

# Fiction Vortex

A Speculative Fiction Typhoon

May 2013

Volume 1, Issue 1

Edited by Dan Hope

Copyright 2013 Fiction Vortex

Smashwords Edition

Website: FictionVortex.com

Twitter: @FictionVortex

Facebook: FictionVortex.

# Table of Contents

Letter from the Editor

Short Stories

Pollinger's Notebook: Years 4.3 - 6.4 — by Mark Burgh (1st Place)

Roots and Wings, Soil and Sky — by Nicholas Beishline

The Girl Who Did Not Know What to Be — by Jay Duret

Triple's Blog — by Todd Outcalt

Undead in the Daisies — by Holly Casey (3rd Place)

The Way Station — by Shay Hatten

Nth Chance — by Konstantine Paradias

The Dream Eater — by Priyadarshini Chatterjee (2nd Place)

The Face in the Moon — by Eric Kiefer

Abraham, the Boy Prophet — by Michael Pacheco

Transformation — by Katherine McIntyre

Book Reviews

Year Zero: A Novel — by Rob Reid

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination — Anthology edited by John Joseph Adams

About Fiction Vortex

# Letter from the Editor

We've come to the end of our first month of publication, and Fiction Vortex has had quite the auspicious start.

I think.

What is an auspicious start for a fiction publication, anyway? That could mean anything from "We already got a million readers!" to "The managing editor didn't pull his hair out or defenestrate himself."

Unfortunately, the former isn't true, but I'm happy to report that neither is the latter. Things are chugging along at a smooth pace here at Fiction Vortex, and that's more than most publications can say from month to month.

I'm even more elated to report that we've got some absolutely fantastic stories to start this journey off right. This inaugural issue of the Fiction Vortex Magazine is stuffed with incredible stories, tales that will take you through the verdant valley of coming-of-age-fantasy, over the jagged summit of hard science fiction, into the dark cavern of cerebral horror, and back out into the sunlit meadows of humorous satire. This compilation of stories is a perfect cross-section of the speculative fiction universe, and I couldn't be more proud of the stories and the authors who wrote them.

The original goal of Fiction Vortex was two-fold: provide a place for talented authors to show their work to the world, and prove that speculative fiction could be powerful, engaging, and thoughtful, not just a genre of clichés and fantastical absurdities. I think we've done just that.

So thank you to the Fiction Vortex staff. Thank you to the amazing authors who submitted to us. And most of all, thank you, dear reader, for letting us invade your mind to spread these wonderful ideas.

In a completely consensual and non-creepy way, of course.

Vortexical Wishes and Cyclonic Dreams,

Dan Hope

Managing Editor, Voice of Reason

Fiction Vortex

(Back to Table of Contents)

# Short Stories

Pollinger's Notebook: Years 4.3 - 6.4 — by Mark Burgh (1st Place)

Roots and Wings, Soil and Sky — by Nicholas Beishline

The Girl Who Did Not Know What to Be — by Jay Duret

Triple's Blog — by Todd Outcalt

Undead in the Daisies — by Holly Casey (3rd Place)

The Way Station — by Shay Hatten

Nth Chance — by Konstantine Paradias

The Dream Eater — by Priyadarshini Chatterjee (2nd Place)

The Face in the Moon — by Eric Kiefer

Abraham, the Boy Prophet — by Michael Pacheco

Transformation — by Katherine McIntyre

(Back to main Table of Contents)

# Pollinger's Notebook: Years 4.3 - 6.4

by Mark Burgh; published May 1, 2013

First Place Award, May 2013 Fiction Contest

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 4.3

It's about Hermione. All of this is about Hermione. Today, after the Lab Director leaves, a smile of incomprehension painting his face, Hermione peeks her nose over the core unit. "He's your new boss?" she says.

"What are you doing out of your environment?"

Hermione's expressions seldom change; she's difficult to read. "I got bored. Do you want to live in cedar shavings?"

I roll back in my chair. "I wanted on the Mars project. But here I sit."

"Mars, Mars, Mars," Hermione says. "Did you get the gorgonzola?"

"Go easy, it's strong."

Hermione shifts, cleans her paws. She looks at me. "Watch that guy," she says. "He won't like me."

~~~~~

STATUS REPORT — Project 401.1 Genetic Implications

Pollinger, A. F. — Research Leader

1. Recombination of genetic material for the purposes of enhanced performance is the purpose of this research.

2. Manipulation of specific genetic material in human subjects lacks consistent results in cases not related to physical characteristics.

3. In the past, attempts to enhance nervous system and personality functions have resulted in subjects experiencing psychosis or mental incapacity. (See the file marked USGCA.ROHRBACH.CLASSIFIED3222/31).

4. Project 401.1 has directed its research to non-human subjects, mostly smaller mammals.

5. Some success with symbolic recognition enhancement with rodent subjects has been documented. (See file marked USGCA.AFP.CLASSIFIED.401.01.15).

6. Further research is promising.

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 4.3

Dr. Otross, the new lab director, sets down the report and looks into my face. "Much work you've done here, I see."

"More to do," I say.

"So you want to go to Mars," he says. "I'm impressed. But I like Earth, you know." He whispers, giggles, xy to xy, "Have you seen the rack on Ysyto?"

I shrug, ignore him. "Zero and low-G living can be made better though fast-tracked gene replacement," I say.

Otross nods. "I did some genetics work," he says. "Hair color. That's a bastard."

Hair color is, in fact, not a bastard. In one of the grad schools I attended I paid for my classes bootlegging hair color genes I made in my rooms. "Yes," I say. "Hair color is problematic."

"Tell me about the mice." Otross blinks at me behind his glasses. Pure affect? Eyeball reshaping costs nothing.

"They're responding better than I hoped," I say. "I've given you the full data."

Otross puts his hand on his chin. "What about, um, mouse psychosis?"

"Delusions? Violent paranoia?"

"How can you tell?"

I rub my face to hide my exasperation. "Control groups?"

"Group mouse psychosis. Get it. 'Mouse' psychosis?" Otross laughs like a chipmunk.

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 4.3

I've been through the training, and passed all the psych programs regarding emotional intelligence, but I couldn't help disliking Otross. Unctuous, imperious, a head shorter than me. He must have come from a poor background. Where were the gene mods, the HGH? I'm lucky, I suppose. My mother was only 1.5 meters, about the size of the director. I chose not to go over 2 meters since height is of no advantage, not in exploration, where I plan to go.

Ysyto, over in Bionome Surveillance, descended from Mesoamerican genes, now sways at 2.3 meters, with breasts large enough to suggest an unstable structure. And she wonders why she's not found a partner.

The new director stopped by to ingratiate himself with those of us with National Science Fellowships: me, Greenburg-Lu Xian, Tal, and of course, Doe X. The director is above his level of expertise, the same old story: who among research wants to go in Admin? Who in admin could do any proper research? Anyway, I'm going to keep quiet about Hermione for a while.

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 4.4

Hermione sits on the desk now, staring at the only capture I've hardcopied that I keep. "Is she pretty?" Hermione asks. I've implanted a nano-voice amplifier/transponder so I can hear her tiny mouse voice.

"Who?"

"This... subject in the picture."

"She's a person," I say.

"And I'm a subject?"

"You're a mouse, Hermione."

Hermione nibbles on some cheese I'd left for her. "It's good. Pecorino Romano, right? Did you love her?"

"I'm working here. You can stay, but be quiet."

"If you're going to be like that, I'm going back to my environment," she says.

"Take the cheese."

Hermione takes the chunk of Romano in her mouth and skitters off.

~~~~~

Daybook: 11 June

19:00 Dinner outside the compound with Ysyto. She wants to discuss research.

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 4.6

Ysyto sits at the table, towering over her food. She's dark-skinned with sad, dark eyes. When she looks up, she smiles at me, touching her dark hair. "Why do you want to go to Mars?" she asks.

"Don't you want exploration?"

She shrugs, like the movement of an unquiet lake. "I don't know that my skills would suit off-world."

"Oh, come on. Mars is like here, except it's colder and all indoors. You're brilliant."

Ysyto smiles again, turning her head. "Oh. Why aren't you up there?"

"Timing," I lie. "Got the grant and that was it for a while."

"I don't know if I could take being screwed into a tube in zero-G for two months."

"What's the difference, between that and working at the lab?"

Brief smile like the last pulse on an EEG, slight shrug. "More closeness."

"Are there any cheese shops around here," I ask.

"Cheese?"

"We'll take a look after dinner," I say. Ysyto's body moves when I say that. I can't wait to look over the cheeses.

~~~~~

USGCA STERNBERG CENTER MEETING 400 UNIT AGENDA – 22 OCTOBER

1. Old Business – On Campus dining; Lab courtesy; Vetting of janitorial staff; Cooperation with USGINet agents.

2. Human Resource Effectiveness Review Protocols – Discuss upcoming reviews and set appointments.

3. Project Updates – Projects 401.1,401.2, & 401.3. Project leaders will give short presentations on the status of their work.

4. New Business – Preliminary budgeting for the next fiscal year – Dr. Otross will talk about funding issues and resource allocations.

5. Lunch in the Sarah Palin Dining Room. Meet & Talk with Congressperson Varda Patel, chair of the House Science Oversight Committee.

NOTE: DR. OTROSS WOULD LIKE TO STRESS THAT ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY!!!

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 4.11

"Emmenthaler?" Hermione sniffs the cheese.

"It's real Swiss," I say. I hold up the package showing the white cross in a circle of red.

"What's Ysyto want with you?" Hermione asks. She picks up the piece of Emmenthaler I slice from the block.

"We're scientists. Geneticists. We discuss research."

Hermione licks her lips. "She likes you."

"Don't mistake desperation for love," I say.

"Who's the desperate one?" Hermione returns to the cheese.

I tap my pencil on my head. "Look." My monitor lights up with a Mars Q. The red planet snaps into view. It's Mars Supervisor Tor Gharsh.

Hermione leaves off the Emmenthaler and climbs onto the keyboard. "What's with Mars? I like the moon. It's made of cheese."

Tor Gharsh smiles, behind her the luxurious urwald of the Mars base station. Plants droop, rich with fruit. You can smell the oxygen, sweet and new, even in my ozone-rich lab. "Next training group for Mars will be chosen in two solar months. Boys and girls, girls and boys, I can't tell you what's it like up here. We're a tight crew. Every time I go EST I see stars that even the North Pole crew can't see. They're treading water, and we're looking into the heart of creation." If I love anybody, it's Tor Gharsh.

"The moon is not made of cheese," I say.

"Better if it was. Some nice Camembert, or smelly Stilton."

Tor Gharsh shows her loving viewers around Mars base station. Halls waiting for geneticists to work in. Kilometers of emptiness. "Were," I say. "Better if it were. Use the subjunctive mood for conditions contrary to fact, or wishes."

Hermione chews. Mouth full. "What's a mouse need with wishes?"

