The train slid like a silver snake across the ice-hardened tundra, the solar array on its roof soaking up the light of a dying sun. It passed barren barns and hollow homes, clusters of abandoned factories and the clutching fingers of skeletal launch towers. The last two people on the rails sat in the cab,…
Thunderous clouds block our path. But these clouds can dissipate. Mine can’t. Mine seep into my brain, misting my memories, casting shadows where I need the light to shine brightest. My daughter sits opposite me, squinting as our air taxi bursts through the cloudy veil into the light. It’s always sunny somewhere, I’d whisper to…
We met at the End of the World Fair and decided to die together. Amidst the dodgems and the whirling teacups, with candyfloss in our hair, I fell in love when there was no time left. He was tall and fair, with eyes like the deep green sea and a laugh like the crash of…
Once a year, my mother catches the cosmic bus from Over There and we meet at the parking lot of the cemetery where she’s buried. The reincarnation insurance scheme she bought into has turned out to be the real deal. Every year Over There, she becomes a year younger and she’ll keep aging in reverse…
I first learned about my father when I dyed my hair blonde and it came out fluorescent. And not fluorescent as in the brightest of blondes, lemme tell you that, but fluorescent as in a xylaphor blast all the way to our neighboring galaxy. Which was, incidentally, where my father lived. “You have to understand,”…
It started off as little more than headphone static, a drone that had been within him for some time, without any recollection of it ever starting. Finding himself focused, it resolved into music: bells and horns and something almost but not quite a melody. Was this what they had warned him of: the stresses of…
Day twenty-seven. Minah wakes to a tepid dawn. Amay Patel’s skies are the colour of weak tea, the air pregnant with humidity. As sleep falls away, her heartbeat rises. She switches on her tablet and checks the news. Nothing. Her breath leaves in a knife-cut rush. Then, as usual, she opens the hologram. Jade’s pixelated…
Dozer and Digger eased out from the forest’s shadows, taking care not to damage the new growth. Dozer tilted its solar panels toward the sun. Its programming didn’t allow it to enjoy the afternoon’s warmth, but the increase in available power gave it something akin to satisfaction. Over the centuries, little had changed about their…
Rat-tat tat-tat-tat. Someone was knocking on the door. This would have been strange enough, given she travelled here alone, but Simone knew the other side was bare. Nothing surrounded the doorway but crumbling rubble of the building that had been, the inside gone over to weeds and weather. The door stood in the ruin, a…
The third time the ocean comes to our door, there’s no sister to wake me. I’m roused from my slumber by the lapping of waves and tiptoe past our father’s bedroom door. He won’t rise for another hour or two. By then, the ocean will have receded once more. He’ll wonder at the damp sand…
