possible fixes, but they won’t let us send down the supply lander in this kind of storm.”

“Is Bayless there?”

Townsend knew he would be, but he was relieved at the quick response of the Scotsman’s arm waving from the right of the feed. He slipped into view with the bouncing gait of a man in low gravity, settling behind the captain and finally turning away from the readouts.

“What even happened, Braeden? I’m surrounded by an array of superconductive lightning rods a kilometer wide and 200 meters tall.”

“It was sheet lightning.”

Townsend had heard the term before, but meteorology had never particularly been his strong suit. “I’m sorry, sheet lightning?”

“We got overwhelmed by the sheer volume of electricity. We’re registering sixteen simultaneous strikes in the array at the exact time of impact, and more than 370 in the ten seconds before and after. Two of our rods are offline; we think they melted right to the surface.” Bayless sighed. “We never took into account the effect of volcanic discharge on the storm—the eruption blew a hole in the side of the shield, and the ash cloud came up much closer than we anticipated.”

Townsend mopped his brow with his handkerchief again, then glanced down at it. It was emblazoned with his old university emblem, and he couldn’t help thinking about the day he’d received it twelve years earlier—the day he was assigned to Icarus. He almost smiled.

“Is Ariadne still set for today?”

“It is,” Sviderskas said, “but Houston’s running point—they’ve got it under control. We’ve got plenty of eyes on us today, too.”

On the screen, ARMORER’s countdown showed the drones’ estimated time to the lander tick down to 141 minutes.

***

Every year, the academy hosted a job fair, a presentation of all active projects and missions that the students would be vying for positions on, but the 2164 Mission Fair had been something special—word had leaked early on that a program being announced would be a monumental step forward in exploration, the likes of which come along only once or twice a century.

But then came the news that two such programs were being considered for development at the same time, and there was still time to get involved—especially for eager seniors.

Townsend and Diggs found seats in the rotunda at the end of the great hall, where chairs had been set up amphitheater-style around a circle of video projections. The lights came down just as they took their seats, and historical photos that everyone in attendance recognized flickered in the air at the center of the rotunda. Conversations turned to hushed tones and then cut out altogether as a voiceover boomed to life.

“After the abolishing of the U.S. Space Shuttle program early in the twenty-first century, the modern age of international cooperation began. American astronauts relied on Russian space capsules to visit and return from the International Space Station, setting the foundation for understanding and cooperation between nations regardless of politics or diplomatic troubles. U.S.-Russian cooperation aboard the ISS, even during the Ukrainian military operations, proved that space exploration remained a critical venture for humanity—one literally above politics.

“With low-orbit tourism rapidly becoming a viable industry and corporations building their own launch craft to take on responsibilities previously handed only by governments, the International Astronaut Corps was founded, allowing private investment in crewed deep-space research to be handled by the best and brightest of every spacefaring nation. This was aided by the full trust and expertise of each member state’s military, without compromising Earth-bound strategy or proprietary developments.

“With significant interest in resource mining on other bodies within our solar system and the possibility of developing new technologies built in microgravity, attention was turned toward the establishment of a permanent base on the moon. With plans to develop such a base in place, a long-term focus was developed on the next steps in humankind’s advancement in space, and the lunar colony grew to include a planned launch site—Launch Site Alpha. From this base, long-term missions could blast off to return to Earth, or outbound missions could be launched to other planets.

“A dozen new launch sites on Earth were constructed, allowing for new takeoffs around the world, with command centers to rival Houston and Moscow springing up in Kyoto, Japan; Darwin, Australia; Recife, Brazil; Cape Town, South Africa; and Reykjavik, Iceland.

“Because a new crop of leaders would be needed to man Launch Site Alpha, the new commands, and all their outbound missions, the IAC looked to found their own exclusive university, modelled after the military academies of the United Kingdom and United States. They settled on a campus in Akron, Ohio, for the Academy of the International Astronaut Corps. From these halls, officers for every publicly funded spaceflight have been chosen from your predecessors. The very first graduating class included Elena Ferreira, only the second Brazilian woman to command such a mission, but perhaps more notably, the first human being to set foot on the surface of Mars nearly thirty years ago.

“Though travel to the Martian surface has been exclusively one-way, Commander Ferreira remains an active administrator with the International Astronaut Corps, coordinating ongoing projects in the Martian colonies. And she has taken time from her busy schedule to record a message for today’s Mission Fair, in order to announce two of our most exciting upcoming projects. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Commander Elena Ferreira.”

Though the video was recorded, several students applauded when the image of Commander Ferreira appeared. She looked much the same as she had in the news footage they had all seen and idolized, if a bit grayer at the temples. If it were possible, she seemed to stand taller—almost impossibly tall—as she stood in front of her desk. A caption identified the location as IAC Mars Command, Dejah Base.

Diggs whistled softly through his teeth, shaking his head in near disbelief. All around the rotunda, on each of the walls, new projections appeared, showing the full-color insignias of the two missions, now confirmed under the names Icarus and Ariadne.

Picture of Tyler Whetstone

Tyler Whetstone

Tyler Whetstone identifies with no one in history so much as the author of the Pangur-Ban poem—an Irish-German monk who kept pets and claimed to spend his nights working on books. An instructional designer, occasional voiceover artist and Los Angeles Dodgers fan, he currently lives in Oklahoma with a senior rescue dog and a tabby cat. His short fiction has appeared in DarlingLit, the Stygian Lepus magazine and an anthology from Wicked Shadow Press.
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Eating the Elephant: Care and Keeping of the Author by Kimberly Rei & Dean Shawker

Authors are some of the most tenacious, resilient, determined creatures. We return to the altar of submissions over and over, regardless of the results—joy for acceptance, wine and tears for rejections. Back we go, making our offering and waiting—days, weeks, months…yes, sometimes years…for the response.

While we wait, we go back to our pens, typewriters, and keyboards, to open another creative vein and start anew.

Tenacious.

And not always the best at caring for the mind and body that keeps our genius moving.

The phrase burn the midnight oil, meaning to stay up into the wee hours of darkness, has been attributed to a poet. A writer. Of course.

Let’s explore the crimes we commit against ourselves and how we can adjust.

 

Sleep

We’ll start here.

Most authors I know (overwhelmingly so) have day jobs. Many have spouses and/or children. There are parents and siblings, pets and neighbors. The list of demands on a life is endless.

When do we ever find time to write?

Why, in those wee hours—when the oil is burning. When others are, finally, sleeping. When our world grows quiet enough that we can hear the voices of our characters, hear the wind blowing through our forests. When everything else fades and we can…think.

Those hours are glorious, but they come at a steep price. Sluggish mornings fueled by caffeine and quick breakfasts. Dragging through a day because neither of those things lasts long. Snapping at people, getting tired of your grumpy self. Ugh.

Carry on like this long enough and you face severe sleep deprivation. That comes with hallucinations! Delusions! Psychotic breaks! The list goes on, but they all have the same consequence…you won’t be writing much. All that sacrifice, poof!

Bottom line: ya gotta sleep.

And not catnaps and quick hits throughout the day. You need that REM goodness—several hours, in a row. That part is important. In a row.

Consider what gets in your way, beyond writing. We have, as a collective, formed some very bad habits around our devices and sleep. Try to keep the phone, tablet, or laptop out of the bedroom. Put some space—both physical and metaphorical—between you and screen time.

Don’t tap away at keys right up to your scheduled bedtime (because that’s a thing you should set). Your brain needs time to wind down from WorkGoWorkGo to RestNow. Read a book. Listen to some music. Sit in the quiet and breathe.

And then, sleep.

(If you find yourself having long term problems, maybe talk to your doctor, if you have one. You might need more than better habits.)

Nutrition

So, how’s the three-meals-a-day thing going?

You’re eating, right?

Not just the kids’ leftovers or what you grabbed passing the food truck brigade. You’re sitting down to a meal requiring a knife and fork. You’re taking your time chewing, savoring, enjoying.

Right?

No.

Okay, look. The body needs things. Food is high on the list.

This section will be far shorter than the previous because food is pretty straightforward: vegetables, protein, carbs.

Yes, you do need carbs. No, caffeine is not a food group.

Create two things:

  • A menu. Stick to it as best you can. A menu can prevent panic eating when you haven’t done the shopping in two weeks and your stomach is chewing an exit through your spine. With a menu, you can shop right from it. You don’t have to make decisions—you already did! If you can make meals ahead of time, groovy. If not, that’s okay too, because you probably need to step away from the keyboard anyway. Plan your meals. You’ll notice a difference in both your health and your productivity.
  • A food diary. I know. Stop groaning. I hate them too. But until you form some better habits that don’t involve “when did I last eat?”, you’re going to need some guidance.
    This isn’t for dieting purposes and it most certainly isn’t for shaming. This is for awareness and gap filling.
    Are you great at breakfast but skip midday consumption? Lunch doesn’t have to be three courses, but it should be something with things your body and brain need. You’ll see where you fill in with pure sugar because that gives you the happy chemicals. You may even see where the crash hits.
    Be honest. Brutally honest.
    You don’t have to show anyone. This is between you and you.

Which leads us to…

 

Hydration

Coffee is not hydration.

Soda is not hydration.

Tea is better.

Mind the juice intake (see sugar crash above).

Water is hydration.

I’m not telling you to drop any other liquid. Some of us will go into shock without the proper balance of caffeine.

Set some boundaries for yourself. I don’t recommend the “drink this many ounces a day” routine. If you forget, you’re guzzling an hour before bed, then waking up twenty-seven times.

I have found two methods that work for me:

  1. Ratio method. I had one Pepsi. I will drink one water of equal or greater ounceage (it is too a word. I made it up. Right here). When I get comfortable there, next I drink two waters. I’ve gone to three, but that tends to make me cranky.
  2. Hours/location method. When I’m at work—or for those of us remote, when I’m in working hours—just water. Something else with a meal, then back to water. When work is done, all bets are off.

I prefer the first method, but it doesn’t matter which I activate—like a damned sleeper cell—I’m drinking water.

I’m winning.

 

Hygiene

This is going to be simple.

Shower. Once a day is nice. Before your family and clothes start hiding from you will do.

Brush your teeth. At least once a day.

Mints do not count.

Nuff said.

 

Sunlight

You are not a mole.

You are not meant to live in dark spaces.

If you can’t go outside and wiggle your toes in grass, at least yank back the curtains. Maybe open the window and let air and sunlight into your space.

We’re adults, and some of us write glorious smut, so try to control yourself when I say you need to get that vitamin D. I mean it.

When you get too deep into a project, the days can evaporate. If you work outside the home, you may fool yourself into thinking you get sunlight.

“Don’t be silly, Stygian Minion, I see the sun when I walk out of my house and to my car!”

I’m sure you do. That’s not much. And it’s hurried, not mindful. Part of the benefit of that great orb in the sky is when you pause to appreciate the warmth and light.

When you, as stated way above, breathe. (I live in Florida. My relationship with the sun is one of love/hate. But still, I go soak it up.)

When the seasons change and the sun is either too much or not enough, you’re the one who needs to adjust. I know this can all sound silly, but it’s another one of those sciency things. It matters. It makes the brain happy, and a happy brain is more likely to create.

 

Writer’s Block

This doesn’t feel much like a care and keeping of topic, does it? Ahhh, but it is.

Consider how you feel when you’re stuck.

Depressed? Angry? Ready to give it all up?

A hindrance to our goals can derail us in significant ways, and that can cause a domino effect. You’re distracted, so you don’t eat. You’re angry, so you pace—inside, where it’s dark. You’re frustrated, and whisky takes the place of water. You’re sad, and good nutrition becomes restless snacking.

There are reams of articles about how to break writer’s block. Explore. Find several that work for you. And I mean several, because what worked last round may not work this one. Have a selection to choose from and give them an honest attempt.

If nothing works, step away for a bit. Either work on a different project, change your work location, or simply go run errands. Get entirely away from the project for a time.

Then come back and see what happens.

It’s an unpleasant beastie that can stalk you for a ridiculous amount of time. The less you feed it, the less you allow it to derail the rest of your life and your self-care, the faster it retreats.

 

So, whatcha think?

Ready to be kinder to your authorly self?

Don’t feel you need to pounce on every point and completely rework yourself. That way lies madness and frenzy…states that cannot hold.

Be gentle. Habits form and change slowly.

Be kind to your author.

Picture of Kimberly Rei

Kimberly Rei

Kimberly Rei, in addition to writing creepy tales, is an editor with Black Hare Press and takes joy in offering the wobbly wisdom of her experience. She does her best work in the places that can't exist...the in-between places where imagination defies reality. With a penchant for dark corners and hooks that leave readers looking over their shoulder, she is always on the lookout for new ideas, new projects, and new ways to make words dance. Her debut novelette, Chrysalis, is available on Amazon. Kimberly lives in gorgeous Florida where the Gulf hides monsters and the sun is a special kind of horror.

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Picture of Dean Shawker

Dean Shawker

Dean Shawker hails from Bracknell, UK, and now lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Dean is co-founder and editor of Black Hare Press.

Having found that his BSc in Bioengineering and BA in Digital Media were as useful in real life as calculus and geometric proofs, Dean now works in commercial non-fiction during the day and moonlights as a minion of the hell hare, Captain Woundwort, in the dark hours.

He writes speculative fiction and dark poetry under the pseudonym Avery Hunter, and edits under the name D. Kershaw.

You’ll usually find him hanging out with the rest of the BHP family in the BHP Facebook group, or here as a servant to the Stygian Lepus.