~~~~~

PROJECT 401.1

Lab Report Experiment 401.1.100

Intro: Using GENMOD 401.03.223 on subject mouse, designated HERMIONE, we will attempt to track psychological effects in a simulated space environment.

Problem: Effective psychological genetic modification in human subjects has not produced a stable result. Most often, the subject evinces psychotic tendencies and/or enters a catatonic state, resulting in death. Upon brain post-mortem, development of lesions, as well as accelerated degradation of neuron networks were revealed. Can genetic personality modification be made effective in human subjects?

Hypothesis: Using subject Hermione, a 400.10 mouse with an appropriate GENMOD 401.03.223, this experiment will test if the personality modifications as listed in attachment 401.01 will occur absent of above listed complications.

Methods: Using the nanomonitors implanted in Hermione, we will track physical data in response to stimuli as the subject interacts in the SSE, a sealed low-gravity environment. We will use both the Bflärhag LG fields and the Feinberg SGG to create the low-gravity environment. No anti-anxiety medications will be introduced. Hermione will remain in the SSE for duration of 48 hours or longer, depending on reactions.

Results: See attachment 401.01.100.01 for data graphs. Subject mouse Hermione exhibited no signs of psychosis or anxiety during the 48.5-hour duration of the experiment.

Conclusions: A promising beginning, but further experiments must follow.

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 4.11

Ysyto claps the loudest at the meeting. Otross smiles, clearly not comprehending this breakthrough. Other colleagues look interested, then sour, or both simultaneously. The Congressperson stares at Ysyto, stifling yawns as I speak. Is she getting any of this?

At lunch I sit next to Doe-X. She's keen to discuss my findings. "I wonder if your work can be transferred to mine."

"Simians?"

She points a fork loaded with chicken at me. "Next logical step."

"Tell me, Dr. Pollinger," the Congressperson asks. "Your work will change the game?"

"Oh, it will, Congressperson Patel," Otross says. "We here at the institute push the edges of science every day." As he says this he stares at Ysyto's chest.

"There's a long way ahead," I say. "First result is a fluke, two results is a coincidence, three is a run of luck, four might be something. Consistent reproducibility is the aim." My colleagues nod, except for Otross, who looks confused.

The Congressperson gives me a condescending appraisal. "I have a PhD in Biomechanical Interface Protocols," she says.

"Oh," Otross says. "I love cyborgs. Did you see that new vid, Ahab, Cyborg, about the cyborg that hunts the whale in violation of all environmental laws?"

Everyone turns to stare at him. A moment of silence, then chewing commences. Congressperson Patel says to me, "If only we could get mice and simians to speak."

Doe-X shakes her head. "Sign language in chimps is quite advanced."

"Still," Congressperson Patel says. "Real idiomatic speech would make this easier."

"Or more difficult," I say. Am I wrong, or is Ysyto eyeing me?

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 4.12

Hermione blinks. "I don't want any Havarti," she says.

"He'll be able to talk as well as you," I say.

"I'm not your slave."

"How about Blue Castello?" Hermione withdraws. Is she shaking?

"Why? Why?" she asks. "Can't you clone me?"

"We're talking evolution here, Hermione, not duplication."

Hermione walks to the picture I keep on my desk. She rises, resting her paws on the frame. "Were you scared?"

I stare at the face. She's long gone. "Yes," I say. "But then I was glad."

Hermione turns to look at me. "And now?"

"I'm going to Mars," I say.

~~~~~

400.10. "Hermione" Scientific Narrative

1. Introduction

Hermione is a BALB/c Mega-Doogie mouse, descended from the original Doogie strain developed in the 1990's. (See Appendix 1 for history of the developments of NMDA receptors in Doogies). The next developments occurred through breeding Doogie mice together with other transgenic mice. The genetic enhancements were, as predicted, passed down and subject, like all genetics, to mutation. Hermione's ancestors developed neural functions akin to dogs in two generations, akin to chimpanzees in eight, and in Hermione's case, higher thought functions, including the ability to learn through abstract symbolics, media, and interaction with humans. Unlike chimps, however, mice cannot communicate with sign language, leaving a gap between objective data recorded from sensors, and observational behavior. Human subjects are notorious for unreliable expressions, but speech can give a researcher some direct data from the consciousness that no sensor can do. A mere graph of brainwaves can show a mental state, as can scans, but ultimately, the holistic totality of a subject is more than the sum of its correlating data, especially in research and experimentation.

If we could engage in higher-order speech functions with our test subjects, we could advance all the faster. 400.10 Hermione has already shown that GENMOD 401.03.223 is successful. The question is now whether this transgenic modification will transmit generationally. Ancillary to this genmod, Hermione's communication functions are enhanced. She can point to words, show affirmative or negative responses, and in general answer the Exploration Service's Psychological Standard Battery (see Appendix 2).

~~~~~

UNIT 401 LAB REPORT 4.12

Introduced subject mouse Edgar 10, a mega-Doogie equally responsive and intelligent to Hermione 10 for the purposes of creating a new generation, designated 401.10.11. This introduction is of particular importance, since this is the first generation of mice with transgenic material combined with natural developments. As mice become more sophisticated thinkers, will their sexual instincts remain keyed to biological cues, or will the subjects, for want of a better word, turn human, with all the agonies of mate selection, relationships, and sexual jealousy attending?

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 4.12

Hermione nibbles on smoked Gouda. She looks up at me, and returns to her cheese. She stops nibbling, cleans her whiskers. "He's an idiot."

"You don't like Edgar?"

"He can't talk. He stares at me."

"You're telling me your instincts aren't working?"

Hermione stares at me. "Are yours?"

"Sexuality is different in mice and humans," I say. "We don't go into estrous cycles. Humans also treat sexuality as a form of recreation."

She shakes her head. "For fun?"

"So they say."

She nibbles more cheese. "I'm in estrous, right?"

"It'll be dark," I say. "Tonight."

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 5.1

It's in front of me. My ESPSB and Hermione's ESPSB. With the GENMOD 401.03.223, her score reflects the optimum profile of an Exploration Team member. Of course, no mouse will be on an Exploration Project. People like me will be. Better people than me.

Ysyto buzzes me. "Can I come in?"

I press the unlock button. My ESPSB in front of me, I hardly notice. The score never changes, and never will. Not in the five years since I stayed in Huntsville for the initial screening. Some got passed over for physical reasons, some for political beliefs, some for aggressive personality profiles, and some for minor mental tics. It's like the last post she sent me. I read it over and over again, but nothing changed. How could it? I can make any living creature larger, change secondary sexual characteristics at will, increase strength, endurance, metabolic rate, hair, eye, and skin color. But no genmod can create or sustain love, or erase mistakes.

I feel Ysyto's mass behind me, a palpable force. "ESPSB?"

"Hermione's." I hand her the tablet.

Ysyto hums as she scans. "Okay." She looks up. "And this one?"

I kill the tablet. "Nothing. Old data."

"Hers?"

"You ever take it? The ESPSB?" I turn my chair around and run into her chest, not deliberately. "Excuse me," I say.

She doesn't back off. "You don't have any human connections, do you?"

"Ysyto."

She stands up, making me crane my neck. "Who is in that picture?"

"Don't you have research? Running any experiments? Observations?"

"Yes," she says. She crosses her arms.

"I loved her." My stare is hostile.

"Her? When?"

I shake my head. "A long time ago. She's dead." I look away and see Hermione perched behind the monitor post.

If Ysyto were normal — if I were normal — a round of commiseration might commence, but we're both scientists. I have just given her another point on the graph, another piece of data. Why did I tell her that? To get rid of her? Ysyto must sense that I don't really have any sexual interest in her.

Ysyto nods. "Human warmth. Intimacy. It has benefits."

~~~~~

UNIT 401 LAB RECORD Date: 5.1

After the standard 20-day gestation cycle, subject Hermione 10 has given birth to six live-born offspring of subject mouse Edgar 10. (Unique designations to follow.) No complications to the births, or any observable defects to the infant mice. High-Security close observation protocols to be enacted as per Unit 401.20.

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 5.3

Hermione spends time with her litter, as all mice must do. I'm actually missing talking to her. It makes no sense to bond with a mouse, even a descendant of 1519 day Methuselah as Hermione is, though I curtailed much of the longevity of her genetics due to the need to move through generations. I regret this now, since I've come to care for her. She's intelligent for a subject mouse, and maybe because of this, I find her company more compelling than with any human, lately. When I was younger I sought more human company, but now, since I'm in the lab all day, and sometimes all night, I can't be diverted.

I think about that night, about her, dying in my arms. Her name too was Hermione, named after some movie character her mother loved as a child. Her hair, natural, waved in the breeze, coronaed with sunlight, and her eyes shone with intelligence, but with an edge of daring, too. We met in genetics class before the war. Both ambitious, she more than I, ambitious enough to join me in my bootleg genmods, teach me the basics of eye color and retroviruses for secondary sexual characteristics. We made enough money to equip a good lab of our own in the house we rented. Women with small breasts and men with small penises started to come to see us, and those that wanted to change their genders without surgery. We charged less than Government Genmod Clinics, and performed the therapies without the standard mandatory waiting periods. We took in some questionable clients wanting total genscan revision, paying us with many credits, but we made sure these were only criminals and not terrorists. We did not want to be arrested for a federal crime, after all. Hermione handled the business end, vetting the clients, bribing the USGINet Locales, using her knowledge of human behavior and reactions to pheromones to devastating effect.

I worked on my personality mods from the start, hoping mainly that Hermione and I would both go to Mars, something we talked about lying together in our bed, so eager, arrogant, so naïve. What bonded us was our claustrophobia. She could never stand to be in a closed lab for long. I hated flying and elevators. We could use anti-anxiety packs, but those made you disqualified for any exploration programs. Not that all long-trippers didn't get a large daily dose of them once on their way. Typical USG hypocrisy.

~~~~~

DAYBOOK — 28 August

19:00 Dinner with Ysyto at her place.

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 5.4

Ysyto rises, the sheet catching on her genmod breasts. She turns to me. Maybe I shouldn't have told her, but I'm a scientist first, not a spy, or a USGINet thug.

"Talk?" Her eyes wide. Awe, disbelief, or hatred?

"A complex interaction between the transgenic nature of the mice and my genmod. Nothing I planned."

She hugs the sheet to herself. "But you've told no one."

"It might be a fluke. An anomaly. One subject." I have broken down and slept with Ysyto because thinking about the original Hermione, long dead, stirred up needs I usually met with less complicated outcomes. Look at Ysyto: thinking, calculating. I would like to give myself over to someone as brilliant as her, but any bonds to earth are not worth the fleeting pleasures.

Ysyto moves forward, leaning her head on her knees. She blinks. "What did the subject say?"

I shrug. "We talk mostly about cheese."

