Emma was lying in the park between my dorm and mid-afternoon lecture and if it hadn’t been for the fact she was feeding birds with the grin of the manic and magnificent I may have continued my stride.
Continue reading “We’ll Both Forget The Breeze by Michael Tyler”
It was really a love story in the end.
The noise outside was consistent. Traffic, construction, and wandering conversations as New Yorkers enjoyed the relative peace of Memorial Day Weekend in the city. But for Steve, the owner of the New Amity Restaurant, it was the end.
Continue reading “It was really a love story in the end by Adam Kluger”
I entered my building’s courtyard at dawn on a clear, cold November morning. I brought a bowl of tuna and a cat trap. I placed the bowl at a specific spot under one of the two box hedges that lined the walk and laid the trap nearby. Every morning I brought food to the same place; it was the trap’s only appearance.
I’d come for the benefit of a feline warlord in winter named Lemmy. I’d been feeding Lemmy on the sly ever since I first met him in the courtyard at least three years ago. Obviously feral, I appreciated the defiance in his attitude that wouldn’t allow him to beg. Oh, he certainly gobbled down what I gave him and shamelessly came back for more–but not once had he ever sought pity.
Continue reading “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It by Leila Allison”
You could say I’m an unhappy guy. I just want to blot out the days, smoke away the nights and dump my beloved books into the ocean. Books used to be my everything, but now they simply bore me – I can hardly read a paragraph my senses are so dulled. I have better days, it’s true, because I’m essentially free. I can choose when I wake – I have no alarms, no commitments, but sleeping in my car, that I’ve called home since the divorce, can be a real drag.
Continue reading “Sanctuary by Tim Frank “
1.
Alarms blare. It is the end. David knows it as much as he knows anything else. Below, glorious golden clouds meld in a blue atmosphere. So much like Earth. But his family won’t see the light of this star system for twelve years. They will grow old and die, and if he ever makes it back all that will be waiting is a grave. Assuming, of course, there is a planet to return to, and a way home.
The ship falls, and David with it. McLonsky’s blood bubbles and flutters around the cockpit in globules that have minds of their own.
This is it. The end. David closes his eyes, and he waits for his Maker’s embrace.
Continue reading “Home Again by Keith LaFountaine”
He dreams he is a young Asian woman. Diminutive. Pretty not beautiful. Not distinctly of Indian or Pakistani heritage but notionally from that region of the world sometimes known as the Indian Subcontinent.
And yet in his dream he isn’t actually the young woman in question. Not as such. More, he is her in the third person.
Whilst the dream lacks structure he experiences a resonance throughout the day. An intangible notion of being someone else. It’s a novel experience but one that returns periodically.
Earlier in the day he had a fall.
Continue reading “Dreaming in the Third Person by Adam West”
Carol was so transformed by her wedding attire – swamped in her heavy bronze foundation, fake eyelashes fluttering like butterfly wings – that her three-year-old daughter, Allison, no longer recognised her.
Continue reading “Underwater Wedding by Tim Frank”
Jackson’s silver hair glinted under the full moon. His boots crunched the gravel parking lot in front of the ramshackle apartment building, long ago a hotel, where I shared an apartment with my mother. Jackson shared our space a few nights a week. He cursed and cast a black trash bag into the bed of his truck. It landed with a soft thud. He hadn’t noticed me yet, standing on the sidewalk, but his presence allowed me to soften my grip on the house keys poking through my fingers. My white, work button-down was stained and reeked of the whiskey spill from an overserved guest at the Angler’s Inn.
Continue reading “Catch and Release by Heather Rutherford”
Ethel Jordan holds her hands out in front of her. She never liked her hands. The fingers are stubby, too short to be mistaken for the fingers of a pianist which she had wanted to be in another life.
Continue reading “Just Trying to Make a Living by Donna M. Williams”
“You’re coming on fine Malcolm.”
“Malky, I want to be called Malky”
“Malky?”
“Aye”
“Aye?”
“Aye? Are you just repeating whit Ah’m saying or are you just being a fud in general?”
Continue reading “A Typical Scottish AI Story by Hugh Cron – Warning – Adult Content.”