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Tripwire by Tom Howard

Captain Jennings moved over as a sergeant scrambled into the foxhole and thrust her radio at him. “Sir, the computers have dropped our chances. They want us to pull out.”

“Damn.” He grabbed the radio and verified the authorization, pissed at another retreat. He lost men and women every time. They died believing their superiors knew what the hell they were doing.

Acknowledging his orders with the press of his thumb, he passed the radio back to the sergeant. “Tell everyone to pull out.”

He fired to cover the scouts as they retreated. Finding shelter wasn’t difficult; the whole damn planet was an overgrown forest with a thick layer of underbrush. Bella Vista with its fleecy golden clouds and verdant landscape was a deathtrap. The entire planet wanted to kill them. He checked his suit’s containment and ammunition.

Earlier at the mission briefing, the one they received each time they went down to Bella Vista’s surface, Commander Farrell had stood in the front of the room, dressed in the standard black uniform. “This mission is no different from the previous ones,” she said. “Satellites have discovered a nest of wildlings on the southern continent. They’re building a giant catapult able to reach our ships in orbit. Your mission is to take them out before they can complete the catapult.”

Her hair had grown gray since Captain Jennings had arrived on station, and she looked as if she hadn’t slept in the intervening months.

“For you first timers,” she said, “Bella Vista seems perfect. Lots of oxygen, water, and plants. No animals except for the blood-thirsty wildlings, which are more plant than animal.”

She went off script, and her voice took on a weary edge. “Bella Vista’s molds, fungi, and plants attacked and killed the original colonists. They had spent billions to purchase Bella Vista, but their settlements were overtaken by carnivorous vines and creepers and spores that reproduced exceptionally well in wet lung tissue. Do not remove your masks under any circumstances, or you’ll die a horrible death.” Not a bad idea to put the fear of God into the newbies.

Despite the significant army losses, the government hadn’t retreated. They kept promising a victory. Jennings had given up hoping to win. He and his team knew each foray could be their last. His goal was to return with as many of his squad as he could each time they went down.

On Bella Vista, the captain joined the scouts as they retreated, crashing through waterfalls of moss hanging from thousand-year-old trees and leaving a cloying scent of crushed rose petals detectable even through their respirators. Outliers formed up on him, along with the radio sergeant, and ducked enemy fire as they ran. They broke through the underbrush like the fleeing targets they were, sounding like a herd of elephants.

The bullets of the wildlings’ “guns” were seeds that exploded from tubes similar to Earth’s bamboo. Fired from the enemy’s shoulders like bazookas, the seeds exploded on impact, imbedding tiny shards of hardened resin that burned through armor and into flesh.

Jennings whipped his rifle towards movement on the left. Wildlings burst from the ground. The five-limbed creatures, their skin the texture of tree trunks and their shaggy hair not dissimilar from the moss they hid within, swung from lower tree branches or jumped from tussock to tussock. After soldiers introduced foxholes to Bella Vista, the enemy imitated them, digging through the loam to attack the humans from underground.

The squad would be overrun before they reached the shuttle if he didn’t do something. He stopped running and wrenched a shock grenade from his belt. He shouted “Squealer!” and threw it. The soldiers scrambled for cover, placing hands over their ears and opening their mouths to minimize the blast pressure.

When it exploded, wildlings stopped pouring from the smoking hole in the ground. Jennings followed his fleeing troops through the brush as they cut a trail. No paths or roads existed on Bella Vista. The aggressive plants overgrew manmade structures and roads as soon as they were built. Anything the corrosive plants couldn’t dissolve, the wildlings, as the planet’s antibodies, smashed.

Jennings stumbled into a clearing, and it took him a moment to realize what it was. A clearing? There were no open spaces on Bella Vista. Even rocks were covered by hungry plants that broke them down for minerals. Yet this ten-foot circle of brown earth was bare. How was this possible? The clearing held no organic material. How had it fended off plant encroachment?

He looked for his troops, but they had run ahead. Stooping as best he could in his armor, he examined the edges of the circle. A thin net of webbing covered the plants. Spiders? Bella Vista had no insect life. Had their probes missed the one thing that could stop the plants from devouring the planet? He had nothing to place a sample in, but he’d report where he’d found the webbing and the next landing party could examine it.

 Something stung his neck. Had he been hit by a seed? He checked his readouts, but his armor hadn’t been compromised. Shrugging it off as sweat irritation, he strode through the hanging moss after his troops.

A hovering shuttle waited for them, continuously flaming the surroundings to push back the encroaching forest. Shutting off the flamethrowers, the shuttle touched down at the troops’ approach and opened a port. A dozen soldiers ran up the gangplank, several carrying comrades. Others stripped off smoldering armor and tossed pieces into the trees. If they were lucky, the insidious seeds hadn’t reached flesh. If they weren’t, the medicos would take desperate measures to stop the minute roots from invading the soldiers’ bodies. Amputations and prosthetics were common.

Captain Jennings covered the others with the last of his ammunition and climbed aboard, the final squad member. He stripped as the port closed and herbicide gas flooded the compartment.

Each veteran scrubbed themselves and one another with scalding hot water. The planet thought up new ways to murder them each time they landed. His comrades had begged to be killed as the roots of blood-eating plants spread through their writhing bodies.

He had to tell the commander about that clearing what he’d found. Something on Bella Vista stopped plant growth.

Vacuums suctioned the pungent fumes, and fans produced blasts of hot air.

“Lieutenant Rand, report,” he said.

“Rand’s down, sir.” Lieutenant Wang dried himself. “We got his armor off, but he’d hit his knockout injector.”

If Rand had hit his blocker, he must have been in agony, aware a plant invaded his insides. The medicos would have to wake him. Damn it. Rand had served as the captain’s right-hand man for the past month. “Do you have his report, Wang?”

“Yes, sir.” The naked young man, looking twice his age and covered with small scars, consulted his temple implant. “We lost two and have three injured. The new shock grenades weren’t as effective this time.”

Jennings nodded. Wildlings learned new techniques quickly and improved their fighting skills with each encounter.

The radio sergeant turned from the wall intercom. “Captain, the pilot wants to speak to you after you’ve seen the medico.” She wrapped a robe around herself.

The shuttle jerked as it left the planet’s atmosphere. Tired and pissed, Jennings grabbed a robe and entered the small medical unit. The injured and dead had gotten there before him.

“Robe off.” Medico Getz smiled at him. “Hope nothing rotted off down there.”

He removed his robe. “The pilot wants a word with me, Inez. Let’s make this quick.” Plus, he needed to tell the commander about the plant-killing webs he’d seen.

Getz’s scanner checked his hairless body, crisscrossed with scars from previous battles on the planet. When the machine beeped, she smiled. “No parting gift from Bella Vista today. Join me for a drink on the station later?”

He considered it. Drinks with Inez often ended up in her quarters. “Sorry, but I have to write messages home for the kids in the morgue.” He gave her a smile of regret and put on his robe.

In the corridor, he remembered the sting on his neck, but didn’t go back and tell Inez. If her scanner hadn’t found anything, he must be okay. He headed to the cockpit.

“What is it, Rooster?” he asked the pilot. Through the forward window, Jennings could see the silver sphere of their orbital headquarters, home until they made the planet safe.

He collapsed into the rear seat, rubbing his neck where he’d felt the pinprick.

Rooster turned, his hands on the controls. “Have you heard the latest buzz?”

“I don’t keep up with the rumors. If I believed half of what I heard, I’d chew a handful of Bella Vista seeds and get it over with. Tell me that we’re pulling out.”

 Rooster shook his head. “I wish. No, the latest rumor is that whatever is controlling the plant life here might not come from Bella Vista.”

“How could they know?” Jennings asked.

“Probes found plants taking over other planets in the system.”

“Damn it,” Jennings said. “We should nuke Bella Vista from space and go home.”

Rooster nodded. “We’ve stopped bringing back dead wildlings after they were booby-trapped to get seeds onto the station. If the planet ever figures out a way to get plants up here, we’re all fertilizer. Imagine if it reached Earth.”

“I liked the pulling out rumor better,” Jennings said.

“Sorry about your casualties.” Rooster’s voice seemed to come from a great distance, and he turned back to his console in slow motion. Afterimages of him glowed bright yellow and violet in dark cockpit.

Red and green lights strobed through Jennings’s vision.

“I’ll. Have. You. In. Your…bunk on the station in half an hour,” Rooster said, his words coming in spurts. Jennings shook his head. What was wrong with him?

Time and colors returned to normal in mid-sentence, and Jennings shook his head to clear it.

He climbed to his feet, light-headed and feverish, but his vision and hearing returned to normal.

The station grew larger outside the window. He was happy to see it. It was beautiful. Almost as beautiful as Bella Vista. He wanted to run naked through the station’s halls when they docked. Smiling to himself, he went to change and check on his squad. There had been something important he needed to report to the commander, but it slipped his mind.

He stood for a moment, gazing out the window and rubbing his neck.

So beautiful.

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Tom Howard

Tom Howard is a science fiction and fantasy short story writer living in Little Rock, Arkansas, USA
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Bunnies by Diane Arrelle

,The light streaming in the windows glittered with thousands and thousands of teeny-tiny motes of dust. Drifting slowly, dancing downward, they settled on the spotless glass windowpanes and slowly coated the surfaces of the highly waxed furniture. Soon the longer-lived particles would spiral all the way down, down into the lush, potpourri-scented, Oriental throw carpet and the polished and buffed parquet hardwood floors.

Prissilla screamed.

Swiping madly at the dust flying wildly about her head, Prissilla started crying.

“I’ll never win,” she sobbed. “I’ll never get rid of the dust and she’ll never let me be free.” She stood amid the wildly swirling particles, blind to them as the tears fell from her face to make tiny dust-mud puddles on the floor.

The dust slowly settled back onto the coffee table, but the majority found their way to the shiny floor. She knew that soon they would unite to form larger units, globs of dust that would skitter under the furniture with the slightest breeze.

“Well, I quit. Yeah, I give up. I can’t control them anymore; the dust bunnies can have their way,” Prissilla mumbled, feeling defeated by the overwhelming task that always lay before her. No wonder Howard couldn’t take anymore.

Shoulders rounded by the weight of failure, Prissilla left the room. Her back was turned from the bunnies that shivered in her wake.

Three hours later, Prissilla struggled to relax and read a book on the spotless, freshly vacuumed sofa. She listened to whispers from under the couch, whispers of hunger, need and growing strength.

“Stay there and leave me alone,” she whimpered. “Leave me alone.”

But the inaudible voices continued to hum in her head, “Prissssillla… let us love you… Sssillla… we only want to make you happy… let us help.”

Prissilla clamped stereo headphones on, turned up the volume and tried to drown out the words with music.

A frail woman with pink-tinged white hair hobbled into the living room.

Prissilla sat silently and watched. 

Watched as, leaning heavily on her gleaming, cold steel walker, the old crone inched over to the bookcase.

“Tsk, tsk,” the woman muttered as she struggled to pull a white cotton glove over her gnarled arthritic hand. Then she slowly ran her fingers over the rim of the shelf and smiled.

“Just as I thought,” she said smugly. “Prissy! Prissy, get up off your lazy behind and clean this room. The dust is so thick a soul could choke to death!”

So die, Prissilla thought. Choke, die and leave me alone, but she jumped off the sofa anyway and immediately starting dusting the furniture with the cloth taken from her jeans pocket.

“The glass, the glass,” the old woman croaked as she lit a cigarette. “The windows are dirty, too.”

Prissilla ground her teeth together until they hurt. She watched the smoke curl upward and could almost see it covering the freshly washed windows with a new coating of tars and resins.

“Yes, Mother,” she finally said.

The old woman hobbled over to the overstuffed chair and fell like a graceless skeleton onto the seat. “While you are at it Prissy, there are dust bunnies under the sofa you were loafing on. I swear you are the laziest woman alive. No wonder Howard left you.”

Prissilla stiffened at the mention of Howard. “Ignore her,” a voice whispered so softly she wasn’t sure if she heard it, or it was inside her head. “No, better yet, kill her.”

Prissilla shook her head, opted to ignore the old woman, and sat back down to read.

“Prissy, if you don’t do something about those dust bunnies, I will, even if it kills me.”

Prissilla looked up for a moment, then back down. She listened to her mother struggle with the walker, trying to pull herself up out of the big, deep chair. She looked up again momentarily when she heard the walker slip from the older woman’s grip on the slick, slippery floor.

She watched her mother fall forward and lay prone on the hardwood.

“Prissy…help me,” the elderly woman called in a pitiful voice. “Prissy I’ve fallen… fallen and I can’t get up”

Prissilla sat like a statue, fighting her emotions. Just as she was about to give in, her mother barked, “Prissy, stop this foolishness right now. Do something before the dust down here drowns me!”

“All right, Mother, I’ll do something… I’ll do something right away.” She got up, went to the phone, and called Howard. “Honey, you can come home now. I’ve decided to take care of the problem.”

Then Prisilla bent down and called. “I hear you. I accept you and you can stay.”

The old woman looked fearful and desperately grasped the fallen walker as she tried to pull herself up.

From under the chairs and sofas dozens of little fuzzy dust bunnies crept out, whispering to each other.

Prissilla smiled at the pests that had somehow become pets and pointed. “Okay guys. Dinnertime!”

A few nights later, Howard sat and read the newspaper as Prissilla dusted the spotless coffee table. She hummed along to the whispered song of contentment that only she could hear as she moved about the room, swiping the cloth across everything.

Everything that is, except the gray, fluffy sculpture of an old, bent woman with a shiny, shiny walker.