Ysyto hops out of bed, a sight to behold, all 2.3 meters of her. "Get dressed." She pulls on an orange USG Exploration Spaceknit undergarment, stuffing her breasts into the tight fabric. "I must speak to your mouse," she says.

~~~~~

POLICE REPORT – MEDICAL EXAMINER'S OFFICE

Examiner: Porus Troblim, MD

Subject: Hermione Nasrim Gryffed-Alberts, aged 25 @ TOD

COD: Examination showed no physical trauma to victim. All organs intact, at proper size & weight for a person of her age and gender. Gene scan showed anomalies as follows:

1. Presence of an unknown genmod on DNA markers for personality.

2. Evidence of numerous genmods common to the victim's social status, however, none of the genmods had manufacturer's encoding.

This led to an examination of the victim's brain, where sub-cranial lesions were found inconsistent with an organic pathology. The number and recent appearances of these lesions led to the victim's death by inhibiting the cortex, causing the victim to lose consciousness and subsequently suffocate.

Ruling: Death by misadventure, not homicide. Possible to perhaps charge whoever made the genmod, but with no markers, whatever killed the victim will be difficult to trace. Remains may be released to family.

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 5.4

Mouse and Ysyto face to face. The lab is empty this time of night, except for the USGINet Security Guards who know better than to stop senior research leaders. Except, of course, they note our entry. Now maybe I regret telling her.

"Are you in estrous?"

Hermione's question makes Ysyto's face open in surprise. "No."

"I explained," I tell the mouse. "Humans don't have an estrous cycle."

The mouse looks over Ysyto with her calm face. "So you did it for fun?"

Ysyto has no answer for this. "What about you?" she asks Hermione.

"I would like some Norwegian Blue," she tells Ysyto.

"So you think about cheese?"

Hermione rubs her face with her paws. "I have to get my brood," she says.

Ysyto sits back, shaking her head. "Wow, you are something, Hermione."

The mouse ticks off to her environment, dark at this time of night. Ysyto watches her, then looks at me.

"Well," I say.

"I need the genetics," she says. Her brown eyes burn at me.

~~~~~

UNIT 401 LAB RECORD Date: 5.8

The fourth course of experimentation with subject mouse. (See previous 401 lab reports for introductory information and data).

Results: See attachment 401.01.100.04 for data graphs. Subject mouse Hermione exhibited no signs of psychosis or anxiety during the 100-hour duration of the experiment.

Conclusions: GENMOD 401.03.223 is ready for further testing.

~~~~~

USGCA STERNBERG CENTER MEETING 400 UNIT AGENDA – 6 AUGUST

1. Dr. Otross will speak on the need for Inter-project Cooperation.

2. Old Business – Parking spaces for junior researchers. Cooperation with USGINet Agents.

3. Project Updates – Projects 401.1,401.2, & 401.3. Project leaders will give short presentations on the status of their work.

4. New Business – Incoming Interns; Lab assignments.

5. Lunch in the Sarah Palin Dining Room. Speaker: Actualizing Your Goals for Interpersonal Achievement. Bob and Babbette Deinerweiner of Encouragement Technology Inc.

NOTE: DR. OTROSS WOULD LIKE TO STRESS THAT ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY!!!

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 5.4

They stare at me, except for Ysyto, who looks at the table. Otross stares too, breaking away from his usual view of Ysyto's chest.

"You're sure," Otross says. "These results."

"The data speaks for itself." I look down into his ferret eyes. Hair color hard to do.

"Publish," he says. "We'll publish. That'll bring some attention to what we do here at the Sternberg Center."

"Premature," Ysyto says. "We have to do a lot more testing."

"We?" I ask.

Otross and Ysyto look at me. Doe-X and the others shift in their chairs, looking at their agendas.

"I'm the one they gave the grant to," I say.

Otross frowns. "Look, Pollinger, it's a matter of..."

"National Security," Ysyto says.

"Oh no," I say. "It's a simple genmod."

Ysyto stands now, towering over me. "No, Pollinger. It's a talking mouse."

"A talking mouse?" Doe-X says. "You're joking, right."

Ysyto turns to her. "No. I've spoken with the subject."

"Her name's Hermione," I say.

Otross pounds his palms on the table, shaking all the glasses of water. "Look, ultimately, the decision to publish our results is mine and mine alone." For a little waxed ferret, Otross comes on strong.

"It's nowhere near ready. And I don't even know if the speech is transgenic," I lie.

"Are we talking about a personality genmod that doesn't cause psychosis, or a breakthrough in human-animal relations?" Doe-X asks.

Otross stands (not much different from sitting). "This meeting is over. Pollinger, come with me."

~~~~~

Transcript of a Private Security Capture

Voice 1 (Identified as Hermione Nasrim Gryffed-Alberts): If we are going to Mars, we have to try this genmod.

Voice 2 (Identified as me, Pollinger, A.F.): It's not ready. The effects could be...

Voice 1: I don't care about the effects, honey. I want the genmod.

Voice 2: No. I. Look, it's not like changing your eye color, or even gender assignment, Hermione, you know this. It's a personality mod. And...

Voice 1: You love me?

Voice 2: The genmod needs a few tests. We have the mice. I just don't think...

Voice 1: I thought you wanted me, you and me, to go to Mars. Exploration. That's what we've wanted. Isn't it? Pollinger, isn't it?

Voice 2: It's bad science.

Voice 1: All the shit we've sold? All the off-the-market genmods? Identity exchanges? Gender reassignments.

Voice 2: That was to pay for grad school and equipment...

Voice 1:...And the weekends in Paris and London...

Voice 2: Okay, but you could die.

Voice 1: If I don't go to Mars, I will die. (cough) I mean, if we, you and me, don't go to Mars, we will die. I will die.

Voice 2: Not this way, Hermione.

Voice 1: If you won't give the genmod, I'll take it myself.

Voice 2: Hermione, please (Sound of door slamming, glass breaking)

~~~~~

FROM: H.R. OTROSS, PhD, Director of USGINet Sternberg Research Facility

TO: SAIC Barkus, Chief of Security USGINet SRF

SUBJECT: Research Project 401

1. You are to seize all materials related to Project 401, including animals. The lab is to be sealed and only opened under my sole approval.

2. You are to remove Pollinger, A. F. from USGINet SRF and turn him over to USGINet Exploration at the location designated below.

3. Security Protocol 540.24 is in effect regarding the above.

~~~~~

FROM: H.R. OTROSS, PhD, Director of USGINet Sternberg Research Facility

TO: Congressperson Varda Patel, chair of the House Science Oversight Committee

SUBJECT: Breakthrough Results from the Team at Sternberg Research Facility

Dr. H.R. Otross is happy to announce two important breakthroughs in genetic modification.

1. The first wholly successful personality modification. Eliminating claustrophobia and other anxieties.

2. The first mouse able to speak directly to humans.

Both projects come from the research team here at Sternberg Research Facility, including Ysyto Grospardo, Doe-X, and some follow-up work by A.R. Pollinger.

I believe these findings will result in significant honors for us at the Sternberg Research Facility, possibly even the Nobel Prize.

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 6.2

Aboard the USIPTS 3028 JAMES MARSHALL HENDRIX

I did the deal. I always do the deal. I did it for Hermione, and it killed her. I did it for the other Hermione, too.

"I'm not going to live long, am I?" she asked. I had only a few minutes before the USGINet thugs carted me away.

"It'll be painless, if that's any consolation." Ysyto, I knew, would sacrifice Hermione to look at her brain.

Hermione laughed. "You're going away. Mars?"

"They're stealing my work. I'm letting them."

She raised herself on her small hind legs. "To get to Mars."

"I took the genmod," I said.

She lowered herself and looked away. "Please don't let them get my children. And give them cheese. Mascarpone at first. Just grant me that." She looked me directly. "I forgive you."

"Yes. I'm taking them to Mars." I said. I looked at the picture of my dead Hermione, and then picked it up. "It won't hurt a bit."

I am writing this after coming out of deep sleep. A bit groggy. The mice remain in stasis, all six of them. I am confused and angry.

Before I entered the USIPTS 3028 JAMES MARSHALL HENDRIX for my journey, I transmitted the genmod, claimed by Otross and Ysyto, to the USGINet CID, still holding open the case of Hermione Nasrim Gryffed-Alberts. The genmod I created came from the strain I first synthesized in grad school, the strain that Hermione introduced to herself while I stood by. The strain that killed her. The USGINet CID will know whom to question now.

