Chief engineer Julia ‘Roddy’ Rodrighero could almost forget she was the only human aboard the Clarion. Monitoring a swarm of drones, she was engrossed as they pirouetted through hard vacuum, stripping the last sections of C-Deck. One of those exposed, honeycomb chambers had been hers, six months ago. She had roomier quarters these days, though…
By the time dusk drapes over the banyan boughs, she can see her own heart. It peers from between the fabric of her chest that has unraveled over the day, a scarlet blossom caught behind criss-crossed threads, and flutters against the thrice re-embroidered fingers she presses against it. Though she has lost the flesh and…
She returns home one night with four sunflowers clutched in her arms like a quartet of freshly baked French baguettes, trailing dirt from their upwrenched roots. “Look,” she says, “what I found for the garden.” She tells me she saw them towering over one of the roadside vegetable patches that pepper the countryside around us….
Meagan always painted her the same way: nude and spread-eagled on a bed of buttery pink flowers, red feathers sprouting from bare shoulders, cheeks flushed by pollen. The spectre of a sneeze dances in the endless, liminal space between the bridge of her nose and the oval of her lips. She is stunning in her…
Marty is maybe twenty people from the teal void that fills the humming doorframe when he waves to the woman with the clipboard. She is wearing a grey suit and her hair is cut short. She smiles as she comes over.“I don’t think I can do this,” he says. He keeps his voice low, but…
Harriet was going slowly along the road, avoiding putting her feet on any cracks in the pavement, when she heard the man screaming. It was a long, loud scream – the kind of scream you might call blood-curdling – and she stumbled to a halt. Setting her foot down just before a crack she looked…
My parents said I didn’t need to be afraid of the monsters in Lake Reema, because the Lady trapped them under ice. “That’s why we hold this festival,” they’d say and stamp the ice, before heading to the feasting table. It never worked. Each time they dragged me out onto the lake ice, I’d…
The end of a long, lonely year has arrived. But no one realises it apart from me. To everyone else, it has been just another Monday. The world is frozen like a painting. Leaves hover in mid-air, stuttering towards the ground while the neighbour’s stride unwinds at a glacial pace. My watch is stuck at…
The bell chimed as the front door swung open. My head snapped up from my crossword to find a man about my age with the most striking face and killer jawline. Fuck, that’s a shame. He wore a bomber jacket, jeans with a distressed knee, and black Chucks. From what I could tell, he bore…
The glade stretched out before me, bathed beneath a dappled azure sky. Flowers blossomed in the high grass, crimson poppies and sunshine flares of dandelions peering through thick tangles of green. The day was warm and the air was full of the scent of the forest, which waited, cloaked in shade, through a gap in…