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Diane Arrelle

Diane Arrelle, the pen name of South Jersey writer Dina Leacock, has sold more than 400 short stories and has three published books including her collection of horror stories Seasons On The Dark Side, and and the rerelease of her updated and expanded short story collection, Just A Drop In The Cup. She is the editor of four anthologies: Crypt Gnats: Horror You’ve Been Itching to Read, WhoDunit, Trees and A Little Fantasy Everywhere. She is co-owner of Jersey Pines Ink, LLC and resides with her sane husband and insane cat on the edge of the New Jersey Pine Barrens (home of the JerseyDevil).
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Perpetuity by Anthony Boulanger

With my arm resting against the one-way glass and my gaze plunged into the interrogation room, I can’t help but shiver. I know that the doctor has no way of seeing me, that he’s only looking at his own reflection, but there’s something in his gaze that makes me uneasy. As if he knows I’m there, knows when I move, knows when I take a breath.

It’s been two hours since the arresting officers brought him here. Eugene Galton… doctor of genetics, expert in cloning. Eighty-eight yesterday, off the radar since his retirement a decade ago. Millions of dollars rich and rentier thanks to dozens of patents still feeding him with royalties. Despite his age, he stands tall in his chair. If one of his sons hadn’t denounced him, no doubt no one would have discovered the dehumanizing factory he had set up.

I stand back as the door on my side opens. Anderson, the captain, flanked by Malt, the investigating officer, appears.

“Well?” I asked.

“Nothing,” replies Malt. An old man of ninety. There’s nothing we can do against him.”

“You’re not going to let him go, are you?”

“We have no choice,” says Anderson. “The bail has already been paid.”

I can see the anger in his eyes. He, too, visited the factory before it was cleared of its occupants. He, too, was present at the first interrogation, and led part of it. The three of us know that this man is a monster with no empathy for the lives he has created. He’s not insane, but his rationality is so extreme, it’s terrifying.

***

“Please help us!”

A child’s voice, crying, sniffling. I leap to my feet and turn on the loudspeaker. Malt rushes up beside me, alerted in turn by my hand signal.

“Please help us.”

The voice has become a whisper, sometimes covered by the crackling of the telephone.

“I’m Lieutenant O’Leary. Can you identify yourself?”

“He keeps us in a large warehouse near a river. I can see a big black tower with Greek symbols through the window when it’s dark.”

The tone replaces the child’s voice.

***

“Do we inform the media?” asks Malt.

The captain looks at the doctor. He, too, is absorbed by this human-like creature. Galton has this effect, as do all his descendants. He draws the eye. We focus on him. He encompasses your thoughts and suddenly takes possession of you. You want to talk to him or shout at him, help him or hit him, but he doesn’t leave you indifferent. Skin so thin you can see the network of veins, hair so blond and fragile it looks white at any age, and eyes as black as two 9-gauge bullets ready to be fired. The hands, resting on the table, are bones covered with a layer of skin to give the appearance of life. There are no wrinkles, no scabs on Galton’s face, as if the energy he had devoted to conceiving his children kept him ageless. Perhaps, in parallel with the work we’ve uncovered, had he found a molecule to limit the effects of aging? That would be logical, and complementary to the objective he described to us.

“Inform them of what?” replies Anderson. “That we’ve found a scientist who’s been conducting forbidden experiments to gain eternal life? No. It’ll hit the papers soon enough, and if we can avoid getting splashed with this crap, we will. We’ll leave it to the D.A. Get this guy off my back, O’Leary.”

***

Based on the child’s descriptions, we soon find the tower. With the indication of the river and the warehouse, the search perimeter is immediately narrowed down, but the number of areas and square meters to be explored remains such that the captain mobilizes every man in the city to unearth the building. It still takes us over twenty-four hours, during which I don’t take any rest, I don’t eat anything, I just search and search. The kid’s voice haunts me constantly, and his words, full of innuendo. “He’s holding us back…” There are several of them, in the hands of a madman, a pedophile, and who knows if every minute doesn’t see a little life snuffed out. You need warrants or authorizations for each address, but I don’t need them, and too bad for the consequences—they’re laughable compared to what’s in the balance.

When I arrive in front of the warehouse, it doesn’t look like an abandoned one. It’s in operation. There’s a light on, steam escaping from a pipe on the roof, cameras pointing in all directions. I have a bad feeling, and I immediately call for backup. My partner is a hundred meters away, circling another building. I’m not going to wait for him. At the front door, I flash my badge at a camera, then knock. The metal amplifies the sound and spreads it around like a death knell. No one answers.

“Police!”

I know my gesture is futile, since I’ve just presented my badge, but I feel the need to make this place resonate with my presence. What if the children were behind and could hear me?

***

“So now I’m free?”

Even his voice makes me uncomfortable. It’s too dry, too penetrating. It shoots my ears off and hangs on to them. This thing is an insect, a phasma made man. I feel it could devour me if it weren’t still shackled at the feet.

“Don’t say anything,” he continues. “I don’t need you to talk. You’ve got nothing on me, apart from a vague story that social services will pick up on. I’ve done nothing illegal under current legislation. I could be criticized for my living environment, but all these children are well fed and educated. At my place of work, of course, but it’s as good a place as any.”

“What about all those we couldn’t find?”

My voice betrays me. It trembles. I shouldn’t have spoken, I didn’t want to speak, but the thought that this man will get away with it, either spared by his age or caught by the Grim Reaper before he can rot in prison…

“As you say, Agent O’Leary, you’ve found nothing. As far as I’m concerned, all these children born under my directives are alive.”

“These children, right? You don’t even have the decency to say they’re yours?”

“They’re not mine,” says Galton, blasé. “They’re me. If you haven’t understood that, then you haven’t understood my first statement.”

***

The door opens, but I don’t move forward. I stand still. Blocked. Petrified. The boy’s eyes are so fixed I think he’s blind. He’s not even a meter tall. I’m no expert on kids, so I can’t give him an age, but surely under three?

“You are too late. We took matters into our own hands. I hope we won’t have to worry about that.”

The voice is the second shock, but one that wakes me up and spurs me into action. Too mature, with intonations and articulation that don’t belong in a mouth with milk teeth. I take my hand off my revolver and take a step. The child disappears from the threshold, and I discover the interior of the warehouse. A gigantic, aseptic complex, with prefabs spread out in multi-story cube blocks in areas demarcated by white paint on the floor.

There are children everywhere. Lots of boys, all from the same mold. A few girls, with the same features. All have white skin, black eyes and stringy hair. They’re dressed in hospital gowns, identified by a number on the gown and a tattoo on the arm.

“What is this place?” I blurt out.

“Where we were born,” replies the kid behind my back.

I walk towards the first block. The surprise of this discovery makes me forget for a moment what could have motivated their call to the police or the danger they were in. On the first floor of the first prefab, through the window, I can see cribs with other children hovering beside them, bigger and older than those I’ve seen so far, but only just.

“It’s the latest generation,” says the boy.

Behind me, other young people have gathered. The same closed faces, the same scrutinizing eyes. I have the impression of an army of masks converging on me. I swallow hard and turn back to the glass.

“They have a genetic similarity factor of between 97% and 99.9%. He was very close to his goal.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying, kiddo.”

“And I don’t understand why you dare call me kiddo.”

***

“Just tell me one thing, Agent O’Leary. Which one turned me in? I know it’s a sixth to ninth-generation one, but that still leaves about fifty suspects. Could you give me something to help me refine my idea? I don’t have any power over these kids anyway, but I wanted to know which one stood out.”

I know exactly what he’s talking about with his generations thing, and it disgusts me to hear him sound so calm and clinical when he uses those words. I mustn’t lose sight of what a psychopath he is. He’s killed hundreds, I’m convinced, even if we’ll never be able to prove it. He’s manipulated just as many.

“I see you don’t want to talk to me. Perhaps you don’t know which child has managed to contact you. But, you see, you need to know for yourself because he still has a role to play in my life. I can’t rely on the one who attacked me first, because these children think like I do. So the most intelligent manipulated the others to exonerate himself, but took part in the assault to show that he wasn’t a coward. Maybe not the ninth generation. After all, they’re still too young to influence their elders.”

The door opens behind me.

“That’s enough. O’Leary, get out,” orders the captain.

***

“It’s quite simple,” continues Eugene Galton. “A man and a woman having a child pass on fifty percent of their genetic heritage each. To be rigorous, a woman also transmits the DNA of her mitochondria, but let’s simplify it for you. All human beings on this planet also share a certain percentage of genes that are unaltered from between generations because they are indispensable to the viability of living beings. Do you follow me so far?”

Captain Anderson nods in agreement. I doubt he’d be interested in a course in genetics, but I know he’s on the lookout in the old man’s speech for the slightest element that might aggravate his case.

“A father and his child, male or female, share around eighty percent of perfectly identical genes, down to the smallest point of mutation. It is likely that the father is genetically closer to his child than a brother is to his sister. As a theoretical exercise, let’s now assume that this same father has a new child conceived through a daughter’s genetic material. The new generation born of this union will be even closer genetically than the old one. The genes of the very first mother are diluted because the new mother is genetically closer to her father. To make an analogy, it’s like those people who say they have half their blood from such-and-such a region. If they reproduce with someone from the said region, it’s said by misuse of language that their children have three quarters of blood from that region, while one parent has only half. Now that you’ve got that down, imagine a succession of enhancements between the same original gene donor and successive generations of descendants. You will mathematically converge on a tangent whose limit corresponds to a perfect genetic copy of the original donor.”

“Are you telling me that by having a child with your daughter, then your daughter’s daughter, then her own daughter, and so on, you hope to have a boy who is your… what? Perfect clone?”

“The term clone is a misnomer. Human cloning is forbidden in this territory, so don’t expect to accuse me of that. We’re talking about genetic copying, I repeat. Think of it as the selection of hereditary traits as practiced in breeding.”

I sense Anderson is making a huge effort to contain himself and remain professional when he asks his next question. “So, you had children with your daughters?”

“I can see what you expect as a declaration, but you can’t be more wrong. I’m talking about cells and genes, not minors and ovaries. Can you imagine how long it would take to conduct such an experiment using natural reproduction? Spin your brain, Captain, do I look like a pedophile?”

“I wouldn’t tell you what you look like, Doctor, but you don’t seem to realize your situation. You seem very proud of your pseudoscience, but you have nevertheless warehoused—that’s the right term—several dozen of your children in appalling conditions, some of whom were exploited to keep your experiments going. Undeclared births, by surrogate mothers no longer traceable today, with transfers to tax havens in the background—”

“I was just about to check whether my mind transfer had gone smoothly when those kids tied me up. These results must not disappear, do you hear me? The children must not be separated from each other. They must continue what I’ve started if you don’t give me the means!”

***

I watch Eugene Galton’s descent down the steps, with a macabre curiosity as to whether he will stumble and break the bones in his frail legs. An accident would happen so quickly, and no one would miss this man. Certainly not this family created for the sole purpose of allowing him to live forever. I’d say he was rational, but with the little hindsight I have on this affair, what madness could drive a being to set up such a plan? To consider his own life infinitely more important than those he could bring out of nothing? How can a man run with such force and energy, with such an expenditure of means and inhumanity, after such a chimera? And if he really could have duplicated his spirit in a body that genetically resembled him nearly one hundred percent, what would have been the next step? Protect himself against all the potential dangers of microbes, viruses, street crossings and fires? Create back-up copies scattered around the globe in the same way that computer data is duplicated for backup?

Finally, the doctor reaches the staircase without losing his balance. He looks in all directions and suddenly raises his arm. The back of his skull explodes and spatters red on the staircase, an instant fresco in honor of death and the bullet that took him. I barely react as the police station panics. Officers come out, and one of them rushes to Galton’s side. For my part, I merely raise my head in the direction he had pointed before being thrown by the impact. In the darkness of the facade, I distinguish a white face, unkempt hair haloing that head. A thin boy stands up and walks away. Eighth generation perhaps, I think. And in the back of my mind, this question: What if Galton had succeeded in his gamble of transferring his spirit into a younger, genetically identical body, would he be able to bear for a single moment the vision of himself older?

Picture of Anthony Boulanger

Anthony Boulanger

Born in the Rouen area of France, Anthony Boulanger now lives in the Norman countryside in the company of his muse and their three children. He works on short stories, novels, and scripts for role-playing games and comics in the fantasy and science fiction genres. His favorite subjects are birds, golems, and world mythologies. To date, most of his writings have been published in French. Among his favorite books are Tolkien's The Silmarillion, Glen Cook's The Black Company, Barjavel's L’Enchanteur, Roland Wagner's Le Chant du Cosmos, Asimov's robotic short stories and the DragonLance saga.
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She’s Got a KRYKit to Ride by Gregory Nicoll

The spinning clay disc exploded in jagged shards. Neon orange fragments hovered motionless against the sky for a fraction of a second, like separated puzzle-pieces, before tumbling to the musky dead hay of the field.

Dorrie smiled as she coiled the smooth leather of her slingshot and tucked it back into the waistband of her burlap kilt. She was still the best marksman in the county.

“Impressive shooting, Dorrie!”

Startled, she spun in place, her moccasins scraping loose gravel. About seven meters behind her stood a small Chinese woman, grinning widely.

“Who—?” The word stuck in Dorrie’s throat as recognition cut the question short.

She had not seen L-Len Lee Hadstate in over 20 years, but here she was.

L-Len, with her flowing shiny black hair—likely dyed from gray these days—still spilling majestically onto her shoulders, her tiny delicate face smooth and ageless. She wore a short, knit skirt and clingy sleeveless silk top, as she had decades earlier when geared up for nightclubbing. The only detail out of place was the vinyl tote bag over her shoulder, embossed with a large Northwest Coastal Properties logo.