Otross wanted the credit so badly he pulled some strings and got me Exploration, and now, on the viewer Mars looms, MARS 01 and her sister installations MARS 02-05 star out from the central base, spidering into the emptiness. I wonder which leg I'll inhabit.

~~~~~

Private Encoded RNA Marks AA – EG Required Year 6.4

Aboard the USSPA Transitional Station ST-103M ALAN STUART FRANKEN

Some days I stare out the window away from the sun, dimmer, colder. The stars burn brighter here, clearer, more vital with no atmosphere or light pollution to block them. Some days I stare at the hardcopy of the first Hermione that I've mounted by magnet against my monitor screen. At last she's going to Mars, among the clear stars.

Two weeks quarantine. Today, low-gravity protocols for incoming transport docking. Pencils float, and all hot drinks steam through lids.

My cube has stars that float too, mice, the second Hermione's children. We are alone in this quadrant of the station, except for a poet somebody thought would do well on Mars. She sits in her cube, weeping most days. I see her in the cafeteria, a hard smile cracking her face. Maybe she needs a genmod.

Today my mice and I sing. I teach them children's songs. Once around the mulberry bush. Twinkle, twinkle. They float and sing amid the clanking somber station. I sing too. The cracked poet blinks at my door, her green eyes startled by the floating, singing mice. She starts to sing with us, a cup of steaming tea in her hand.

Our voices rise together, sweeter and stranger that anything I have ever heard before.

Mark Burgh lives in Fort Smith, AR.

(Back to Table of Contents)

# Roots and Wings, Soil and Sky

by Nicholas Beishline; published May 1, 2013

In recent history there existed a small town situated deep in a dense forest. The people of this town, much like the town itself — more of a village, really — were nearly born of the forest itself, their lives and their senses of purpose inextricably tangled with the living monoliths all around them. The shelters that protected everyone from the rain were in fact built entirely in tandem with the trees, the floors constructed to balance across the strongest branches and the roofs densely woven into the canopy overhead. Verdant flora decorated the floors and ceilings in arabesques, and natural light illuminated daily activities. No walls divided the people of this village from one another, for they understood that true community requires no separation from one another.

Within this village lived a young woman whom everyone regarded as something of an anomaly. Her childhood was spent in a curious state of limbo created by the difference in treatment from her peers and her elders; the former treated her as something to be wary of — the newcomer who cannot yet definitively be trusted — while the latter were always careful to instill in her the sense of communal sameness that all of the other children so easily enjoyed.

Much to her elders' chagrin, however (like everyone else in the village, she had no true parents, as child rearing was considered an all-inclusive task), the differences in the girl were unable to be ignored. She became known by the elders as "little pupa," not because of her young age but because her behavior and mannerisms began more and more to resemble those of the tiny cohabitants of the town that, had the townspeople known the word, would have been called "insects." Her movements were somewhat jerky; her hair was thick and tangled, resistant to any attempt to tame it, and was a strange brown-green color, not unlike the thick carpet of fallen leaves below the dwellings that had not yet lost their color. When she would exert herself — which she often did, as her energy seemed to know no limits — and began to perspire, she smelled of the damp forest on a humid summer's day, and at night, from a hiding place she'd found and made into a sort of second home, the rest of the village could hear a melancholy tune created by a strange chirping sound made, presumably, by a singular instrument of her own invention.

Sometimes those passing by could also hear the mournful lyrics accompanying her music, telling stories of "roots and wings, soil and sky," and "burning sunlight 'gainst the eye." Her singing was never forceful, never especially confident, and always seemed to lament experiences that only she had the privilege or curse of knowing.

As she grew into young adulthood, she began to be approached by others her own age, of both sexes, who attempted to court her in various ways. She was resistant to each of these advances, however, because she knew that she was somehow different from the others. Perhaps this flat refusal of affection was a result of the strange space she had occupied as a child, that liminal space of neither acceptance nor rejection inadvertently created by others to be inhabited by her alone; it is equally likely that she was daily made painfully aware of her strangely developing body. In any event, she chose to be alone, to live apart from the others and occupy a space completely her own.

She first realized that she was physically maturing differently from her peers when she stumbled upon another girl who was bathing in a river not far from the village. Hiding in the brush a safe distance from the riverbank, she watched the girl rise from the water, shake herself off, and turn to disappear into the woods on the opposite side of the river. The strange girl gave herself away by stepping on a stick that cracked underfoot, however, and when she was discovered she fled into the trees with the bather's surprised voice still ringing in her head: "Seanene? Is that you?"

Seanene: the name meant no more to her than the world beyond the woods in which she dwelled. Seeing the naked bather confirmed once and for all that she was maturing differently from the other girl. For months already, she had felt a burning along her back—not painful, exactly, but distracting, and usually accompanied by the impossible sensation of her skin pulling against itself. Her body remained angular and her movements sudden and jerky, and she kept her thick hair piled in such a way that the thin appendages growing from the crown of her head could not be seen. The insides of her arms and legs were still lined with a single row of tiny ridges, but they had grown harder; she could feel them with the lightest touch of her fingertips, ridged like the bodies of the fish she could so easily catch. She had often run her hands the wrong way along their bodies, from tail to head, in order to compare the edges of their scales to the rough inside planes of her limbs. She understood instinctively that she was something other than the others, something new, and the only name by which she could understand herself to exist sounded wrong in her head.

Seanene.

It was one night not long after the bathing incident that a boy her own age visited her in her hiding place. He was tall, though not as tall as she, and smoothly muscled; she had often furtively watched him as he hunted or swam. She knew his name was Cole but, like her own name, she did not care to know him by the distinction of his name.

He advanced slowly, clearly unsure of himself, looking around in wonderment at the small alcove she had created beneath the roots of a particularly old and massive tree. He thought she smelled like the earthen walls when she ran, but he did not say this; did not, in fact, say anything until he was standing squarely before her. Even then, he merely breathed her name, and raised one hand — to cup her cheek, touch her hair, or strike her, she did not know, but she did not flinch.

His hand seemed to lose its power as it neared her face, and it came to rest instead on her bare shoulder. "I heard you singing," he said at last, and looked around the small space a bit awkwardly. "Where do you keep your instrument?"

"Instrument?" Although Seanene had known Cole her entire life, it had always been from a distance, and she thought this was probably the first word she had ever spoken directly to him.

"The one that makes that chirping noise. Its sound is always stuck in my head, buzzing around like an insect's song I can't forget."

Seanene shook her head and tried to push him away, suddenly afraid, but he did not fully retreat, coming instead to stand at the edge of her space: still solidly there, but at a safe distance, as though he meant to tell her that he would do her no harm. Possessed by a sudden, brazen anger, she kept her eyes fixed on his and very slowly, in a thrall of defiance she had never before known, extended her arms in front of her and rubbed them against one another. The resulting sound was a short, mournful chirp from which Cole did not flee, as she had perhaps expected; instead he took a single step toward. She held her ground, and when, without breaking eye contact, he breathed a single word — "again" — she obeyed.

~~~~~

Their coupling was nothing like she could ever have anticipated. It was clumsy and awkward, but pleasing, as well, although she found herself entering into the act with the same guarded distance with which she had always approached everything in her life. She was, in fact, only just beginning to lower her guard a bit when she felt the familiar pain in her back once again, but worse than before, making itself known in an incarnation she had never before imagined. It was excruciating, and in the midst of it, as she tried to pull away, Cole's eyes opened and she watched his expression change from bliss to something very nearly approaching horror, and in the next instant he was gone, fled completely from her dwelling beneath the tree.

Her vision was altered, too, in this rush of confusion and revelation that followed the single most momentous event of her life. Where previously she had always seen the world as one image, an aperture made clear by the cooperation of both of her eyes, now the world appeared to her several dozen times over, as if she were gazing at a reflection badly fractured by a cracked looking-glass. Through this terrifying, dizzying new sense of sight, she thought she could glimpse something flittering just at the edges of her fractured vision. She screamed, and continued to scream, and finally fled her space and, from there, the village itself.

~~~~~

She did not know how far she had fled, or in what direction, but the next morning found her in an unfamiliar clearing with a motionless pond of water in the center of it. Her vision still scared her, but she thought she was beginning to adjust to it, and when she crept to the pond to stare at herself in its reflection, she almost did not recognize the image presented to her in the still water.

She was still herself, but so much was different. Her eyes appeared prismatic in the reflection, multi-faceted and possessing countless arrays of color. The appendages she had long felt growing from her skull were now fully visible — two of them, each nearly a foot long, and capped with a tiny bulb which, she now realized with a start, were alerting her to vibrations and sounds she had never before perceived. And, as she bent farther over the water, she finally saw the result of the continuing pain in her back.

Seanene stared in mute amazement at the delicate wings that now stretched from her back. Like so many of the insects and butterflies she had enjoyed watching for as long as she could remember, she now possessed wings of her own: studies in gossamer that shimmered in the sunlight raining down from the clear sky above her, one color changing into another in the glare, so that it was impossible for her to tell whether they were one color or several at once.

~~~~~

The boy known to Seanene as Cole crouched at the edge of the clearing in the forest and saw a strange and beautiful creature crouched over a small pond, studying itself in the water's reflection with an intensity that seemed consistent only with one's initial moment of self-recognition. He watched her — for, in spite of the strange entomological appendages, the creature was still unmistakably female — slowly straighten, rising to her full height in the young sunlight of a new day, and stretch her arms to heaven, seemingly in sudden understanding and acceptance of some long-sought truth about herself. As she turned round and round, he stood frozen in place and watched those brilliant wings twitch, then flutter back and forth in clearly intentional movements, until they quickened into a blur and the girl was lifted, just for a moment, off of the ground. He recognized her as the strange girl from the village, but she was clearly something different now, something somehow more, as if in the course of a single night she had fully matured into the woman he was seeing now.

The sound of her new, unburdened laugh astonished him, as did the relieved sob that closely followed it. It was the laugh and the sob of a creature never before seen: one that finally understood its place in the world, and was only too happy to claim it at last.

Later, after she ran off to lose herself in the trees once more, Cole abandoned his voyeuristic study of the stunning creature and moved instead to inspect the grass and leaves on which she had earlier awoken.

There, under close inspection, he found dozens of dimly shining, nearly translucent orbs, no larger in diameter than the smallest nail of one's smallest finger.

And he wondered if possibly, just possibly, they did not curiously resemble eggs.

Nicholas Beishline is a doctoral candidate in Victorian literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His writing has appeared in such e-zines as Chronogram and, most recently, M.E. Sharpe's Encyclopedia of Global Social Issues. When he is not writing, he is being harassed by his cats, Milo and Penny. In addition to reading and writing, Nicholas loves teaching English and playing the electric guitar.

(Back to Table of Contents)

# The Girl Who Did Not Know What to Be

by Jay Duret; published May 3, 2013

The Girl Who Did Not Know What to Be was in school one day when Ms. Standly, her regular teacher, called in sick and so did Ms. Moore, who was Ms. Standly's assistant, and so did half a dozen other teachers because the Have a Bad Day Flu was going around that month. And so that day a very prim lady who insisted that she be called Mrs. Charity was called to school under emergency circumstance to teach the second grade class.

The Girl Who Did Not Know What to Be didn't yet know that she didn't know what to be and so she thought of herself only by the name her parents had given her — Metrissa. Metrissa was very excited with the arrival of Mrs. Charity because school had reached that long part of the year when the days went so slowly that they would start again before they had finished. Any change of the routine seemed like a good idea to Metrissa, even if Mrs. Charity seemed a little severe when she walked into class.

"So, class," she said, "you probably are thinking that because I am a substitute teacher that you will not have to turn your brains on today. Oh yes, I can see it your eyes; you think that you'll have some fun at Mrs. Charity's expense." Mrs. Charity looked around the room very slowly as if she dared them to disagree with her. "Admit that you were thinking that very thing, weren't you?" she said and looked right at Metrissa.

"Me?" said Metrissa. "Oh no Mrs. Charity, I was not thinking that at all. I was thinking about what you were going to teach us about today."

"I doubt it. But never mind, I can assure you that you'll not be having any fun with Mrs. Charity. No one ever has fun at Mrs. Charity's expense. We are going to start right now with today's lesson." Mrs. Charity looked around the room again to make sure that nobody had any other ideas. "Today," she said, "we are going to be discussing occupations. You," she said pointing at Tommy Motley, "what are you planning to be when you grow up?

Tommy was twisting the collar on his shirt and hadn't been paying much attention to Mrs. Charity. "What?"

"I said, what do you intend to be when you grow up, young man?"

"I'm gonna be a football player."

"Oh, so you want to chase around a silly ball."

"Well, I'm gonna play football," Tommy said.

Mrs. Charity shook her head at the hopelessness of it all. Then she turned her gaze on Ben Howard. "How about you?"

"Me too," said Ben.

"Me too what?"

"I'm going to be a football player, too," said Ben, "and a 'gineer."

"A what?"

"A 'gineer. Like my Dad. He works in an office where he draws plans of buildings and roads and that kind of things, and I can go there with him whenever I want."

"I believe that you mean Engineer, and that seems to be a much better idea than a football player. Engineers build things."

"Well Dad doesn't build them. He draws them. He is kind of an artist."

Mrs. Charity went down the rows of students asking what each one wanted to be.

"A ballerina."

"A movie star."

"Rich."

"A cowboy."

"Policeman."

"One of those guys that rides up on top of a truck."

Finally, Mrs. Charity reached Metrissa.

"You. What about you? What do you want to be?"

