She moves her arms, her hands, her fingers as if she’s floating in water. From an index finger, a swirl begins. It’s the air. Concentrated. Rotating clockwise. An inch in diameter. It bends all the light and all the colors in the room, yet remains clear.
Continue reading “Swirls by Laura Shell”
On July 5 of 2033 Antarctic bases McMurdo, Davis, Casey and others reported earthquakes of 6 magnitude on the Richter scale. South Africa and Tierra Del Fuego in South America had minor tsunamis shortly after the earthquakes. Helicopters flew to the suspected center of the disturbance near the South Pole. What they saw was deeply disturbing. An area of hundreds of thousands of square kilometers had subsided anywhere from a few to a hundred meters deep. What appeared to be naked humans were slowly digging out of the steaming slush. As the observers goggled at the scene, something like a red guided missile flew out of the depression so fast it was just a blur. There was no safe landing place, so the helicopters which were short of fuel flew back to their bases. When the film they had taken was released, the world observed a second odd event.
Continue reading “Kingdom Collapse by Doug Hawley”
I was watching the 1969 Science Fiction flick The Valley of Gwangi on TV last month. It was playing on the ancient Philco set that connects the PDQ network in our sister realm of Other Earth to my home realm of Saragun Springs. The film was the final Ray Harrhausen/Willis O’Brien dinosaur picture. The story involved a thirty-foot tall, psychotic Allosaurus named (brace yourself) “Gwangi,” who somehow managed to reproduce (apparently without a Mrs. Gwangi) and survive at a “Forbidden Valley” in Mexico with other unlikely creatures for at least 145-million years–without, mind you, attracting notice until 1969–that from a reptile with the brain power of a caraway seed.
Continue reading “My Fair Juan G Starring Boots the Impaler By Leila Allison”
Prologue
A psycho doesn’t need to explain her actions until the trial begins. And even then it is optional. Thus the answer to all things “Why?” in my make-believe land of Saragun Springs is almost always a case of a shrug and the words “shit happens”–a concept that is a byproduct of Free Will. Still, everything sounds fancier in Latin, and telling someone “Stercore Accidit ” gives one an air of scholarship; the following is a case of Stercore Accidit if there ever has been one.
Continue reading “The Giant Clock Radio by Leila Allison”
Behold the little god of half-assedness
Officially nameless, Charleston’s “Alone Park” was once part of neighboring New Town Cemetery. “Once” because In 1973 two-hundred square feet of graveyard property was accidentally left out when chainlink replaced New Town’s original fencing. Upon discovering the error, the city council refused to cough up another cent for link-fencing, but it didn’t want an inch of their property left unconquered, either.
Continue reading “From the Files of the Alone Park Project By Leila Allison”
Death loved Life, and she loved him, too.
Life was everything and nothing. Her skin, translucent and radiant, was the sun, and her shining eyes the millions of stars. Her small mouth was the clouds and her hair was the singing forests. Life sang, passionate and golden, and green was brought to the world. Life wept, and water nourished the land. Life slumbered, and there were nights of twilight.
Continue reading “To Wilt by Djordje Negovanovic”
-1-
It’s hard to ignore five shadows cast on your desk by as many hovering beings outside the window. I do not know if there is an achievable degree of determination to successfully ignore such a situation; if so, it lies beyond my level of sticktoitiveness.
Continue reading “billigitmania by Leila Allison”
It came to us in our dreams.
That’s how it passed, jumping from person to person, dream by dream. Some were lucky and woke with just a mild fever, but others weren’t so fortunate. They were never the same again following that dream, and sadly, some never woke at all.
Continue reading “The Dog in Our Dream by Chris Farrington”
The children tumble into the church basement, pushing, dodging, and shouting. Good boys and girls, but wild with pent-up feral energy. Deacon Grumpus pauses at the top of the stairs. He understands the cacophony and approves. Good old-fashioned childish exuberance. So human, organically human, as it should be. Exactly what the Divine Order of Cellular Humans teaches its followers.
Continue reading “Sunday School by Marco Etheridge”
-1-
Famous fantasy realms are ridiculously wealthy– them with their pool parties and scantily clad underage lawsuits in waiting. But for every emerald high rise in Oz there’s a dozen impoverished lands of make believe held together by duct tape and the wages of mental illness. My realm of Saragun Springs is as threadbare and stone soup as it gets, but that might be a-changing. Yes, prosperity and the torpedoing of what little charm we have may be just around the corner. Actually, it is up in the sky–and to paraphrase Dickie Plantagenet, we aim to pluck it down.
Continue reading “Hobnob Standard by Leila Allison”
literally stories 