Dorrie was stunned. “I mean, how?”

L-Len grinned. “Should I call that shooting? Or was it throwing?”

Dorrie shook her head, stirring waves of tangled gray-white dreadlocks. “Definitely shooting,” she answered quietly. “Even with a slingshot. So, uh, how did you get through my security gate?”

L-Len smirked. “Good to see you too, Dorrie.”

Dorrie shrugged. “Sorry.” She took a breath and gave a brief, respectful bow. “Welcome to my hacienda. Nice to see you after all this time. I hear you’ve been making mega-dollars doing the realtor thing.”

L-Len stepped forward and hugged her. She felt shorter, smaller than Dorrie remembered, but the sweet smell of her hair and the exquisite smoothness of her bare shoulders brought a flood of pleasant memories.

Dorrie pushed L-Len gently, but firmly away. “Okay now, seriously. How did you get through my gate?”

L-Len smiled coyly, avoiding the question. “I thought a slingshot was one of those old-timey things, two rubber bands on a wooden—”

“This is also a slingshot. Harks back to David and Goliath.” Dorrie uncoiled her weapon and held it up. It was just a long and narrow leather strap, cut somewhat wider in the center than at either end, smoothly tanned on one side, naturally rough on the other. “It’s truly a sling.”

L-Len grinned. “Looks like my underwear.”

“Pretty sure I could knock down drones with it,” said Dorrie, “depending on how fast their pilots react.”

“No drones where we’re heading,” said L-Len. “Winds too strong there. If Northwest Coastal could fly drones in that region, we’d be ogling video instead of riding to the site. C’mon. My KRYKit is ready.”

L-Len’s little orange self-driving pod awaited them at the edge of the field, hovering silently just above the ground. Narrow black letters spelling “KRYKit” blinked intermittently on its front. Aside from the tilted solar panel on top and two oblong headlight lenses—one on either side of the KRYKit logo—the pod had no visible markings or contours to blemish its smooth surface. It resembled a giant plastic egg.

Was the KRYKit capable of driving through walls? Or through gates? Was that how L-Len had slipped undetected onto the property?

“You still haven’t told me how you got through my security gate.”

“That’s because I didn’t go through it. I went over.”

An oblong portal opened silently on the vehicle’s side and a small ramp extended, stopping as it met the ground with a faint crunch of metal against gravel. Dorrie climbed inside, blinking to adjust to the change in light as she extended one moccasin down against the plush black carpet.

The car’s interior was surprisingly roomy. It was ringed on all sides by a narrow couch, but with a pair of large, padded reclining seats in the center of its floor space. All these surfaces were a pale shade of orange, pleated, and adorned with a black crosshatch pattern, which resembled a cartoon spiderweb. A small console stood between the recliners.

Overhead hung a single glass knob. Dorrie suspected it was a security camera or a microphone, possibly both. Everything smelled of warm plastic and citrus air-freshener. There were no windows.

“Kinda dark in here,” Dorrie observed.

L-Len spoke to the ceiling dome in a commanding tone. “Keep Moving,” she said, “show what’s outside.”

Immediately, the interior of the KRYKit lit up, tall screens on its walls displaying an unbroken 360-degree image of the open brown fields to the left and right. The picture was so detailed and immersive that it seemed as if the walls of the car had opened all around them, but when Dorrie reached out toward the image, her fingertips touched the smooth, unyielding vinyl surface of a simulation screen.

“It’s showing us what really is outside around us right now,” said L-Len. “But the Keep Moving module can also simulate just about any other environment you’d prefer.” She said loudly, “Keep Moving, show me Paris, France.”

Immediately the display changed to a view of the streets of Paris, its gray, centuries-old historic architecture interspersed with modern steel and glass. The silhouette of the Eiffel Tower loomed on the horizon.

Dorrie grinned mischievously and called up to the microphone, “At night!”

The display screens flickered blank for a split second, then returned to the same view of daylit Paris.

“It can do that, but it has to hear my voice,” explained L-Len. “Mine is the only one it’s been programmed for. Now have a seat.”

Dorrie straightened out the folds of her kilt and sat on a recliner. It was solid beneath her, but she felt its foam spreading, adjusting to her body. She lowered her hemp tote bag and her two wineskins onto the car’s floor and swiveled herself up fully onto the chair. It was instantly comfortable, molding itself to her shape and providing solid support for her head and lower back.

L-Len sat down beside her on the other chair and clipped a large-size rectangular personal phone into a slot on the console between them. She logged onto it by pressing the tip of her thumb against the security pad at the edge of its darkened screen. The phone recognized her and opened to its display menu. L-Len selected Navigation.

There was a loud beeping sound and a pop-up window superimposed itself over the screen, flashing a warning about something Dorrie could not quite read. She thought she saw the phrase “essential firmware updates” blinking in it. L-Len impatiently closed the warning screen, which required pressing her thumb to the security pad again.

“It’s always trying to update to Keep Moving 2.3,” L-Len grumbled. “Can’t afford the downtime for that right now. Last one stewed for nearly six hours and I couldn’t use the car that whole time.”

She pressed Navigation once more. A sub-menu offered various standard choices, but she scrolled quickly down through them and tapped User-Defined. This brought up a list of seven maps. The first six had checkmarks beside their now grayed-out titles, but the last was unchecked and stood starkly in bold letters: Osprey’s Roost.

When L-Len tapped it, the phone projected a topographical map into the air between the car’s two recliners. Property boundary lines, longitude and latitude, acreage measurements, and elevation data were superimposed over the line drawings.

“So… you ready?”

Dorrie fumbled in her tote bag and withdrew a paper map. She unfolded it carefully. It was old, frayed along the crease lines, with a few torn edges and small pieces missing. Meticulously, she compared a section in its upper left corner against the hologram from L-Len’s phone. Eventually, she nodded. “Ready.”

L-Len tapped her phone. The holographic view was replaced by the flat monochrome image of a real estate contract. “Got the paperwork ready here. One touch of your personal bio-met’s in that blue square at the bottom, and the sale is completed. Osprey’s belongs to you.”

Dorrie smiled. “I still need to see it first.”

L-Len smiled and closed the image. She reclined back on the chair and spoke upward at the ceiling dome. “Keep Moving, take us to the lower southern border of Osprey’s Roost.”

The KRYKit made a humming sound as it retracted its ramp and sealed its portal. Images of Paris vanished from the wraparound display, replaced by the natural view of the actual exterior. The car moved.

The surface of the recliner gently squeezed Dorrie, holding her in place. She refolded the map and restored it to her bag.

The KRYKit’s operating system spoke. It had a pleasant, soothing, artificial voice with what Dorrie assumed was supposed to be a British accent. “Estimated travel time to Osprey’s Roost is three hours, twenty-seven minutes,” it said.

The car rose higher above the roadway and picked up speed, its display screen images accelerating to a blur.

“Is it safe for us to be traveling this fast?” Dorrie asked.

L-Len grinned. “We’re not going as fast as it looks. It’s a simulation. Have you never seen the adverts?”

“I saw an ad,” Dorrie admitted, “but hated how they used that old song by The Beatles, turning ‘Ticket to Ride’ into ‘KRYKit to Ride.’ Sounded like the Beatles were actually singing that. Creepy.”

L-Len shrugged. “They probably used Voice Gym to change ‘ticket’ to ‘KRYKit.’ Anybody can use Voice Gym. I’ve even got its free starter version on my phone. I punked my last girlfriend by switching around words on messages she left.”

“Must have truly endeared her to you.”

L-Len waved her hand dismissively. “Wasn’t interested in getting tied down in any extended relationship. Don’t have any family. Don’t want to build one. I love being free and indie.”

The KRYKit reached the highway, merging smoothly into rows of fast-moving traffic on the main thoroughfare. Its bright orange contrasted starkly against the dull grays and blacks of the single passenger sedans and suburban mini-vans, and the smoky whites and rusty reds of the tractor-trailers.

“Want a drink?” asked L-Len. Without waiting for an answer, she told the car, “Keep Moving, serve us pom-vod. Two glasses, chilled.”

A small portal opened on the center console with a slight mechanical whirring sound. A purple glow spilled from within as a metal tray rose, bearing two translucent drinking vessels, accompanied by a gust of cold air and a pungent fruity smell. Lightly ruby-hued liquid swirled within the glasses, spears of ice rotating in a ghostly dance below the surface. Between the two drinks sat a reddish fruit pod.

Dorrie sat up. “Is that a pomegranate? A real one?”

L-Len nodded. “Part of the presentation, a decoration for effect. Here, try some of this pomegranate vodka. It’s my favorite.”

“No thanks.” Dorrie reached down and collected the two wineskins she had placed on the car’s floor. “I brought some grape wine that I made myself and some well water, which you’re welcome to.”

L-Len waved a hand at her. “No water! Join me in a pom-vod!”

Dorrie picked up the pomegranate and held its ruddy husk appreciatively in her hand. “May I have this?” After L-Len nodded her assent, Dorrie tucked it into her bag beside two hearty bunches of her grapes. She pulled the cap loose from one of her wineskins and took a quick sip.

L-Len picked up both glasses of pom-vod. “More for me, then.” She proceeded to take a generous gulp from one and then from the other.

Dorrie put the cap back on her wineskin. One deep swig of its sweet berry taste was all she needed. She hoped L-Len would exercise similar restraint.

She was disappointed.

***

The KRYKit carried them uneventfully over the silver ribbon of busy roadway for more than two hours before Dorrie sensed something strange in its movements. She was certain it had turned sharply to the right, despite the screen image to the contrary.

With much persuading, she convinced L-Len, who had been drinking glass after glass of pom-vod, to temporarily disable the car’s Keep Moving display so they could see what was really happening.

“Ishhh okay,” L-Len slurred.

They discovered that dense smoke from a wildfire had closed the northbound highway. The KRYKit was detouring over surface streets.

“Ishhh okay,” L-Len murmured as she reached for another glass of pom-vod.

“Haven’t you had enough?” Dorrie asked.

L-Len scowled. “You’re sh-shounding like my bosh.”

“Like who?”

“Like my bosh.” L-Len cleared her throat. “My boss. Always sc-scolding me. But I won’t hafff to wurry about her mush longer.” She took another sip of pom-vod. “Bosh gave me sebben properties, um, seven properties, to shell. To sell.” She burped, briefly covering her mouth. “Seven hardest ones to sell she could find. An’ I sold six of them show far. So far. Yours will be th’ last.”

“That’s only if I do buy it,” Dorrie countered. “Still need to see it.”

“Contrast, um, contract—contract’s ready to go, right on my phone.”

“You showed me that.”

“Once I shell you Oz-Oz –”

“Osprey’s Roost.”

L-Len grinned. “Right. Once you buy it, whiff my commission from the shale, I start my own company. No more killjoy bosh telling me to shop drinking. I already turned in my notice thish morning.”

“Good for you,” Dorrie said, speaking with a forceful tone she hoped would bring the speech to a merciful conclusion.

Fortunately, the car itself intervened. “Destination Osprey’s Roost,” announced the overhead voice, “is now approximately thirty minutes away.”

“I have to go,” L-Len announced.

“Go?”

Gesturing at the back of the car, L-Len grinned and whispered, “Ladies’ Room.”

To Dorrie’s astonishment, L-Len rose and stumbled toward the rear of the KRYKit. A section of the web-like pattern on the wall opened to reveal a small restroom like those on commercial airliners. A faint scent of disinfectant wafted from it.

L-Len took hold of the doorway to stabilize herself, then swiveled so she was facing back out. She waved idiotically at Dorrie as the portal closed, the black spiderweb pattern immediately covering the wall behind her.

Dorrie turned back to view the northbound road ahead. The country was less developed here, more hilly, with snow-capped mountain peaks visible in the distance. This was the sort of territory she had always yearned for, always dreamed of settling into some day.

She could easily afford Osprey’s. She was the sole heir to her family’s lumber fortune. Necessary funds had already been transferred to her account. Whether it would be possible to construct a modern house at Osprey’s remained to be seen, though, as the property was remote, far off the roads, and perched in high, treacherous, windy country.

A loud thump sounded from the restroom.

“L-Len?” Dorrie called out. “Are you okay?” She stepped back toward the car’s rear and knocked where she had seen the doorway, but the heavy orange padding dulled the sound. She was surprised and momentarily distracted to find that the black spiderweb pattern was stitched over the soft orange vinyl with some durable artificial material, rather than merely printed onto it, presumably as extra protection against the padding being torn.

Another thump came from within.

“L-Len?”

The door opened and L-Len, who had apparently been leaning on it from the inside, tumbled out. Dorrie intercepted L-Len’s fall and, turning in place as she supported the smaller woman’s weight, lowered her onto a section of the couch at the left of the bathroom. The door quietly closed and vanished as L-Len sprawled beside it. Her skirt was askew, and Dorrie noticed the two telltale pink wire leads of an S-Sim protruding from her black silk thong.

“L-Len, were you getting sex in there?”

Heavily intoxicated, L-Len grinned with delirium. “Ohhh, baby,” she cooed. “Faster, faster. Don’t stop.”

“You’re drunk. I mean really, really drunk.”

“Am not.” L-Len struggled to get to her feet, both arms swinging wildly.

Dorrie took a step back. “Be careful—hey, I think you should sit down.”

L-Len was fully upright now, but swaying. She threw her head back as if in ecstasy. “Faster, faster!” she shouted.