Here was the problem. Metrissa had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up. There were so many choices and she hadn't yet decided which one was the best. When she was little she used to say that when she grew up she wanted to be a bird so she could fly, and that always made the grown-ups laugh. But one time her Dad said, "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it," and she thought that was good advice so she decided to take her time before deciding what to wish to be. She hadn't expected that her time would run so short and that Mrs. Charity would be standing in front of her with her stern face and all the other kids would be looking at her, expecting her to announce what she was going to be when she grew up.

"I don't know."

"What did you say, girl? Speak up."

"I said I didn't know." She said it much more loudly.

"Well, what would you like to be?"

"I don't know. I haven't decided."

"You must want to be something, don't you? You don't want to be a nothing, now do you?"

"No, Mrs. Charity. I do not want to be nothing." Metrissa looked at her shoes.

"Well, dear, what is it you want to be?"

"I don't know."

"Sometimes children believe that substitute teachers are fun to poke fun at because they don't know anything and won't ever be back. But not Mrs. Charity. No one ever makes fun of Mrs. Charity. So why don't you just tell us all what you would like to be when you grow up."

"Really. I don't know."

"I don't find this very funny, girl." Mrs. Charity turned to the class. "What do you think that this girl should be when she grows up?"

In the back of class, Tommy Tudereaux yelled, "A substitute teacher," and Mrs. Charity's face turned bright red. She snapped back to Metrissa.

"Well, Little-Girl-Who-Doesn't-Know-Who-To-Be, I guess you wouldn't object to doing a little thinking about who you want to be, would you?"

"No."

"Good. Perhaps you would like to start right now. Why don't you take that little seat over there in the corner and you just think about whom you want to be when you grow up. And when you have decided please let me know. In the meantime, we will go on with our lessons."

Feeling very small, Metrissa went to the chair in the corner. It was a very small chair and not very comfortable.

"Oh, girl," said Mrs. Charity, "turn that chair so it faces the wall; I don't want the class to distract you."

And so Metrissa sat. And thought. And sat.

And thought.

And thought.

And as she thought she turned into the wind and blew out the open school window into the tumbling fall day outside. She whooshed and spun across the schoolyard out of control in the vast pandemonium that she had discovered. She blew over walls. She roared like a train and the roars she roared spread themselves all about her and she felt like a spirit moving over the earth.

I will be the wind she said to herself. I am the wind. I am everywhere. I am nowhere at once. I am moving always. I am the sky when the sky starts moving.

And then she was back in her seat at school staring into the wall. Behind her she could hear Mrs. Charity talking.

"Yes. That is right. They did not intend to let you sit like lumps on your seats just because a substitute teacher arrived, even though I know that's what you were all expecting. Mrs. Charity knows that's what you were hoping for when you heard that your regular teacher was sick. You probably didn't even feel bad when your teacher was ill; you were so smugly pleased that you would have a substitute and could sit like lumps on the chairs and throw spitballs and pass notes amongst yourselves snickering all the time."

The Girl Who Did Not Know Who To Be became a bursting brilliant ball of light and she was suddenly traveling away from school and town and earth into and through the blue brightness of a fall day, and then suddenly through the sky and into the nimble black regions behind the sky where the stars were. She shot forward so fast that she split the night universe, planets whizzing past to either side and the hoary brilliantine stars ahead quickly gone like signs passed by a rushing train. The speed was so fast that all sounds died and she could not feel her toes and then the black regions opened into a blinding homecoming where all light finally comes home to rest.

And she was back in her seat at school.

"That's the way it is today but that is not the way it has to be. There was a time you know before there was Xbox and iPads and children had to spend their own energy to get something done. That's what they had to do and that what they did. No one should be surprised if you can't think for yourself when they haven't given you marching orders."

Metrissa poured like golden liquid amber from the room, running in syrupy flowing waves across the school courtyard and into the brilliant undulating light that was waiting there. The light and the amber syrup mixed together with layers of blonde on honey blonde all glowing from the center as if there was a light in the center of the amber honey flowing Metrissa girl.

And then she was back.

Metrissa slowly looked over her shoulder. Mrs. Charity was standing at the front of the room and was holding a globe in her hands as if she was big enough to hold the world. Metrissa turned slowly back to the wall.

"Oh no you don't" said Mrs. Charity. "I saw you looking. I saw you looking at Mrs. Charity. I saw you wondering if I would let you come back and join the class. Hoping that I would let you come back and join all the children who want to be something when they grow up." Mrs. Charity gestured with the globe. "Stand up. Stand up. Have you decided what you will be?"

She stood up. The children were all looking at her. She did not say a thing. All her words were in front of her.

"Please answer Mrs. Charity. Have you decided?"

Metrissa said, "I have decided."

"Well don't keep us waiting dear, what is it that you want to be?"

"I will be a word maker," Metrissa said, "I will make words."

"Why how odd of you, dear. Surely you don't mean that. We don't make words. We just, we just, we just use them dear. Why if everyone could just make words then no one would know what anyone meant by them. Don't you see Mrs. Charity's point?"

"I think that it will be easy to make words. When I make a word people from all over will know what I mean and they will want to use the word and they will ask me for permission."

"Could you be thinking that Mrs. Charity is too old to know what you are doing? Could you be thinking, Miss Doesn't Know What To Be, that Mrs. Charity won't just realize that her leg is being pulled..."

"Yoooouuuccchhh!" yelled Teddy Cumberbun from the back of the classroom.

They all turned to look. Teddy was standing on his desk. A small green plastic item like a little pencil sharpener was stuck on his finger.

"What is that?" Mrs. Charity demanded.

"It's a..., it's a..." Teddy said but he trailed off.

All around his classmates tried to help.

"It's a peashooter."

"It's an eraser."

"It's, it's, it's..."

"It is a mortan hand bangle," said Metrissa. Everyone stopped and looked at her. They knew just what she meant.

"And what," Mrs. Charity asked, "is a mortan hand bangle?"

"A hand bangle? Seriously? You never?" piped up Jonston Lucree. "You mean it?"

"She doesn't dilly." Metrissa said. "I can tell. Just by the jurly look."

Jonston whistled. "Big time. Let me hear that one again."

"You heard the hopster. Hankopeebee." Metrissa said.

"Are you making fun of Mrs. Charity, Little Girl Who Doesn't Know?"

But Metrissa was busy wordmaking the piano commotion in the classroom. "It's all so bumper glide mizmat," she said, "You know what I bigger bobble?"

Mrs. Charity smacked the desk with the book in her hand so hard that the thunderboom of the big sky class headroom wardeled around in the high sound snippet. "I will not have this jilly bizmat here!" she shouted in tundra glee.

The classroom exploded in laughter.

"No really tob chocks!" Mrs. Charity screamed.

All the children laughed louder.

Mrs. Charity looked hard in all directions until the noise emptied out of the room.

The room was clip clop quiet. No further understanding passed the class. But Metrissa was still on the loud wagon. "Stick-o-business! It's a billion bizzles for free. Stay julip, melville."

"That'll neber belittle, sticks," said Mrs. Charity. "That'll neber belittle."

Metrissa was well beyond the puzzle. The names were bigger than their meaning. She turned and hopped on a hovering hozzle. And over she sped the classroom and the missing connections and now there was no Charity and none the need, for there was no gap in the admiration she had for this spinning amber planet bearing all to who they were going to be.

And Metrissa was going, too.

Jay Duret is a San Francisco based writer. His stories have appeared in a number of journals and magazines including The Citron Review, Cigale Literary Magazine and OutsideIn. He blogs at www.jayduret.com.

(Back to Table of Contents)

# Triple's Blog

by Todd Outcalt; published May 7, 2013

After posting the latest installment on his blog, Gary Triple rose from his desk chair, yawned as he stretched his twenty-nine year old frame, and then padded into the company kitchen for a beer. The lights were dim — per company policy — so that employees would have difficulty ascertaining the time. Clocks and other time-devices were forbidden, but most people had learned to tell time by the sun and moon. A half-mile below ground, Triple proceeded to the office periscope and peered up into the sleepy city as he whispered to himself, "Midnight, give or take fifteen minutes."

He'd been blogging for five consecutive days, without sleep, getting by on coffee and pretzels. His eyes were sand. His fingertips numb. Still, it was what he was paid to do, though he'd never met his employers and had never actually talked to anyone in the firm. His instructions came in hourly installments through other blogs, with facts and figures that were meant to provoke him to write a blog directed against the latest political decision. Someone out there in Washington D.C. fed him the information and he jumped on it. He posted his thoughts, and others read what he had to say.

Deep underground, he was alone in the office, as usual, and he was only allowed to surface every few months. But the company provided for his needs.

Triple tugged at a drawer in the darkness, reached inside, and brought out something cold. Holding it up to the dim light, he could ascertain that it was some kind of vegetable — green and limp — and he bit into it and swallowed before his taste buds could adapt to the taste. He had no idea where the food came from. It just appeared in the drawer every few hours. Then, at the end of each month, Triple received a bill for what he'd eaten and the amount was deducted from his pay.

The office was a round module cored deep in the earth, bunkered down in ten feet of slate and concrete, and on a clear day, peering through the periscope, Triple could see all the way to the Atlantic. Over there somewhere, political decisions stirred the country, and he stirred the decisions with his blog. His employers, a mega-conglomerate of pharmaceutical activists and lobbyists, paid his salary and provided the space for his work. He hammered keys and kept the juices flowing.

When he was hungry, he opened the drawer and pulled out an egg or a chicken bone. When he got thirsty, he drank a beer.

Momentarily, an icon flashed on the computer screen followed by a crisp sound that was reminiscent of ice tinkling in a glass, and Triple returned to his post, hunched over his station again. He posted his final blog just as the senators were departing from their chambers and the long session at the nation's capital drew to a close.

Pharma-Century continues to offer the best in erectile enhancement drugs and sleeping aids. The Tassler Bill (No. 5877-347C), while offering a wider range of options to the public, fails to recognize the patent rights of various medications, including Thera-blend B, Qualvista, Nitrexidone, and Sherpaxalor. The public interest would be best served by a majority vote to defeat this bill. See also Nitrexidoneblog and Vistablueblog for additional details and to order free samples.

Triple secured his keyboard for the evening, yawned again, and considered taking a nap. The senators would not be in session until morning, and if he needed to rise early to get a head start on his next blogging session, he could always take a time released wake-up pill. But a little fresh air might clear his mind, he thought. His nerves twitched with caffeine, his brain stem stirred by the medical concoction that the firm provided through an intravenous drip. And after five days, his body was beginning to shut down. He knew the signs.

Thumbing through the policy manual, Triple noted the small print of his contract and gave special attention to Section Twelve, which provided the protocol for his sleep deprivation and the number of surface hours he would be permitted each year — a stipulation difficult to gauge without the benefit of clocks and calendars.

