“That carbon scoring came from laser blasts, not a hot re-entry. You might be able to fool the others, Tara, but not me. You should know better. That’ll cost you extra.” Janae side-eyed me while tilting her head towards the marks on the glider while shoving her hands deeper into the pockets of her coverall….
Down in the valley, beneath trees whose trunks rise evenly spaced and straight but whose gnarled arms twine high above, a woman kneels digging. She digs with her hands, nails tearing. Bright-beaked birds watch, hopping among the risen roots. One chirps a sad melody, but the song is lost beneath the waterfall’s thundering: a…
The staircase is weeping again. Not tiny flecks of moisture that could be mistaken for a fresh cleaning, but big shining beads swelling, straining, breaking. Damn. I usually notice before I’ve got pools on the hardwood floor, but I’d been sitting in the dark, watching the fog creep up the yard outside, waiting for the…
Lex on my doorstep, her arms wrapped around a potted monstera deliciosa, smiling. The plant’s fenestrated leaves sway in the breeze, viridescent and bigger than dinner plates. My eyes must be nearly as big. “Erika,” Lex breathes, almost like she’s surprised to see me answering my door. “Hi.” She hitches the plant up her hip…
WHAT WILL YOU OFFER? by Mark Salzwedel The alien called itself the Visitor. It orbited our planet beyond our moon for many months and was mistaken for an asteroid. It monitored what it could of our communications and watched buildings go up, forests come down, and the seemingly most intelligent species moving about everywhere without…
At Least No One Else Will Suffer By Dawn Vogel The king will be dead before the end of this celebration of our marriage. In the days to come, some will say that I married him, and murdered him, solely for my own benefit. Who else stands to gain as much as the queen,…
Adaptation by Jennifer R. Povey Elaine had been to plenty of crazy planets, but this one took the cake. For starters, it was in a binary system, and that always made for extra weirdness. Two suns overlapping each other in a way that kept night always short. The natives did not seem bothered by…