The KRYKit accelerated.

“Faster! Faster!”

The car continued to gain velocity.

Dorrie noticed with alarm that the images of the mountainous north country were passing more quickly. This was not another Keep Moving simulation. She felt herself pressed back against the cushions by G-force. This was real.

Astounded that L-Len was still standing, she cried out angrily, “Tell it to stop!”

L-Len leaned back, arms outstretched, eyes closed tightly. “Don’t stop!” she yelled. “Don’t stop!”

She fell. Slammed back against the wall where the restroom door had opened, she tumbled to the floor, landing on her head and pivoting on her neck. Something in her spinal column cracked with a sound like the snap of a wet carrot. She sprawled, limbs twitching spasmodically for a moment before settling to permanent stillness.

Dorrie had seen enough wild animals die to know the signs. L-Len was gone.

Fighting the G-force that weighed her down, she crawled over to L-Len’s body and made sure. No breath. No heartbeat.

Clearing her throat, then struggling to mimic L-Len’s voice, she called up to the ceiling dome, “Slow down. Resume normal travel speed.”

The car ignored her.

“Keep Moving, slow down,” she said, realizing with frustration how contradictory and absurd that sounded.

There was no response.

Dorrie looked up at the blurry images of the untamed countryside streaking past on the simulation screens. If only there was a real glass window she could break and, maybe, jump out of.

How long would the KRYKit go before it exceeded its solar charging? And what then? Would it seal itself? With no charge remaining, could it even open its door?

She was startled by the car’s voice.

“Approaching Osprey’s Roost,” it announced. “Distance to property line is approximately five kilometers. Leaving highway. Ascending to off-road altitude.”

With that, the KRYKit swooped up into the air. It banked to the right and rose dozens of meters above the trees, continuing at intense speed.

Dorrie’s heart beat faster. Peering down at the terrain—jagged rocks and deep canyons—she ruled out any notion of jumping, even were it possible.

If only she had a recording of L-Len’s voice. Maybe she could find a word or a phrase to play back that would trick Keep Moving into obeying.

Wait. She did have one—that message L-Len left on her phone.

Dorrie scrambled to fish the phone out of her bag. Her hands trembled as she gripped the smooth plastic surface of the little green oval and pressed her thumbprint on the security pad. Accessing her messages, she clicked on the one from L-Len and listened nervously as it played.

“Dorrie, it’s L-Len with Northwest Properties. Got your two posts with the co-ord’s and directions to your place. I’ll come getcha Tuesday about 10 a.m. for a look at Osprey’s Roost. It’s a long ride up, but I’ve got a nice KRYKit self-driver with that new Keep Moving add-on, so we’ll be comfy. It’s smooth as glass, so those coastal winds won’t bother it. Too bad there’s no hotel or anywhere for us to crash up there but, no worry, we can always nap in the car. See you Tuesday!”

Dorrie frowned. If only L-Len had used the word “stop” or “slow” somewhere in that message.

She played it again, but paused it at “two posts.” What about “posts”—like “stop,” but backwards? What had L-Len said about something called Voice Gym?

Unlocking L-Len’s phone was a challenge.

After tense consideration, Dorrie decided it was prudent to leave the phone docked on the KRYKit’s center console, linked and providing route directions, rather than risk resetting everything by disconnecting it. To provide the phone’s security with L-Len’s thumbprint, she had to drag the dead woman’s body over to it. With much effort, she moved L-Len up with her back against a recliner, close enough to allow pressing her hand against the mounted phone.

Another issue: The phone would not initially recognize L-Len’s thumbprint, either because L-Len was dead or because her skin had been chilled from holding an iced drinking glass. Dorrie rubbed the tip of L-Len’s thumb with the flat of her own hand, hoping to generate enough friction to warm it up. Four attempts later, its temperature was finally sufficient for the pad to accept. The main menu opened.

The Voice Gym icon appeared at the bottom of the first screen. To Dorrie’s immense relief, tapping it launched the app with no further requirements. The app’s screen resembled a pizza cut into four uneven slices with different labels: “Record,” “Edit,” “Playback,” and “Save.” Holding her own round green phone up to this screen, Dorrie clicked “Record” in the Voice Gym app and started L-Len’s voicemail.

When the message played back, a transcription of it appeared on the Voice Gym screen. After it completed, Dorrie clicked-and-dragged a copy of the transcribed message into the app’s “Edit” section. She then separated the word “posts” from the balance of the text.

She had to turn “posts” into “stop.” Could she play it backwards?

Well, she decided, if a moron like L-Len could use this app…

She pressed two fingers against the word on the little glowing screen, one fingertip on the “p” and the other pushed tightly against the last “s.” She then rotated her wrist, as if turning an old-fashioned doorknob. The word flipped upside-down, blinked off the screen, and then returned as a mirror image of itself, displayed upright but completely backwards.

Dorrie clicked-and-dragged the reversed word into the app’s “Play” quadrant. She tapped on it.

L-Len’s voice chimed out from the speaker, but the word sounded more like “shtoap” than “stop” and it had a weird descending cadence, noticeable even as a single syllable, betraying its reversed origin.

Dorrie looked hopefully at the ceiling dome, but there was no reaction from the Keep Moving software. She glanced over at the car’s displays and watched the wild, mountainous countryside still flying past at breakneck speed. Despite her rising alarm, she was fascinated to see several large predatory birds circling in the air toward the west, apparently some of the region’s namesake ospreys.

Acting quickly, she cut and pasted the phrase “Keep Moving” from the transcription and added it in front of the mirrored “posts.” She played it back.

“Keep Moving, shtoap,” said the phone.

It sounded doubly stupid, but Dorrie replayed it anyway.

There was a brief pause, and then the overhead speaker answered quietly, “Unrecognized instruction.”

Dorrie swore under her breath. She scanned the transcription again carefully for something else she could use. The third time through, almost to the end, she spotted what she needed.

There it was: crash.

Dorrie took another long, deep breath, followed by a quick slug of sweet strong liquid courage from her wineskin, then took action.

She buckled L-Len’s corpse into the other recliner so it would not be flying around inside the car upon impact. She also minimized the Voice Gym app and, mimicking steps L-Len used earlier, brought up the sales contract between Northwest Coastal and herself. With the touch of a button, full ownership of Osprey’s Roost was now hers.

A twinkling chime from her own phone signaled confirmation of the transaction.

Then with trembling hands, Dorrie returned to the Voice Gym software and assembled two more edits from the transcription, a long one and a short one. When she was finished, she leaned back on the recliner and let its soft orange foamy surface grip her securely. Reaching over to L-Len’s phone, she dragged the longer edit into the “Playback” quadrant and tapped it.

“Keep Moving,” said L-Len’s voice from the orange phone’s tiny speaker, “crash… at Osprey’s Roost.”

There was a pause.

“Unconventional instruction,” answered the car. “Repeat command for confirmation.”

Dorrie tapped the long edit again.

“Keep Moving… crash… at Osprey’s Roost.”

She then dragged the short edit into the “Playback” field and tapped it.

“Crash,” said the phone.

She tapped it again. And again.

“Crash… crash.”

The images of the countryside blurring across the car’s displays abruptly slowed. Dorrie experienced a sickening sense of inertia, as if her body were being pulled backward while her mind continued to move forward. Her stomach churned, and she felt light-headed.

The KRYKit came to a dead stop in mid-air.

Dorrie gripped the sides of the recliner tightly, the smooth orange vinyl bulging up between her clenched fingers.

And then the bottom fell out.

At first, the sensation evoked memories of what she had experienced decades ago, riding in glass elevator cars as they descended from the highest floors of tall buildings.

The KRYKit smashed to the earth, bounced once, and rolled end over end three times before falling off the edge of a shallow ravine. It landed at the bottom, finally coming to rest on its side in a cloud of dust which the high winds quickly scattered.

***

There were four of them this time, their heads snagged securely in the tight web of the black netting. Dorrie was pleased.

One of these trout was exceptionally large, bigger than her own forearm, so she added it to her stringer. It would serve as an excellent addition to her evening feast. The others she carefully disentangled from the gill net and allowed them to swim away freely in the cold, clear water of the mountain stream. She could certainly catch them again another day, if necessary, unless an osprey took them first.

Dorrie smiled. Now, she thought, I’m the osprey.

She was continually amazed by the durability of the net. She had invested nearly two full days of labor in painstakingly unstitching the black nylon webbing from the upholstery of the KRYKit’s couch, but the effort had proven magnificently worthwhile. Since she stretched it across the stream, not a day had gone by without the option of fish for dinner.

After filling both a wineskin and a clay pot with fresh water, she waded out of the stream and sat on a hard, flat rock at the water’s edge. It was warm to the touch, baked by the sun. Her sandals would dry quickly here. From this high vantage point, she could see most of what she dubbed her “garden,” a series of deep divots in the rocky surface of the mountaintop. Each was low enough to be shielded from the high winds, but wide enough to catch the sunlight on its flat inner surface through most of the day. She carried water to them regularly in the big clay pot she made, but she planned to create irrigation channels from a point farther upstream.

The seeds she germinated from the KRYKit’s pomegranate did not disappoint. There were now three rows of pomegranate bushes sprouting from the earth in the closest divot. She knew it would likely be next year before she would see any harvest from them, but that was certainly on its way, although she expected her first crop of grapes would be ready much sooner.

The aroma of roasting osprey meat wafted down from her campsite. She realized the bird she left on the fire must be nearly ready.

Returning to camp always gave Dorrie a warm feeling. The wreckage of the KRYKit, now stripped of everything she could use externally, made a fine shelter. She had cast all its electronics, along with the black-box recorder and both mobile phones, out into the ocean during her one brief expedition to the coast. Much of the car’s sturdy orange upholstery she had adapted into a sling hammock that was wide and comfortable. She detached and moved its two recliners outside, positioning one beside the campfire and relocating the other up higher to a nearby ledge. From there she could lie back on it with an unobstructed view of the constellations glistening overhead at night. The S-Sim, fully charged by the still-functioning solar panel salvaged from the car’s roof, made those long nights even more pleasant.

The osprey lay across her modest cooking fire, spatchcocked on a grid of metal skewers she had pried from the door mechanism of the KRYKit. The bird’s skin was now deep brown and she knew its meat was evenly roasted, so she removed it from the coals to let it cool. She admired it as she cleaned and prepared her fresh-caught trout to take its place over her fire. L-Len’s silk thong had become an excellent additional slingshot.

As for L-Len herself, the young woman proved more useful to Dorrie in death than she had been in life. Stripped naked, limbs wired to a gigantic metal “X” made of the KRYKit’s roof struts, L-Len’s corpse hung at the entrance of the first arroyo near the base of the mountain, crucified on fragments of her own self-driver. The sun had burned and blackened her flesh, shrinking it so her lips pulled back from her teeth in a grotesque grin.

Around L-Len’s neck hung a signboard, fashioned from the cover of the car’s solar panel, on which were written a pair of words, their lumpy, drooling letters painted with a mixture of blood and pomegranate juice, baked hard by the weather. The irregular font seemed to emphasize the instructions they imparted.

As far as Dorrie knew, nobody ever ventured this far north to search for L-Len. Or, if they did, they obeyed her hideous human scarecrow’s grim two-word command.

And kept moving.

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Gregory Nicoll

Gregory Nicoll is an author and journalist whose work has been honored over the decades in both The Year’s Best Horror Stories and The Year’s Best Music Writing. He memorably combined both of his specialties for a story in the British book Gabba Gabba Hey: An Anthology of Fiction Inspired by the Music of The Ramones. In late 2023 his horror/western tale “Entrails West” appeared in Volume 2 of the anthology Monster Fight at the O.K. Corral. Greg lives in Georgia with his wife, two crazy dogs, hundreds of vinyl record albums, and about a million DVDs.
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Not for Me the Grinding by Peter Mangiaracina

A blue page fluttered bat-like, impaled by a pushpin on a rippling latex wall. It read, “Not for me the Grinding.” An off-key dirge from a harmonium blared from a tiny speaker.

Flickering images, cross dissolving:

A cookie crumbling on a torn paper plate.

Bedsheets knotted, twisting.

Sobs, raw and jagged.

Pendulum shadows, keeping time.

And always the open window

No!—not the window!

My eyes snapped open. My throat burned from screaming a name I didn’t know.

I gasped in sharp, stuttering breaths, my body locked in Nightmare’s goblin jaw. I rubbed my stubbled cheek, yanked an eyelash free from the glue of sleep. In the dark room, a grave of black stars pulsed, denser than shadow.

Was I still dreaming, or marooned in hypnagogia, where the unconscious unravels its horrific secrets?

I reached for the void. Resistance. I pressed through its membrane into a shifting panorama of slick and melting vinyl. The soft ground yielded beneath me.

What I saw… all wrong.

A red fire engine, an Etch-a-Sketch, those beloved childhood toys, but soft, cast in gelatin, shivering at the slightest tremor. A bone-chilling cold blasted through an open window so distant it seemed a discarded dollhouse frame. The persistence of a memory.

Here’s another oatmeal cookie. Our secret. We won’t tell mom and dad. Pinky swear.

“Hello?” My voice wavered. “Who’s there?”

Silence.

I shrank, helpless, a serf to an ambiguous yet demanding ID.

A figure loomed in the window, head tilted unnaturally, eyes bulging, mouth frozen in a silent howl. She reared back and flung something at me. It hit with a dull thwack. I yelped and staggered back, expecting worse.

I searched and found it near a heap of rumpled bedsheets. My pudgy toddler hand groped through bubbling laminate, closing around a crumpled blue paper ball.

