Tag: post apocolypse

Short Fiction

Grayscale by Carolyn R. Russell

literallystories2014

From behind a second story window, we three watch for the girl. Fissured by time and fractured by turmoil, the glass allows for less than optimal viewing, but my sisters and I can see well enough to take immediate notice when her slight figure emerges from a subterranean staircase and melts into the crowd. This particular evening is boisterous and punctuated by the trappings of revelry. A new year is preparing to throw its filthy arms around the neighborhood, animated celebrants studding the sidewalks like remnants of a tenement fire.

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All Stories, Science Fiction

Bunker Cleaning Lady by Franny French

literallystories2014

They only had time to perfect the robot dog, and the robot car, and the robot bank teller, which still eyed people like me with suspicion. And the robot mail carriers, whose knee socks would not stay up. And the robot Walmart greeters, whose human accents weren’t much better than the old GPS bots that put the emphasis on the wrong syllable (“Take a left onto ML … K-Junior Boulevard”). And the robot armed-agents-of-the-state, which, it’s weird, actually did resemble pigs. Before the outside air became unbreathable, they never got around to perfecting the robot house cleaner. That left them no choice but to save people like me, laborers who more and more had gotten used to things not working in our favor.

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All Stories, Science Fiction

Living La Vida Extraterrestrial by Douglas Hawley

literallystories2014

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.

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