Rigging up the periscope again, Triple squinted through the lenses into the dark interior of the city and scanned the horizon for signs of life. There was movement, but faint, and he wondered if he would encounter anyone on the surface to talk to. He lowered the scope, snapped it into its locked position, and slipped on his shoes. He'd not showered for a week, but he crept into the small bath next to his workstation and splashed a bit of pungent cologne on his neck. Before coding his exit pass into the elevator, he drank another beer and gargled the suds until his teeth shone.

The lift whined as the doors closed around him, and then oscillated in pitch as the elevator rose more rapidly toward the surface. No music. Triple heard nothing but the steady grind of the cables and the successive chugging of the motors' cogs.

When the doors opened, he was standing on a street corner surrounded by dark, deserted buildings that rose toward the stars like obelisks. He swigged a lungful of air, held it there for a moment as if inhaling a cigarette, and released it was a sigh. Nothing in the area presented an immediate danger or fear, and so he made the quick decision to walk the block. Maybe, he thought, he'd encounter another person. It would be nice to have a talk. His vocal chords stirred in anticipation.

Shuffling up the cracked sidewalk, Triple eased past broken windows and busted street lamps. He lingered under cones of yellow light and breathed deeply, studying the moths that danced beneath the bulbs like a chorus of sparks rising from flame. After some minutes — if indeed they were minutes — he turned toward the heart of the city and noticed a curious neon sign that, periodically, flickered in the darkness like a beacon.

Triple followed the siren song of light past gaping manholes and the stench of sewer breath and eventually found himself standing outside a bar. It was an old establishment, like something out of a movie. Red brick façade. Checkered drapes. Oily windows. Standing in the allure of history, Triple took it in before pushing through the front door. Inside, he found himself facing a near empty room — just a bland sprinkling of wooden tables and chairs, a few glowing candles, and a smattering of deserted wine glasses and beer cans. Behind the oak bar — a beautiful piece of wood polished to a bright gloss — stood a tall man in an apron. The man's eyes sagged inside circles of wan, forgotten brows and sallow cheeks. He grunted as Triple approached.

"Nice evening," Triple said.

The bartender didn't respond, reached over and slid a small card toward Triple.

My name is Avery, the card read. What'll you have?

"A beer," said Triple.

The bartender reached for a mug, angled it under the tap, and pulled on the keg lever until a head formed. He blew some of the foam toward Triple as he slid the mug across the bar.

"Kind of hot for a September evening," Triple commented.

The bartender's eyes narrowed in anger and Triple wondered if he was pressing too hard to make meaningful conversation. In fact, Triple knew that he was bordering on the illegal by trying to talk to the bartender. And so he determined to get at the issue another way. "Is there anyone here I can talk to? I'm willing to pay for a proper English conversation. None of that abbreviated stuff. I need some real talk, if you know what I mean."

The bartender gave a faint smile when Triple flashed his Maximus gold card. "I'll give you twenty free words," said the bartender, who spoke in a surprisingly gentle voice.

"And what are they?"

"You can talk to Daisy. One dollar a word. She uses full sentences. No abbreviations. She's in the back room."

Triple counted the free words the bartender had afforded him. The number was spot on.

Pinching his beer, Triple rose from the bar and crept toward the back room. He lingered at the threshold for some seconds until his pupils could adjust to the low light, and then stepped into the room where, center stage, an alluringly beautiful woman in full makeup reposed on a silken couch. She wore a low-cut red dress with spiked heels, and was polishing her fingernails with an emery board. A tiny lamp at the head of the couch illuminated her voluptuous body and her long tanned legs.

"Are you Daisy?" Triple asked, sidling up next to the couch. When she didn't answer, he flashed his Maximus gold card again. She snatched it, swiped the card through her wrist scanner, and handed it back. She smiled, then pressed a start button on her wrist scanner before she spoke.

"Yeah, I'm Daisy," she said, her voice soft and polished. The wrist scanner emitted three muffled beeps—one beep for each word that Triple had spoken. A red LED counter on the wrist scanner then recorded the rise and inflection of Daisy's voice, and, like a taxi meter, kept a running tab on the price of the conversation. "How long has it been since your last confession?"

"Huh?"

"How long has it been since you talked to a real woman?"

Triple paused. He'd never actually considered time. It wasn't in his nature to break the law, but he noted that Daisy also sported an ankle watch. The timepiece was probably hot, or stolen from a museum, but she wore one nonetheless. Triple feigned a casual disinterest, but then gave it a quick glance to confirm that the hands on the watch were ratcheting forward toward one in the morning. He didn't let on. But he was proud of his ability to tell time by the stars, too. He was never off by more than a few minutes.

"Well... it's your money, sugar," Daisy cajoled.

"Oh, it's been... wow, probably three or four months since I actually talked to someone in a proper way," Triple confirmed nervously. He was whispering in case the room was bugged. But as for time itself, what did it matter?

"Then you must be starved," said Daisy, beckoning him to take a seat at her feet.

Triple thumped down in one of the rickety wooden chairs before he could change his mind. There were several subjects that interested him. "Would you be willing to discuss foreign policy?" he asked.

Daisy, a woman who appeared to be in her mid forties, offered a pouted lip. "Honey," she whispered, "why would you waste your money on water when you can drink the wine?"

Triple brushed a bead of sweat from his forehead. "I see what you mean," he continued. "I have other options."

"All drivel," said Daisy.

"Well then," Triple wanted to know, "what would you suggest?"

"How much are you willing to spend?"

"I can go as high as seven hundred and fifty dollars," Triple told her. "That's a day's pay."

"Big spender," she said, eying the meter on her wrist calculator as it tallied every word she spoke. "Let me see... how about discussing us?"

"Us?"

"You know — us!"

Triple's puppy-dog face flushed; he gave a quick glance into the corners of the room to make sure there were no cameras, no microphones. "I'm afraid," he said, "there really is no us. We just met. How can we talk about us?"

"I know your type, honey," she said mysteriously. "But don't take offense. You're the kind of man who can talk about it all day. You probably spend days on end putting your words out there, your life's work crafted in frenzied little sentences that say nothing and mean even less, words that populate, multiply and pay the rent. But it doesn't say a damn thing about you, whoever you are. The words are just words. But they aren't you. You can't be found anywhere in your blog. Am I right?"

Triple found the logic of the spoken word difficult to follow, and so he tried to imagine her words as stringy, perpendicular paragraphs flowing across his computer screen. He dissected them. Considered their weight and import. He had made a life of seeing words, of writing them, but not hearing them.

"If I ascertain your meaning," he answered at last, "I gather you consider yourself to be some kind of relationship goddess."

"Not a goddess, honey. A gift! You want to open me?"

Triple had read about such women. Whores, they were called. Prostitutes. But most of them had exchanged sex for conversation decades ago. The life was easier. And the pay much better. "I'm really not interested in a relationship," Triple blurted.

"You've got me all wrong, sugar... this isn't about putting our bodies together. This is about putting our words together. You came here because you wanted to make a real connection. Flesh and blood. Am I right?"

Triple tried calculating the running total of her words in his mind. It wasn't time that was being wasted, but the syllables themselves. "I am..." he said finally, "as you might say... incredibly lonely."

Daisy stirred on the couch, batted away a lock of silken blonde hair from her green eyes, and stared at Triple's young, handsome face. She wasn't trained in psychology any more than the bartender was trained in integral calculus, but her years on the streets had taught her the fine art of counseling. That's why some men paid for her services. They wanted to hear the truth about themselves. They needed affirmation — if even for a moment — before returning to their cratered-out lives and starved, digitalized existences.

"Listen, sugar," she said. "I'm going to tell you a story."

Triple leaned over, set his elbows against his knees, and cradled his head in his hands.

"Many years ago, there were people. Not like now. But people who inhabited these walls because the world was free. There were people then who didn't sell themselves because they had to live, but who lived because they wouldn't sell themselves. The best brightened this world for a time or times, and I have been told that words flowed then as freely as wine. Out of lips. Out of mouths. And there were people who drank them. The words were the people. And no one paid to hear them, or to give or receive them as payment. There was no sadness like theirs. Nor no greater joy. To speak face to face. To know the other. And there was time. Time eternal. Before time was taken away and the words with it."

Daisy groaned a satisfied sigh and relaxed against the couch, her breathing nearly a lustful panting. "That's what I mean by us, sugar."

Triple had read various blogs on the taboo — the history of the world when there was time and words were free — and all of them followed the basic storyline espoused by Daisy. Still, he wondered if she considered herself a prophet? He wondered if she talked to the bartender without paying, giving herself away freely? But he didn't have enough words left to pursue that line of questioning. He wondered about his cache of remaining words in her wrist calculator.

"I don't think," he admitted, feeling less inhibited in her presence, "that I would be so lonely if I were allowed to hear spoken words without paying for them."

"None of us would, honey," Daisy readily admitted. "But then, where would I be?"

Triple realized the catch. Such freedom would necessitate a complete overhaul of the social order. He might not get paid for his blog. Daisy might not get paid for her conversation. The world as they knew it would break apart.

"There's a bill in congress now," Triple said, "that, if passed, would allow husbands and wives to sign a contract when they get married. They could forgo the payment policy and agree to speak freely with each other." Triple had been blogging mercilessly against the bill, but most of the words that emerged from the corridors of national power were on the fringe of the Ethernet, and heavily censored.

"I was married once," Daisy said sadly, her soft voice falling away. "Many years ago. We were young then. Less inhibited. And yes, we talked."

"For nothing? For no reason? Free?"

"Why would we need a reason?" she sighed. "There were so many beautiful things to talk about. The color of the sky. The flowers we planted. The promise of children. The—" Her voice trailed off into unformed syllables that did not register on the wrist calculator.

"I think—" Triple began to give his opinion, but then realized, out of old habit, that his opinions were the property of the firm. Every opinion was to be blogged: his thoughts on policies, politics, yes, but also his opinions about the taste of the beer in the company refrigerator, the sensation of descending into the office, his forthcoming review about the mystery vegetable he had pulled from the drawer. These were property of the firm, not to be given out in back rooms of near-deserted bars.

Daisy understood his dilemma. "It's okay to think," she said. "Just don't say you are thinking it. That's how we make connection, honey. You have to overcome the fear."

"Then..." Triple continued, choosing his words carefully, but trying to let go, "I would like to affirm your idea of marriage. I trust it would be... fun to speak and listen without limitations."

Daisy smiled.

"Are you still married?" Triple asked sheepishly.

"No," she said, staring at her red polished fingernails. "He died — Joe died — in the Middle East War. We did have a child. But he's grown now. And our relationship is traditional."

"You mean you don't talk?"

"Just digital communication," she said. "But he's a good boy. Not one to make waves."

Suddenly, Triple found himself keenly interested in Daisy. She was a mystery. And he wondered where she had grown up, what she enjoyed when she wasn't being paid for her services. "What do you like to do for fun?" he asked.