Dizziness overcame me, a hideous memory clawing to the surface, while a violent negative pole of willful ignorance shoved it down.

I read a torn page from a journal, the writing jagged and unsteady.

          I once met my future self
          Her face was bone and ash
          I plied her with questions about my choices and my past
          But she just kept screaming.

Such a strange meter! Part of a longer lament? Or a Tarot that went revoltingly wrong?

The voice squirmed through my thoughts again.

How many years have you denied I was HERE, Jonathan? I watched over you. Played silly card games with you while your mom and dad guzzled Mai Tais and nibbled Swedish Fish past midnight. You were too young to know. It was the grind, Jonathan. The pointless repetition, the Jello mold of ennui… the lazy, narrow deer path to oblivion.

I pressed the heel of my palm to my forehead. Cookies. Card games. Why couldn’t I see it?

The sea pulled back before the tsunami of recollection. I tried to hold it off, but it consumed me with devastating force, dragging me under while I groped for the wreckage of repression.

An old black and white movie flickered and rolled on the TV. A man played chess with a hooded figure while people in burlap collapsed with pustules in their armpits. A breathy, reedy instrument wheezed in the background. It frightened me, but I refused to show her.

She watched, entranced. Halfway through, she hit pause. Her lips tightened in resolve; a tear quivered at the rim of her eye.

“Your mom and dad should be home soon,” she’d said, staring past me at a shuttered window. “You ought to be in bed. Not that they give a damn.”

Back then, I didn’t question my parents’ laissez-faire child-rearing. I did whatever I wanted.

She went into the kitchen. Hinges squeaked, then the whoosh of pouring liquid. She returned with an oatmeal cookie on a paper plate and a glass of milk. The plate had a tear at the rim, as if she’d ripped it from the package in frustration.

 She set them in front of me. “Be a good boy. Wait here ’til they come back.”

“Where are you going?”

She rubbed her palms against the side of her jeans. In hindsight, her eyes seemed weary and distant. “Just stay here. Don’t move. And eat your cookie.”

Even now, fifty years later, I can still taste the cookie’s rough sweetness, the dry crumble, and the sludge I made by taking a sip of milk and rolling the whole mess around in my mouth.

Upstairs she wept, sounds so raw and relentless that they unraveled into a ragged cough. She’d told me to stay, but curiosity—or was it concern, or both—pulled me up the staircase. At the landing, the linen closet stood open. Fresh pillowcases and mattress covers lay scattered across the floor. The crying grew louder.

I followed the sound to my room, eased the door open a crack and peered inside. My red fire engine lay on its side, its ladder splayed like an insect’s wing. Beside it, an Etch-a-Sketch, a capuchin monkey engraved in graphite on a gray screen. The crying had stopped, but a frigid breeze crawled over my skin from the other side.

“Jilly?” I called. “Are you here?”

I pushed the door open. Wind surged through the open window. I hugged myself against the cold.

No one was there. Had she vanished? I was young enough to believe in magic; a disappearing lady didn’t seem impossible.

Then I saw the rope of knotted bedsheets stretching from the bedpost out the window.

Now why would Jilly escape from my window? Golly, she could’ve just used the door. Silly Jilly!

In that moment, in my waning years, I finally faced what I had known as a child but would not accept. The grain of sand that had formed the pearl of my trauma.

The sheets leading from the bedpost out the window were taut, and a thick pendulum of shadow swayed in the moonlight.

Picture of Peter Mangiaracina

Peter Mangiaracina

Peter Mangiaracina is a writer and English instructor based in the Canary Islands, Spain. Originally from New York City, he spends his time balancing work, storytelling, and his love for videography and jazz fusion guitar. His fiction has appeared in The Morgue Magazine (Pull the Strings, Dec. 2024), Three Panels Press (Facing the Music, Jan. 2025) and Bewildering Stories (The Alchemy of Attraction, February 2025). He recently completed his first novel, The Canary Killer, a mystery/thriller.
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Thank You For Your Donation by Sophie L. Macdonald

It’s the smell I notice first. A mustiness offset by a bitter edge of copper. It coils through my mouth and nose, filling my chest.

The man is watching. He’s small, with sharp, goblin-like features, and bright eyes. He’s wearing an odd mixture of patterns and textures—a satin vest with a coil of material at his throat. Not quite a cravat. For some reason, I can’t decide what colors he’s wearing. They seem to blend and swirl, giving impressions of purple and red, but my eyes can’t focus properly. The lighting is unusual in this shop, and the orange puddles from lamps cast shadows in unexpected places. A headache tugs at the back of my eyes.

“Good evening, sir,” I begin.

The man twitches a smile at the edges of his mouth, his fingers steepled on the glass of the counter between us as if he’s about to perform a magic trick. There’s nothing up my sleeve.

I’m about to show him the letter when I spot something, and my stomach lurches.

“That photograph,” I say suddenly, indicating behind him. “Is it a famous portrait? I feel as if I’ve seen it before.”

“Before, ma’am?” His voice is quiet. The diplomatic hush of a doctor or, in his case, a pawnbroker.

I am transfixed by the photograph on the wall behind him. It looks both old and new, and the woman in the picture is staring, wide-eyed, stuck there like a butterfly. I can almost see her lips twitching. Let me out.

“I beg your pardon?” the man says.

“I didn’t say anything.”

My voice is shaking, but the man remains calm. He must be used to odd behavior in here. Desperation and ruin. Heartbreak and hope.

I focus on him, willing myself not to look at the woman in the photo, even though I feel she is looking at me. So familiar. I’m not sure why it bothers me so much.

“I’ve come to claim something back,” I say. “I think there’s something here belonging to me, but I’m not sure.”

“Do you have a receipt?”

There’s something on his face I don’t like. A knowing. I draw my coat around me, suddenly cold. My stomach hurts. “You need to turn your heating on, sir.” My words puncture the air between us, startling me, and I’m embarrassed by my outburst.

“You said that last time.” His smile creeps wider.

The smell of dust is choking me, and for a moment I can’t catch my breath. The shop is small, but it’s piled high with surrendered belongings, and they loom above me. It’s suffocating.

A baby’s cot catches my eye, and I am overcome with sadness. What manner of parent brought a cot to this godforsaken shop? Did their baby die, or were they so desperate they had to choose between their child’s sleep or food?

I focus once more on the man, whose grin remains in place throughout my silence.

“I’ve never been here before.” I say it as much to myself as to him. Fumbling for the letter in my pocket, I drop it on the counter to avoid touching his hand. “Here.” I point at the picture on the letter. “This is your establishment, isn’t it?”

He barely looks at it before handing it back to me. “That’s not a receipt.”

“Did you read it?”

“I know what it is, and I know what it isn’t.”

“It’s a thank-you letter.” I’ve folded and unfolded it countless times, but the writing has not faded. I’ve memorized every loop of every letter. At the top is a crude line-drawing of the shop, with its faded Pawnbroker sign. Underneath it simply reads, “Thank you for your donation.”

“Exactly,” he says. He dips his head, a mock bow. “Not a sale. Not that for which a refund may be applicable. A donation. Thank you.”

“What donation? I’ve never been here before.”

“But you must have.” He says it kindly, so softly. “After all, the letter is the proof.”

I stare at it, checking again that it is definitely a picture of this shop. But there is no mistake. As I peer closer at the drawing, I see more detail than I have ever noticed before. The windows are piled high with goods. It’s impossible—it must be a coincidence as the stock must always change, but the shop window in the drawing even shows a baby’s cot, just like the one here.

It’s almost as if I am falling into the picture. There is a shopkeeper in the drawing. I can just make him out through the window, and the faintest outline of a woman who looks like me. The letter falls from my hand, and I lean heavily on the counter. I try to steady my breathing.

“I need your help.” My voice has taken a pleading tone, and I know he hears it. He likes it, I think. My fingers bite into the counter as if it were a lifeboat. I can’t let go. My head is fuzzy.

“I think I must be suffering some sort of amnesia,” I say. “All I know is that I have this letter, and everything else is a blur. I’ve been walking the streets for hours, trying to find your shop. I thought you might tell me what I sold and return it to me. It might help me remember. I think something is wrong with me—maybe I’m not well.”

The woman in the picture is saying something. I can see her lips moving as I talk. It almost looks as if she is mouthing along to what I say. I must have a head injury. I must be seeing things.

The man follows my gaze to the picture behind him. “Would you like a closer look?” He takes it off the wall, and I am immediately certain I don’t want it anywhere near me. A bellow of horror that starts deep inside of me belches out in his face. I am horrified by the sound—guttural and deafening. I clamp my hands to my mouth, but he doesn’t flinch.

He holds it up beside my head. “Not your best angle, but I only had one shot.”

“Get it away! Get it away!” I scramble backwards, falling, scuttling like a crab away from it. I can feel it pulsing, like it wants to fill me up.

“Not everyone likes their own souls,” he comments. “From the outside, you can see them more clearly than ever.”

Impossible. Fantastical. But the truth of it feels undeniable.

“Why would I have given my soul to you?”

“Maybe you needed a favor. Someone to be saved. Someone to not be saved. I always try to help those who donate to my shop.”

“Did I save someone?” I whisper. I watch the picture mouth the words, and I know the answer from her face. The woman in that picture did not save anyone.

There is a flash of images, so fast I almost can’t see them. A man—my husband? A woman—his mistress? Shock on her face; a knife in her chest. She is screaming.

“Did I kill someone?”

“Sometimes people want to get away with murder.” He shrugs. “I don’t judge.”

“This can’t have been what I wanted,” I cry. “You must have tricked me. You took it out—you can put it back.”

As I say it, I am struck by the conviction that if whatever inhabits the portrait was a part of me, I don’t want it back. I don’t want her near me. But I can’t bear this feeling that I have been hollowed out. I’m empty.

“And all of this?” I wave at the belongings—the baby’s cot. “What are they? Is that a baby’s soul? Did the baby donate that to you?”

The man chuckles, a benign gleam in his eye, as if indulging a child telling a joke. “No, ma’am,” he says, finally. “These are all things that you brought here.”

I look again at the furniture stacked up in the window. A plush, mustard-colored chair, a bookcase, an outdoor set with a faded umbrella. There’s a set of dolls, a vanity, and a frame containing what I can now see is a university certificate, bearing my husband’s surname but an unfamiliar female first name.

“I don’t recognize any of this.”

“That’s because the people who would own it can no longer do so.” He sighs. “Such clutter, but it must go somewhere.” He nods at the cot. “A baby who was never born has no need of a bed, or a doll, or even a degree. A woman who did not get to finish her life will not buy that chair or that garden table. Everything must go somewhere.”

“A baby—”

“You didn’t know, of course. How could you? They didn’t even know themselves. Would it have prevented you? Or would it have hastened your actions, perhaps?” He brushed an invisible speck of dust from his sleeve. “It doesn’t matter.”

It’s so icy that my breath is misting up the whole shop. The pain in my head and my stomach have increased to the point where I can barely think. I feel as if a hole has been drilled through me, scooping out my ability to make sense of what is happening. All that’s left is fragments. Pulp.

“I do enjoy our chats.” He gives a wide smile that shows all his teeth. “You must visit again. I will be closing soon.”

Sudden tears come to my eyes. “I don’t know where to go.”

It’s true. I cannot think where I live, or who I could turn to. I don’t even know my own name.

“It is unfortunate you died so soon after making your donation. Perhaps you could have learned to live without a soul, but we would have met, eventually.” He says it like that should bring me comfort.

I’m about to tell him he’s wrong—I’m alive! I didn’t die! But another image flashes through my mind—my husband, grabbing the knife from my hand, a look of understanding and grief. Darkness.

“Did she come to see you too? Does everyone come here when they die?”

 “This display is only for you, ma’am,” the man says, as if bestowing a great honor. “I’m sure you must appreciate that we value customer confidentiality in a business such as this.”

“But you haven’t helped me! I didn’t get away with anything because he killed me straight away! That means you took my donation and gave me nothing!” The portrait behind him is mouthing the words. She is enraged.

“I suppose I could return it.” The man reaches towards the portrait, laughing as I cower from it. “I didn’t think so.” He returns to his steeple-fingered posture, observing me from across the counter. I remain a few steps back from him, although I’m not sure what I am trying to save myself from now.

“You’ll want her someday,” the man says, either to me or the portrait—I’m not sure which. “You’ll beg to have her back. Maybe, if you’re a good customer, I will let you.”

He didn’t move it, but I suddenly feel as if the portrait is closer to me. She is mimicking my expressions, breathing when I breathe, and her face is moving towards mine. She is a monster. She is terrifying.

My legs feel as if I am in a nightmare, and they won’t work properly. I stagger to the exit, wrenching the door open.

“See you again soon, ma’am,” the man calls, softly, as I fall onto the street.

The pavement is cool and solid, and I feel as if I have just woken up. I am confused. I don’t know why I am here. My head hurts and I wonder if I’ve had an accident and lost consciousness in the street. I walk, but I don’t know where I’m going.

There is a piece of folded up paper in my hand. It says, “Thank you for your donation.” I don’t know where it came from, but there is a drawing of a pawnbroker’s shop at the top of the page, and maybe if I go there, I’ll remember something. I walk for hours, up and down empty roads, and then I see it—a little shop, glowing orange lights out into the darkness, piled up with nonsense in the windows. There appears to be a man behind the counter.

With relief, I enter. The shop is unusually cold, and I pull my coat around me. An odd scent of dust and metal fills the air. The shopkeeper is strangely dressed and looks at me as though waiting for me to speak.

“Good evening, sir,” I begin.

