He doesn’t peer into every corner. He doesn’t need to know. There are shadows on the wall, leaving an indistinct impression. One among many. The walking wounded stare back. Casualties of war. Now, they’re in another place, fighting battles for survival. Their wounds are all too real. There is no front line, or back seat, or room with a view. Come dawn, along with the rats, they all disappear.
Denise organized the chairs in a circle, each no more than six inches apart. She sorted the donuts on the tray so each had its own space, none touching. The coffee was positioned to allow for steady traffic and conversation.
Denise smiled and watched each person enter the room, grab donuts, gulp coffee, and slid chairs out of position. She stayed silent, reminding herself this was part of the healing process.
‘This is Britain! My fuckin’ Britain!’ shouted Gleeman as he slammed his ham-sized fist into his wife’s stomach. ‘Things are different now! There’ll be no more of your lip and no more of your equality. We don’t do that shit in my country no more!’ He stuck out his oily hand. ‘Gi’s it!’
I was chosen to write the history of the survivors of the destruction of earth that happened hundreds of years ago. First, a few of us escaped by rocket to the planet of the Azari people for what seemed like three earth years based on the amount that we aged, but we may have been aging faster on a planet that does not match our biological cycles. We can’t be certain. Our atomic clock either broke or was sabotaged, so we could not judge the passage of time. It didn’t help that Azari was illuminated somehow so it was never dark and the temperature was generated internally and remained consistent. I might not have survived it if I didn’t have Sapphire Hendrix, the companion that I had met during the planning for escape from a doomed earth.
Continue reading “Living La Vida Extraterrestrial by Douglas Hawley”
Gleipnok wakes to discover that sometime while sleeping she transformed into a big, hairy Earthling. Legs already hanging from the end of her once roomy sleep pod, she wriggles out and reaches with her mind for her crewmates. Thinking things like, “Ah!” and “Help!” and “I’m a big, hairy Earthling! How did that happen?”
Leila Alllison has been rooting in the basement again and this time presented us with a Sci Fi story for another moment in the spotlight. This is what she said:
Ensign Ronda-12 tapped the door to the ready room as she entered. Her long, slender legs devoured the space to Captain Blade’s desk in five strides. The captain arched his eyebrows. “Sir,” she said, “you have to exempt Lt. Hickok from the Jalatis Large landing team.” More arching. She wondered if a human’s eyebrows could ever touch their hairline. “It’s too dangerous.”
The home-med stopped giving Alice her usual meds on Tuesday, and by Friday she was feeling unlike the person she’d been, unlike anyone she’d ever met or even heard about. The feelings were waves pushing a new tide ashore, erasing and redrawing the beach of her mind with each of a thousand pulses from an ocean she’d been unaware of until sometime on Thursday. She’d lain in bed Thursday night, drifting in a sweaty tangle of cotton, dangerous and terrifying thoughts banging noisily around inside her skull; Alice couldn’t decide if she was more scared that the new thoughts and feelings would continue or that they’d stop.
In September 2212, the artificial intelligence running the Near Earth Object Observation Program at Big Pine, announced impassively that it had discovered a new asteroid that would impact the Earth in about five years’ time. It estimated its size to be similar to that of Australia. I’ve often wondered who it told first, and how they reacted.