It had been years since anyone had asked her a question like that, had been willing to pay for the answer. She touched a red fingernail on her chin and pondered the answer. "Do you know what I like to do, sugar? I like to paint. I enjoy creating the world over again. In fact, these walls..." Her voice cracked a bit. "These walls are filled with my creations."

Triple relaxed in the chair as Daisy pressed a button on the arm of the couch and brought up the lights in the back room. Suddenly the room stirred with color, like a rush of intoxicating beauty. Triple stared dumbfounded at the paintings on the brick walls: magnificent seascapes wrapped in whorls of azure and turquoise and foamy white; brilliant red-gold sunsets unlike any he had ever witnessed through the periscope; images of people touching each other in stunning wardrobes of aqua-green, velvety browns, and royal purples; lovely mountainscapes in star light and autumn blaze; visions of cities gleaming in yellow, translucent light and glistening glass; the exquisite grace of flowing rivers; ravishing brushstrokes of rainbow hues coupled with elegant movement.

He feasted on the paint, not saying a word, and listened while Daisy spoke.

"I enjoy this room," she said. "It's my sanctuary. You're one of only a handful of people who have seen it. Which is sad, really, but necessary. And now you know that there is beauty in the world and that people used to talk about it, and enjoy it together. This is my love, really. When I'm using my brush, I'm having a conversation. It's as if these walls are my best friend, and I'm speaking whatever I want to say and I'm listening to what the wall is whispering to me that day. Maybe it's the ocean, or the mountains, or the people I used to know, but all if it is a conversation. Everything in this room reminds me of the world as it was, how it used to be."

Triple didn't move.

"Thank you for asking about me," Daisy said as she turned out the lights, the mural melting once again into the darkness of the perimeter. "That was sweet of you."

"I can see why you like to paint," Triple told her. "All of it is beautiful. Marvelous, really. Your work should be in a museum."

"Thank you. But I'm afraid I don't much care for censorship. I'll just keep the conversation here with me. That way, I won't get lonely."

Triple made another mental calculation. He had plenty of time; he was not due back at the office until morning light. He felt good about his word selection. "I believe our time is about up," he said, then caught his error and smiled. "Actually, I guess time isn't really a problem," he added. "It's the words I'm paying for."

Daisy glanced at the calculator display, offered a frown, then said, "You're a premature ejaculator. But you never did tell me your name."

"Gary Triple," he said.

"I've read your blog," she admitted. "And believe it or not, I actually hoped you'd show up here one day."

Triple thought she meant it. But she could have been padding the count, too. The total was approaching. "That bad, huh?"

"Your blog is insightful," she said, "but trite. And I don't follow politics. I just take the drugs I need. Beta-blockers. Poloxycycline. Some vitamins. Occasionally a shot of cortisone."

"Pharma-Century, I hope!"

"Off the street. Cheap stuff from China."

Triple said nothing, but his face revealed a hint of disgust for her black-market purchases.

"Don't look at me that way," Daisy said with a pause. "Just remember me."

"I will," Triple said.

There was an awkward moment of silence as the room stirred, then Daisy rose, stepped off the distance to his chair, knelt beside him, and kissed his cheek. Her lips were full, moist, and she deposited a smudge of lipstick near his dimple. "That's for us," she whispered.

Triple smiled at her, opened his mouth to tell her about himself, but didn't know where to begin. He could scarcely remember where he had come from. His past melted into his future and his heart sank as surely as he would descend again into the earth. "I know I don't have much left on the meter," he said. "But could I hear you say your name?"

"Daisy," she whispered in his ear.

He closed his eyes. Listened to the sound of her breathing.

"What else is there to know about you?" he asked.

"I'd like to tell you—" An alarm sounded on Daisy's wrist calculator. She stopped speaking.

Triple knew that he'd reached his limit. Still...

He sat silently in his chair, staring at Daisy, who smiled warmly at him. She said nothing, but Triple thought that, for a moment, he could read her mind. It was as if she were enjoying his company — not because he was paying her to talk — but because she was willing to make herself available to him, and was willing to simply sit in his presence and be. Was she lonely, too? But Triple wondered if anyone could even quantify that reality anymore.

Triple sat in the chair, inside the dark room, staring at the lovely woman as she returned to her couch, the woman named Daisy, who did not move, nor make any attempt to move. He glanced at her ankle watch, but determined that time was not important. He sat for long minutes — or was it hours? what did it matter? — and observed the way she polished her fingernails with the emery board, the way she smiled, the way she slept, when, at last, she did sleep. And he was still there when she woke, though she did not speak.

~~~~~

Later, after the stars began to dissolve into light, Triple returned to the elevator, descended once again into his cavern bunkered deep in the earth, and stirred his blog by recounting his decision to bite into the mystery vegetable. He blogged on politics. The latest senate bill. He pushed the drugs the firm manufactured.

He thought of writing about Daisy — per his contract — as all of his thoughts and opinions legally belonged to the firm.

But he didn't.

Rather, he kept her there, like a gift, deep inside his mind — a memory really — and cherished her words and beauty for their own sake, wondering when he might surface again. And if he did, if she would still be there, waiting for him.

Todd Outcalt is the author of twenty-five books in six languages and has written for such magazines as Morpheus Tales (British), Alpha Centuari, Rosebud, and Red Wheelbarrow.

(Back to Table of Contents)

# Undead in the Daisies

by Holly Casey; published May 10, 2013

Third Place Award, May 2013 Fiction Contest

A plan of action for keeping your garden healthy and beautiful while dealing with the monstrous horde at the door

The question of how to deal with botany-unfriendly, undead nuisances while trying to keep your garden looking its best is one of the most frequent questions I receive. By the time I hear the question, people are frustrated, confused, and angry. Underneath the rhetoric, the real question is, "How do I get rid of these unholy monstrosities?"

With that in mind, I think there are a number of reasons why gardeners everywhere have trouble keeping their landscapes lovely during this growing apocalypse.

1. The small band of survivors they have joined up with has a pattern of only protecting the vegetation they deem "useful." The begonias and roses are left to be trampled underneath the hooves of hell spawn while the corn and squash are ruthlessly defended.

2. They have never seen someone bludgeon the rotting head of a zombie to stop it from limping through their marigolds, or, if they have, it was a big, messy situation.

3. They are so uncomfortable with conflict that they are unwilling to defend their meticulously planted plot of greenery against the ungodly mutations inexplicably attracted to the bright colors.

4. They feel guilty "wasting" clean water on decorative plants.

5. They worry such an extravagant show of fantastic life against the backdrop of this ravaged land — infested with beasts and monstrosities that come from both hell itself and the foolish, unknowing, undeserving hands of man — will lead them further into a spiraling depression that they had hoped to escape using this one spot of beauty.

Despite its discomforts, confronting the undead horde can be one of the most important tasks of gardening you'll face. Many a gardener has spent hours pruning, weeding, and watering, only to have all their hard work dug up and destroyed by a roving pack of werewolves one night when the blood-red moon is full, looking upon our world as if it was the emotionless eye of the cruel god who has forsaken us. Of course, the truth is any type of accursed beast has the potential to ruin your plant life, and the real question is just which kind are you dealing with.

If you remember The Days of Innocence — a time before the oceans were a constantly thrashing and churning white foam that could no longer sustain life because of their violent restlessness; a time before the technology we relied upon failed us as radiation leaked out of unseen cracks, power lines refused to carry a charge, and computers randomly fired missiles; a time before the earth was split open like an egg to release a terrible brood of ravaging fiends from hell — well then you remember what it was like to deal with all the annoying insects and animals in your garden. And, I bet you remember what a hassle it was to deal with them! Just one remedy would not get rid of all those pests, and the same thing still holds true.

Now if you're a younger reader, you may not know what an insect or an animal is (they were given a quick, sweet release from this world that we humans were denied), but I bet you do know that while a stake to the heart will take out a vampire, it will do little to a zombie, and the same principle holds true when keeping these monsters away from your freshly trimmed topiaries. You'll have to use a different deterrent for the varied amount of depraved horrors that turn up at your door.

Demons and Vampires: Since both of these are highly satanic creatures, you can use similar tactics to protect your garden from them. Crosses around the edges of your flowerbed will work fairly effectively, but holy water is definitely your best bet. If you can find a man of faith who hasn't cursed the god he once believed loved us, definitely try and get him to bless some water for you! Also, as an added punch against vampires, plant garlic. The bloodsuckers hate the stuff, and you'll have a fangtastic new seasoning!

Werewolves: This one is a bit more difficult. These tortured beings only take their twisted form once a month, but they can do a lot of damage when in the throws of an agony that only comes from existing in a mind-breaking limbo between human and beast. Any type of silver will deter them, but your best bet is just to shoot them with a silver bullet, it's the only way to kill them, and put an end to their trouble for good. Protip: If your friend has soil under his/her nails and smells of your honeysuckle bush that was dug up during the full moon last night, try stabbing him/her in the neck. If your friend doesn't die, you have your answer about what really happened to that plant!

Mutants, Zombies, and Those Simply Driven Insane by this Never Ending Nightmare We Inhabit: Now, these are probably the hardest little buggers to keep out of the petunias. They have no inherent weakness except for the classic headshot, and, except in some individual cases, there are no substances you can simply place in your garden to repel them. My only advice for this is to join with those who are just as willing as you to fight to the death for the last living things of beauty to remain on earth. For example, I have joined a convent sworn by blood to keep flowers alive. We have created a towering wall, made from the bones and gore of those aberrations of nature determined to undo our sacred work, that encircles the new Eden we have nurtured. Many of my sisters have lost their lives fighting off the devils that would try to break through our wall of death to obliterate the only elegance, the only delicacy, the only poetry left in this world. Also, since everyone in the convent is a gardener, we all have fun planting tips and trivia to share!

As you can see, each monster has a different remedy, but the most important thing to remember when dealing with whatever would threaten your garden is to have a firm hand. If you hesitate, falter, or just don't go after this threat with everything you have, you will fail. You will lose the one thing you cared for in this scarred world. You will find yourself in a darkness that will be all the more complete, all the more consuming, because you, if even for a fleeting moment, held the promise of light.

Of course, if you do manage to protect your garden, it will be safe, secure, healthy, and appealing! Now doesn't that sound nice?

Holly Casey grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee with two siblings, parents, and a number of different animals over the years. Currently, she is finishing her last year as a student at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky and will graduate with a Bachelor's Degree in Dramatic Arts and a minor in Creative Writing. Though she has been reading and writing from a young age, Undead in the Daisies is her first story to be published.

(Back to Table of Contents)

# The Way Station

by Shay Hatten; published May 14, 2013

The wheels on the bus went round and round and round, and sitting inside, Terry was dead, dead, dead.

In spite of that, or maybe because of it, he looked out the window at the road ahead. And saw it end. Not in the earthly way, not with roadblocks and construction signs, but in a more ethereal sort of way. It just ended. Disappeared. So did the landscape that it ran across. The whole desert simply stopped about thirty feet in front of them. And they were moving towards it at full speed; which, for this bus, was about fifty miles an hour.

Terry rose to his feet and stepped out into the aisle.

"Going down!" the Driver called.

"Hey, Driver!" Terry shouted. "Is this it? The grand finale?"

"Not quite," the Driver said, and spat a wad of tobacco out his window. "Got a few more passengers to pick up. Now sit back down, else you're apt to come flyin' up here next to me."

"Yes sir," Terry said, and sat back down. Sat back down, and watched through the window as they plunged off the edge of the road into the vast expanse of that unbelievably blue sky, sky bluer than any he'd ever seen.