Picture of Sophie L. Macdonald

Sophie L. Macdonald

Sophie L. Macdonald was born and raised in Hampshire, England, where she graduated from Southampton University with a degree in Psychology. Her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Underdog #LoveOzYA Short Stories, The Evil Inside Us, Futurevision, Obliquity, Seasons of Discontent, and more. Her story, “Breathe Me In”, was chosen for the 2020 HSC English exam by the NSW Education Standards Authority. Sophie now lives in Brisbane, Australia, with her family, cats, and a guinea fowl called Jeff. For more information please visit her website.
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The Dream Peddler by Zachary Arama

Frankie Newell was nervous.

He did not like visitors. In fact, he didn’t like people at all. Even his father, who owned the farm where Frankie’s little cottage was nestled, didn’t disturb him unless it was critical. Other than his weekly trip into town for groceries, he rarely saw another soul. He could count the number of people who had his address on one hand, yet the knocking at his door came again.

Rap pap pap pap… Rap pap pap pap…

Eight knocks felt very presumptuous to Frankie. Three was polite, and four was borderline acceptable. But eight? It only served to heighten his anxiety. He hugged his cat tightly to his chest as he walked down the hall, unbolted the three locks, and cautiously opened the door.

The man standing in the doorway was short, even compared to Frankie, who was 5’7”. He was almost a dwarf, and he wore a top hat that made his appearance somewhat comical.

“Can I help you?” Frankie eyed the small man’s briefcase apprehensively.

Oh no. A salesman.

“I hope I can help you.”

“Oh. Um. What are you selling then?”

“Dreams,” the little man said.

Frankie waited for the short-statured salesman to elaborate, but he did not.

“What do you mean by… actually, I’m not interested in any vacations or anything else. I have everything I need already, and I’m quite happy. Thank you.”

The little man smiled an excessively toothy grin that made Frankie uncomfortable. “Dreams,” he repeated.

Frankie was bad at social situations. He didn’t understand what this man wanted, so he asked out of polite desperation, hoping that by letting him say his piece, he would go away. “How does one buy dreams exactly?”

“It’s effortless!” the man said, his eyes lighting up. “You simply tell me what kind of dream you want while you sleep tonight. Easy as that!”

Frankie was wracking his brain to find the best way to get rid of this diminutive madman.

“And you’re in luck, my friend! The first customer today to ask about the dreams gets their first one free. No strings attached! It’s a deal that can’t be beaten, and I think you’d agree that no rational person, especially not a clearly smart man such as yourself, could turn this brilliant offer down!”

The little man started pumping his arms in excitement, and Frankie’s discomfort grew.

“I’m very sorry, but—”

“You just tell me what kind of dream, and it will be done tonight!” He paused and leaned in closer. “What do you have to lose?” He winked, and his toothy smile grew even wider.

Frankie wanted more than anything for this conversation to end, but he didn’t know how to end it. However, a small part of him was curious. “So, you’re saying I can have one of these dreams free, and I don’t have to pay or sign up for anything?”

“Correct!” the little man said enthusiastically, hopping from foot to foot. “Just fill out this order form, check the boxes you want, and it’s done. No credit card required!”

He pulled a colorful notepad out of his briefcase, tore off the top sheet, and handed it to Frankie. There were three boxes at the very top to fill out.

Name:

Type of Dream (see legend):

Length of Dream:

Frankie scribbled his name in the first box, then paused at the second. Underneath these questions were dozens of boxes in assorted sizes and varying fonts. He flipped the sheet to the back and saw rows and rows of additional choices. He scanned over these options, which ranged from forest paradise and other euphoric-sounding names near the top, to dreadful options like imprisoned torment at the bottom.

Frankie started reading several of these aloud, and the little man interjected.

“May I make a recommendation?” he flipped the form back over and pointed his stubby finger to an option in the first column.

Exotic Bliss.

“One of the most popular selections. You will love it!”

“I don’t even know what I’m signing up for. How does this work? What does it entail?”

The salesman looked at Frankie the way a sympathetic parent might look at a child, tilting his head in a you’ll see gesture.

“Okay,” Frankie said meekly, feeling overwhelmed and confused.

“You have to check the box.”

He did so, and the small man snatched away the pad with his patented grin. “I’ll handle the rest. Sleep tight tonight, Frankie. And I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Frankie slid the bolts back into place and stared at the back of his door. The whole interaction had felt like an illusion. He tried to put the surreal episode out of his mind, and by that evening, he had convinced himself that the peculiar man who’d come to his door was deranged. If he saw him again, he would call the police.

That night, Frankie dreamed he was on a tropical island. Yet it wasn’t a dream at all; he felt fully awake. He was walking on a beach, the impossibly white sand warm on his bare toes. His pasty skin wasn’t damp like it usually became at the first hint of sun. Standing on the shore with her ankles in the water was the most beautiful woman Frankie had ever seen. He approached her, feeling no timidness. She turned to look at him and took his hand.

“My name is Bertina,” she said.

They spent hours together, hiking through perfectly cut paths in the lush foliage and wading in the gentle waves. She hung on his every word, marveling at every mundane detail of his life.

At the end of the beach was a magnificent shack with an oversized hammock in front, where she lay her head on his chest as they watched the sun dip under the horizon. He kissed her passionately, in truth his first ever kiss. She told him it was incredible. He didn’t know this type of euphoria existed.

Frankie awoke in his bed feeling indescribable fulfillment, and he wanted more. He knew it had been a dream, yet it felt as tangible as the reality he had returned to. He swung his legs off the side of his bed and recoiled at the sticky carpet underfoot. Downstairs, he ate his cereal without a word, eyeing the door.

Will that funny little man come back?

Can he send me back to the island?

What will it cost?

The cost didn’t matter; he had experienced something remarkable, and he needed it back.

Rap pap pap pap… Rap pap pap pap…

Without thinking, Frankie leaped out of his chair and sprinted down the hall. Realizing how desperate he must seem, he paused, took a few deep breaths, and slowly unbolted the door.

“Oh, you again. Hello.” Frankie tried to sound disinterested, but his voice cracked with the last syllable.

“Just checking back to see how your sample dream was. Would you be interested in purchasing another? Of course, there’s no obligation. I can—”

“I might be interested,” Frankie interjected before he could stop himself.

“Well, all right then.” The little man broke into the same wide smile. “I can do them for longer if you like. The form I previously gave you is the starter form. I have a more… complete form, if you’re interested.”

He popped open his briefcase and brought out a booklet as thick as a Bible. It looked farcical in the man’s short arms.

“This is the full form. Endless combinations, and I can do them for as long as you want. I don’t usually do this”—he flashed his smile—“but I’d like to give you one more freebee. You seem like a stand-up chap, and I can tell you’ll be a good customer. So, here’s my offer—anything you want, and I’ll make it free.”

Frankie couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “I want to go back to that same island. And be with that girl!”

The little man nodded. “Ah, Bertina.” He raised his eyebrows. “An excellent choice.”

He flipped to different pages, meticulously checking boxes as he went.

“How long would you like? Regardless of how long you set the dream for, in real time, it only lasts one normal sleep cycle. I took the liberty of setting your last dream to twelve hours. I hope that was appropriate.”

“How… long can you make them?” asked Frankie.

“Well, dreaming isn’t an exact science. The longest I can safely make a dream is two years. There are dangers to dreams that long, even though you’ll always wake up after around eight actual hours. The passage of time is a precarious thing. There are some in my business who are pushing for longer dreams, even borderline endless dreams. But those bring up moral issues I generally don’t like to broach. One subject tried a hundred year dream. When he woke up the next morning, he was, well… blank. Just a husk. I ended up having to—”

“Then I want ten years. You said any dream for free, and that’s what I want. I don’t care about these supposed dangers; I’d be happy to never see this farmhouse ever again.”

The little man paused, choosing his words carefully. “True, I did say that. But a dream that long, it does things to the psyche. Even experienced dreamers take caution, and when you eventually come back, you will—”

“I don’t care. I want the same dream. The same one. And I want to be with Bertina. You can do that, yes?”

“I can.”

“Then that’s what I want.”

“Well, that’s—”

“Just do it, you stupid midget!” The seething words were out before Frankie could catch himself, and he immediately regretted saying them. He had tried to retain his composure, but he was desperate. He had to go back.

The smile came back to the little man’s face. “Okay, sir. It’s your decision.” He deftly flipped through his order form book, checking boxes and scribbling notes. “Sweet dreams, Mr. Newell.”

Frankie tried to busy himself with his usual work around the farm for the rest of the day, but everything felt hollow. The hours dragged by until he could no longer stand it. At 6pm, Frankie climbed into his truck and drove forty minutes to the nearest convenience store and bought a bottle of melatonin. His drive back took less than half an hour. The instructions on the back of the bottle said that adults should take one to two pills with water. Frankie took four and put his mouth to the sink faucet, sucking water down as fast as he could. He flipped on his alarm out of habit, stripped down to his underwear, and fell into bed.

Frankie opened his eyes to the soothing sound of the tide. He sat up and saw Bertina with her feet in the ocean. He walked barefoot through the sand and put his arm around her waist.

They spent that first night in the shack on the beach, and not a day went by when they weren’t together.

 Frankie was peripherally aware of a whole community of people on the island, but they only ever came onto the private beach to clean the shack and bring whatever food Frankie desired. Things didn’t always make sense, but Frankie accepted these inconsistencies without fully recognizing them. His days were filled with swimming in the ocean, moonlit hikes in the warm outdoors, and dining on the finest food he had ever tasted. All with a woman who was as infatuated with him as he was with her.

One day Frankie proposed to Bertina on a rock overlooking the ocean, and she cried tears of joy. Their first child, a boy, was born the following year. The pregnancy felt like a breeze, and Frankie always understood what was needed. There were no doctors on the island, but he never doubted that the baby would be healthy. He loved that baby boy more than he ever knew was possible, and when Bertina became pregnant again, it was Frankie who wept with happiness.

After four years on the island, Frankie began to forget, possibly by choice, that he was in a dream. He needed it to be real. Sometimes, late in the evening after he had tucked in his children and kissed his wife goodnight, he would climb to the roof of their shack and look out at the stars, breathing in the salty ocean air and unable to imagine a more perfect life for himself. Each day was meaningful, and as the years passed and his children grew, Frankie’s gratification never abated.

He was racing his children along the beach when he heard it. A blaring sound from the sky. At first it was faint, like a faraway siren. Then it was all around him, getting louder and louder. Frankie felt his eyelids tighten, as if a hidden layer of skin was peeling itself back, and everything around him started fading. He tried to fight it, but he was powerless.

The alarm screamed. His eyes snapped open in horror, his vision bleary. He lay still in his cold bed, breathing heavily as his mind tried to reconcile what was happening. Frankie knew this bedroom, but it wasn’t his bedroom. His bedroom was in a shack on the beach, where the ocean lapped at the doorway. Not here, where the walls were peeling and the air smelled like dust.

He lurched out of bed. His underwear was wet at the crotch, and everything was spinning.

Rap pap pap pap… Rap pap pap pap…

He waited. Things were coming back to him in fragments, like little shards of terror.

He stumbled down the stairs, his fingers shaking uncontrollably as he fumbled with the locks. The funny little man was standing on the doorstep, his smile wide, staring at him. Staring into him.

“Hello, Frankie. How was the dream?”

“The… the dream? What… where’s my family? My children. Please, I need my two children.”

“I have no idea if you actually have children, Mr. Newell. We spoke yesterday, and you signed up for a dream. A rather long one, which I did not recommend. But here we are, no point dwelling on past misfortunes.”

Frankie stared with his mouth hanging open. The memories of this place were becoming sharper, and the panic continued to rise. “Please. Let me go back. I’ll do anything. You can have everything I own, just please let me go back.”

The little man paused, letting the desperation hang in the air. “Funny you should mention that, because that’s the exact payment I require for another dream.”

“What is?” Frankie pleaded.

“Everything. The first two dreams are free. But the third will cost you all you own. Which isn’t much, to be honest. This farm and everything on it already belong to me. Do you know why?”

The little man gestured up the path to his father’s house and seemed to take immense satisfaction in what he said next. “It’s because your father chose the exact same dream as you. Living on the exact same beach. And get this—with the exact same woman, Bertina. Isn’t that funny!” The little man let out a high-pitched howl as he doubled-over with laughter. He had tears in his eyes.

“I just came from his house, and he said he had two children with her as well. He signed the deed to the farm over to me in exchange for one more dream with her. Surely you can see the humor, Frankie!”

Frankie’s legs gave out, and he fell sideways against the door’s wooden frame, grasping it for support. None of it was real. Bertina wasn’t real. His children weren’t real. But they were his whole world. And his father had… Frankie slumped all the way to the ground and tucked his legs under his chin.

“I have a contract for you. One year from now, if you work hard enough here on my farm, I will give you another dream. You won’t be able to pick up where you left off. That dream is a vapor. But you can have the same dream if you want. Start over. The beach. Bertina. Make new children—I can make them the same if you like. Your father did.”

Frankie rolled onto his side as the vomit forced its way up his throat and soaked the doormat. He looked up at the little man, who was grinning so widely he looked like a character out of a nightmare.

“Where do I sign?”

Picture of Zachary Arama

Zachary Arama

Zachary Arama hails from London, England, but currently resides in the Pacific Northwest. His writing has been published in Fiction Attic Press.
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Mother’s Merry Girls – Part Two by K. Wallace King

The next thing I knew, we were on one of the rollercoaster streets. The rain had stopped, but it was nighttime. How could that have happened? I wondered. Where did I put the time? Hadn’t it still been daylight when I stepped into the café?

I was astonished to see the streetlights fallen into rain puddles, their green, red, and gold reflections pulsing and glowing. I bent down, trying to scoop them out of the water, but the boy-man pulled me, and I snapped back into his smile like a stretched rubber band.

I laughed, weaving between people on the sidewalk. His shiny eyes reminded me of a seal.

I pointed to a man with a briefcase, whose hat was a pointed pyramid. “Why is that man staring at me?”

The boy-man tugged me in the other direction. “He’s not real. Don’t look at him, Dolly Girl. Don’t look at any of them. They’re in another dream. Come on, come on, come with me.”

 

***

We were inside a great spaceship. No, said the boy-man, no, it’s a ballroom. Hear the music? Of course—the music. Liquid candy.

We were dancing then, all of us. Colors brighter than poppies, so many people pulsing together, ventricles in a massive heart. I grabbed hold of him and shouted, “I’m dancing in the Eye of God!”

He laughed and hugged me, his face both young and old, and in that moment, I knew he was my true love. Lips and Eyes and Souls. I love you, I told him with my mind. What are words? They float, you can’t catch them, but the mind holds forever. I felt his love return as he pulled me to him, his hands on my thighs, his fingers.

A shining girl danced between us, cutting us in two. She shimmied up to me, filling my ears with a silver tinkling as she wound around. The sound came from hundreds of bells sewn onto her dress, and I hugged her close to hear them better.

She had a red flower in her hair, like the beautiful girl’s—a flower with a center like dark parted lips. For just a second, I thought I saw something like a pale tongue flick out between the petals—or perhaps a tiny white worm—but before I could look closer, the boy-man yanked her away. She jangled as he plucked her, and in his motion, I imagined the harsh tug of a leech pulled from a wound.

He gave her a hard shove into the crowd. In the ocean of dancers, she drowned.

I tried to follow her, the burn inside my bones driving me forward, but he pulled me back to him. Then the music was inside me, and I was drowning too.

The night rolled on, and my head burst bright with dying stars. People shivered and quaked, but gradually—I began to sense God’s Eye closing. The music turned violent, pow and bam, fists on drums slamming inside my head. The dancers howled, their movements twisting into something tortured, as if they were dancing on a hellish floor. I think I screamed.

He told me to sit down, and gradually, the music became sand in my head.

The next thing I remember was sitting on the floor, realizing I was cold. The boy-man said his name was Danny and that he knew a place where we could crash. “We’re coming down,” he said. As he leaned close, his breath smelled like an electric cord freshly pulled from a socket.

He grabbed my hand again, and we wove through the gyrating crowd. Their faces were contorted, twisted with what looked like terrible pain, and the music—it wasn’t coming from the stage anymore. Was it in their heads? It must have been.

The ballroom was encircled by gilded columns supporting a balcony, but the floor—there was something pink and viscous. Vomit. I stepped over it.

The door to the ballroom was open now, and cold grey light streamed over me. It was dawn.

I looked at Danny, his face sallow and flecked with acne. The sullen light illuminated the pillar beside me, and something floated there—or so I thought. A mist, a cloud, but more substantial. A sick, pale glob. Not floating anymore, but crawling, inching toward my ankles. Up, down, hump, hump. Grub. Maggot.

I grabbed Danny’s arm, trying to get him to look, but he pulled me through the lobby and out the door.

Outside, in the damp gray dawn, I looked back over my shoulder. There was nothing. No—there was something.

I unclasped my hand from Danny’s.

“Don’t. Leave it,” he said.

But I bent down, picked up the strange red flower, and tucked it behind my ear.

***

The morning sun was a pale disc in a boil of clouds. Others stumbled outside behind us, mingling with pedestrians on the sidewalk—men in suits, women in dresses and white gloves. A cable car clanged down the street, and car horns blared.

I felt faint, dizzy. Danny shoved me into a taxi cab, the black leather seat cold against my back. It smelled of spilled coffee, cigarettes, and the driver—a man with greased-back hair and a dark ring around the collar of his shirt. Danny rattled off an address and pulled me close as the taxi’s brakes screeched down a hill. The cab shuddered as it climbed another.

Danny kept talking to me, but his words wouldn’t stick in my head.

The taxi stopped in front of a tall Victorian house, its flaking yellow paint dulled by time. Similar houses flanked it on either side, though they were less brightly painted. The windows of the yellow house gleamed darkly, as if repelling the daylight.

“Come on,” Danny said, unlocking the door.

Inside, I heard people but didn’t see them. Somewhere, music played faintly. A girl and a boy stood beside the staircase, pressed against the wall. At first, I thought they were lovers about to kiss passionately, but instead, they were locked in deep conversation.

“Hello,” I said, but they didn’t look at me.

“Commies.” Danny laughed, pulling me up the stairs to a room at the back of the house.

It was tiny, with a worn and scratched wood floor and a mattress on the ground. Danny flopped onto the mattress. “Come here,” he said.

I glanced around the room. The walls were blank, except for a poster of a crimson-colored naked woman standing among the shards of a broken cobalt-blue egg.

Behind me, Danny turned on the radio. Eight Miles High, they sang. He handed me a bottle, and when I took a drink, the back of my throat caught fire. I wiped my mouth with my hand, and he laughed.

Danny plucked the red flower from my hair and made to toss it across the room, but I grabbed it back and tucked it behind my ear again. Then, I marveled at his hair—curls pale as dandelion fluff.

I don’t remember taking off my jeans and sweater or seeing him take off his clothes. We were just cold skin against skin. Light filtered through the one window, softened by a purple batik scarf, casting lavender bruises on Danny’s torso. I think I fell asleep beside him, breathing in his electric scent. He was my true love.

While I slept, I dreamed of Calvin—his fingers thick as snakes, his smothering mouth. With my jagged, broken tooth, I chewed right through to his bones. I tore through his skin, stretched tight as a drum, gnawed down to the shiny pink and red. I lapped him up, swallowing the sour liquor of his juices like a thirsty dog.

When I woke, the sun was in my face. The scarf had slipped from the window, and the glare stung my eyes. I sat up, disoriented by time, by day or week. My fingers were smeared with something viscous and sticky, and I wiped them on the grimy sheet.

I was alone. The little room was empty.

The radio was playing Sunshine Superman. I had the record back home in the brick ranch-style house with the walnut tree out front. Did they wonder if I was dead? But they were dead to me, I thought as I got up off the mattress, put on my clothes, and wiped more of the sticky stuff from my face.

My sweater was dirty, so I pulled it off, and red petals floated to the ground. From my hair, I plucked the stem of the denuded flower.

“Ow,” I said out loud as it pricked my thumb. I sucked the blood, wondering how I hadn’t noticed the thorns.

I picked up a checkered shirt—the type a cowboy might wear—from Danny’s floor. As I did, something pale squirmed beneath it, then inched quickly behind a small chest of drawers.

I put on the shirt and ran out of the room and downstairs.

In the kitchen, a woman in a long, fluttery dress was making scrambled eggs.

She didn’t know Danny, she said; she’d just moved in the night before. I asked a girl with a kitten, a boy with a little girl, and a fat bald man with a beard if they knew where Danny was. No one did.

The woman in the kitchen offered me some eggs, and I ate them, hoping to dull the strange taste in my mouth—a taste like licked nails.

“Aren’t you going to the park?” she asked. The sun was bright through the window. “That’s where your boyfriend probably is.”

***

Ginsberg was coming. Maybe the Beatles. That’s what they told me on the way to the park. These people, like the ones from the cover of the magazine—dressed in mad colors, long-haired, short-haired, brown, black, and white. Smiling, laughing, flowers in their hair, flowers in their hands. Babies, children, barking dogs.

I was one of them now. My heart was full. Soon, I would find Danny, and we’d dance like dervishes. My one true love.

In the distance, the drums called to us. We passed houses, shops, and restaurants. A dog I’d petted a moment ago had attached itself to me, and together we danced up the street with the others.

Suddenly, the dog shot down an alley and began barking furiously. I turned, looking for its owner, but the crowd just smiled and surged around me. The dog kept barking, a sharp, distressed sound—a something’s wrong bark.

I stepped away from the crowd, leaving the bright shine of the sun and entering the deep dark of the alley. The smell of garbage hit me hard, visceral, making me gasp.

I walked deeper, toward a row of dented trash cans. The dog was whining now. “It’s okay, boy. It’s okay,” I kept saying, but in my deepest self, I knew it wasn’t.

Déjà vu. The feeling of time slipping was so intense it twisted my gut. As I approached the dog, I was overwhelmed by the certainty of what I would find. The leaning walls of the dim alley, the slick slime on the damp cobbles—I’d seen it all before.

And the smell. It was vile, putrescent, sickening. Yet—there was something else. An overtone so sweetly sensual, like pursed red lips, like the musk of lovers. It was this last scent that drew me forward, toward whatever the dog was pawing at.

The dog whined. An insect droned—a wasp, I think. I should have been afraid; I’m allergic to their sting. But my mind was too busy trying to sort out what lay stuffed between the metal cans.

A raw roast? A side of beef? The crisscross of pink and white over bone, pale sausages—a discarded butchered carcass.

Then, a breeze lifted a dozen red petals into the air. I caught one and watched another slowly drift downward, landing atop a blonde-haired head.

I stood staring as the breeze stirred that hair, so pale it might have been made of dandelion fluff.

I turned and ran, my mind blank. I don’t know how long I ran—only that when I stopped, I was at the park.

I convinced myself it was just a drug-fueled hallucination. It wasn’t Danny. Danny had disappeared, abandoned me. Used me up and left me all alone. Another Calvin. Faithless.

So I danced, a tambourine on my hip, with men, girls, and a child I swung in the air like a helicopter. How it laughed!

Alan Ginsberg read a poem. I sat at his feet, but his words twisted and melted, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull any meaning from them.

I wandered through the park. I petted a goat, ate an apple, kissed a man with a long black beard.

Music drew me to a grove of trees, where two beautiful girls with red flowers in their hair danced to the sound of a sitar and tabla played by cross-legged men in crimson robes.

The girls crowned me with red flowers. They took my hands, and I swayed with them like corn in a long-ago field.

The one with blue eyes told me to look to my right. I turned, my gaze falling on a woman seated on a camp stool beneath a eucalyptus tree.

It was the old woman from the café. She wore the same tattered dress and was smoking a cigarette.

“Mother Merry wants to meet you,” said Blue Eyes.

We had stopped dancing, the two girls and I, though all around us, music and frolicking continued.

“That old lady? She’s your mother?”

“Ours,” said Blue Eyes.

“Ours,” echoed the other girl, holding my hand.

Mystified, I followed them to where the old woman waited. Her eyes were milky, opaque—there were no pupils. She blew smoke from her cigarette into the leaves of the tree and then into my face.

“Excuse me,” I said, but the two girls were on either side of me, and with surprising strength, they forced me to my knees.

I struggled, but they pinned me, and when I tried to speak, no words came—only red flower petals falling from my mouth.

“Soul to soul?” croaked the old woman.

I think she laughed, but it might have been the screech of metal dragged across concrete. She scooped up the petals that had fallen from my mouth and held them in her palm.

The petals began to twitch, then stood upright, tumbling and rolling themselves into little red worms that crawled up the length of her scrawny, bare arms.

This isn’t happening, I told myself. I’m just high.

One of the girls, the blue-eyed one, bent close to my ear. “Yes. Oh yes, it is.”

I tried to rise again, but the harder I struggled, the more force pinned me down. Once, years ago, I had been held beneath the water in a swimming pool. I had splashed and thrashed, desperate to break free, but the hand holding me down was relentless, and I had known I would die.

Now, it felt as though I were looking up through that rippling water again, but it was the old woman staring down at me.

She pressed her hands to either side of my head, pushing hard on the crown of red flowers. The thorns were sharp as barbed wire, piercing my skull like teeth chewing through bone. I could feel them gnawing, grinding through calcium and cartilage.

My scream erupted as a vomitous spew of red petals.

The old woman gripped my chin and turned my face toward the park. It was as if I were looking through a fine-mesh screen. The dancers, poets, and musicians—the beautiful people—were shriveled, their skin puckered and stretched thin over bone, as if drained of every drop of life. They whirled and leaped, but their movements had turned to anguished hops, like blistered feet forced to dance.

I turned back, and the old woman no longer sat on her camp stool. Instead, she perched on a grotesque throne of gristle and bone.

She was a massive, pale thing, eyeless and lipless. Atop her monstrous head sat a crown of blinking eyes and screaming mouths. Around her neck was a wreath of flowers—petals red as severed flesh. From the stamen of each bloom crawled pale grubs, their writhing forms draping her in a squirming robe.

She held out a hand devoid of fingers, and when she touched me, there was a buzz of electricity, a sharp crackle as her flesh met mine. The air filled with the sickly-sweet stench of burning skin as it blackened and charred.

Lipless and blind, the Fallen One sang:

I am your soul-scorching love

My flower, your mouth

Your mouth, my flower

Will you be my girl?

Yes.

It was the Summer of Love.

I wore flowers in my hair.

Picture of K. Wallace King

K. Wallace King

K. Wallace King’s recent short fiction appears in the August '24 Issue #50 of Cosmic Horror Monthly, The Opiate, Underland Arcana, Chthonic Matter, Nightscript, Orca, and the 2024 double Shirley Jackson Award winning, Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic, an Anthology of Hysteria Fiction, among others. She lives in Hollywood, California, where the handprints of dead dreamers are pressed into the sidewalks.
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