~~~~~

He remembered it; his dying.

Remembered walking down Fifth Avenue. Remembered the pain shooting up his left arm. Passersby swarmed around him as he sunk to his knees. As he clutched his chest. As his vision faded out, and as his body released massive amounts of DMT, causing him to see that bright white light at the end of the tunnel. All that typical death mumbo jumbo. He was actually disappointed, in his final moments, how cliché it was.

Then he slept.

Slept for what felt like a day, but what was, he knew in reality, much, much longer. Or maybe not. Maybe it was mere seconds. However long, it was a span of time that existed outside of everything he'd ever known, and goddamn if it wasn't the best night's sleep of his life.

When he opened his eyes, he was standing in a desert unlike any he'd ever seen; a desert that stretched on in all directions with no mountains or other landmarks to denote that there was anything in the distance other than more desert. Even the sky was devoid of characteristics; no sun, no clouds, nothing but blue, blue, blue. Blue forever.

In this desert, there was nothing but sand. Sand, and Terry, and the road.

It was old and cracked and the paint was fading, but that was clearly what it was; a highway cutting across the ground, perfectly bisecting the desert, reaching forever in both directions. Terry stood by this now, underneath a sign marked, of all things, "Bus Stop." Like the road, it was cracked and old and in dire need of replacing. At some point a shotgun had sent a round through the middle of the thing, rendering it barely readable. When he looked at it he was struck with the faintest pang of recognition. Something about all of this; the desert, the battered sign, seemed so familiar. Was it something from his childhood, years spent in Arizona? But no; his bus stop had been on the corner of his residential block and he had preferred his deserts road-free. Terry disregarded the notion.

He knew what he had to do.

He had to wait.

So wait he did. For an hour, two hours, longer, shorter, some length outside of time itself.

Finally the bus came rumbling along.

Rumbling; that was the only way to describe how it moved, spewing up black smoke and practically shaking from side to side. Although to be fair, Terry couldn't be sure if that was the fault of the bus or the cracked road it drove on. The way it was going he wasn't sure it would even make it to him.

And when it did, when it rolled up next to him, screeched, and rocked back on its wheels, he wasn't sure it would ever start again.

The door squealed open and Terry found himself looking into the face of the Driver. Middle aged, overweight, and wearing a backwards Red Sox cap, the Driver looked at Terry with what resembled disgust, but could just have been neutrality worn on a face that time had rendered harsh.

"Can I ask you something?" the Driver asked. His jaw moved up and down as he spoke, and Terry could see the thick slop of tobacco working around in his jaw.

"Sure," Terry said, for lack of anything else.

The Driver's jaw worked up and down a few more times as he looked around; then he turned back to Terry and said, "Where are we?"

"You mean you don't know?"

"Course I don't know," the Driver said. "You're the one who this should look familiar to."

"Well it doesn't. Never died before."

"Give it a minute," the Driver said. "It'll come to you."

Terry looked around again, took in the sign and the endless desert, the sunless sky, and realized what he was seeing. "This is my childhood, isn't it?" he said. "Not one memory, but the amalgamation of all the time I lived in Arizona. The bus stop, the sunny days..."

"Care to explain why I'm fat and old?" the Driver asked.

"I did this to you?" Terry asked. Then he laughed. "When I was a kid, the school bus driver. He was this big scary looking dude; always terrified me."

"Probably that's it then," the Driver said. "Now come on, get on the bus."

"Where are we going?" Terry asked.

"Where do you think?"

Terry honestly had no idea, but regardless, he got on the bus. This desert, he thought, had shown him about all it had to offer.

As soon as he was clear of the door, the Driver spat a wad of tobacco through the opening. Then he hit a switch and the door slammed shut.

"Stay behind the line," the Driver said, and pointed to a strip of peeling yellow tape on the floor.

"You'd think you guys would be able to afford better buses," Terry said as he took a seat near the front.

"This bus could've been whatever you wanted," the Driver said. "You're the one that made it old."

~~~~~

As the bus fell through the sky, Terry grabbed the front of his seat and looked out through his window. They were diving straight towards a body of water.

He would have called it an ocean, but that wasn't what it was, not really. It was big enough to be an ocean, stretching in all directions like the desert had done, but with no waves, no wind, no visible wildlife, there was nothing to classify it as an ocean. It was just water. From up here it might as well have been a giant kitchen sink.

Terry braced when they hit, but there was no impact; they just slid into the water. Slid into it, straightened out, and then they were driving on nothing, watery blue stretching all around them.

Up ahead, Terry saw, was a young woman. He felt brief empathy at her having died so young, but then realized she probably hadn't. Probably, like the ocean, this was some ideal version of what she had once been.

Terry was struck with a very strong urge to be able to see his own face, but when he looked at the window he saw that it bore no reflection. Even at the front of the bus there was no rearview mirror. He supposed it wasn't necessary. No traffic on these roads.

The door opened and after a brief conversation, the Driver ushered the woman on board. Terry couldn't hear the conversation, but didn't think he needed to. It was likely the same conversation he'd had... minutes? hours? days? However long before.

"It's a cool boat, isn't it?"

"What's that?" Terry asked. He turned to the woman, who had taken a seat across from him and was now leaning in timidly to speak.

"This boat," she said. "It's pretty kickass. And the Driver; what a cutie. I mean, if you've gotta die, this isn't a bad way to do it."

"Where did you grow up?" Terry asked.

"Hawaii. You?"

"Arizona," he said. "It's a bus for me, and the Driver's old."

"That's unfortunate," she said.

"No," Terry said. "It's nice."

She smiled at him and said, "Well I guess that's the point."

Terry smiled back.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them the bus peeled away for the briefest of moments. For just a flash, he was on a speedboat that was somehow swimming underwater, and the Driver was young and grinning and had what Terry had once heard his wife describe as 'sex appeal.' Then Terry was back on the bus.

"Going up," the Driver yelled.

"Is this it?" the woman asked, leaning in towards Terry. "Are we moving on?"

"Not yet, I think," Terry said. "I think we're picking up more people."

~~~~~

The bus took them out of the water and into the sky, and from there back down to Earth where they drove through jungles, and across icy plains, and over mountains, and through deep endless meadows. They drove through big cities in small towns and villages in the south of France, all devoid of people except for their one expectant passenger. And as the

seconds? days? years?

passed, the bus got more and more full.

Until, eventually, every seat was filled.

"Going up!" the Driver yelled.

The bus started to climb, rising from the boardwalk it had been driving across and ascending towards the sky. A sky blacker than Terry's darkest dreams.

"Hey Driver!" he called. "Is this it?"

"This is it, alright!" the Driver called back.

"What's next?" Terry asked. "What comes next?"

Terry looked at the Driver. And for the briefest of moments, the old man peeled away. For the briefest of moments, the Driver was a ship captain, a pilot, a jungle guide, a man, a woman, a child, black, white, big, small, there, gone. For the briefest of moments, he was everyone and no one. For the briefest of moments, he was everything. And nothing.

And still, he only smiled.

Shay Hatten has written three novels, several screenplays, and dozens of short stories. One of his short stories was recently published on TheFictionShelf.com, and one of his screenplays, titled Another Life, currently resides on Amazon Studios' "Notable Projects" list. More information about him, as well as samples of his work, can be found at his website, shayhatten.com.

(Back to Table of Contents)

# Nth Chance

by Konstantine Paradias; published May 17, 2013

I saw myself across the street today, waving at me; did my absolute best to ignore I-across-the-street, despite my constant protestations. From the corner of my eye, I noticed that I-across-the-street was grasping a slip of brightly colored paper. I picked up my pace, then bumped onto a young man who shoved me back violently, causing me to tumble back, spilling all my worldly possessions onto the sidewalk as my nylon bags ripped.

I-across-the-street ran toward me the minute he saw me stumble. I used the pedestrian crossing (I'm finally catching up, though this seems absurd) and made my way towards me, the paper still firmly grasped in hand. I-from-across the street said:

"It's 42! Monday's forty—"

Then a semi-truck with damaged brakes rolled over I-in-the-crosswalk, making a sound like two dozen knuckles popping in unison, followed by a loud series of thumps.

Around me, the crowd was screaming or pointing their fingers at the bloody mess spattered all over the asphalt. The young man that had shoved me mumbled something about kittens before violently vomiting. I picked up my possessions, stuffed them in my coat pockets and turned my back on I-all-over-the-asphalt without sparing me a single glance.

Even a sight as traumatic as watching an exact and perfect duplicate of yourself dying in the most horrible fashion can grow tedious after the first dozen times...

~~~~~

My name is David Jinks. And I've been killing myself trying to pull off the same blindingly stupid experiment every day for almost a year now. Well not myself, strictly speaking. Try to think of the multitudes of Davids that have perished as possible Davids. I once tried giving them numbers, in an attempt to rationalize with these strange events. I not only grew used to the horror, but also terribly tired of it.

Oh sure, when David-1 slipped from the balcony railing while he was busy explaining that he was 'I, from the future!' and I saw him crash head first on the ground, I nearly went insane with grief.

But by the time David-39-or-so was impaled by a stuffed swordfish, which was launched from the roof of a car that braked to avoid running over a dog crossing the street, I merely shrugged and kept on going. Even let out a chuckle.

I have managed to piece together a possible theory (or even explanation) to the origins of the Davids that plague me, as well as their deaths. It is a story I have begun to piece together since before David-3′s untimely demise by accidentally swallowing a salted peanut — to which we were both allergic — while drinking beers at a bar. As David-3 was swelling, eyes tearing up, he gasped out a brief explanation:

He was from the future.

My mind was reeling with possibilities when I was visited by David-4 in the homeless shelter. David entered the bathroom to relieve himself and moments before he slipped on a tile, breaking his neck on the toilet bowl, I found out that:

He was hailing from a future when I was rich. Not financially secure, or even moderately rich, but mind-bogglingly rich.

David-5 tapped my shoulder as I was hunched over a burning drum barrel with some of my colleagues. He had not yet tried Hooch's moonshine, which made him turn around and spit the fluid, rich in alcoholic content, into the drum barrel. This caused the fire to leap up at him, setting his shirt on fire and causing the bottle of moonshine to combust into flame, eventually turning him into a cinder. He told me that:

I was living the big life. I was a great man, and Sheila had come crawling back, and the kids didn't hate me anymore.

I met David-6 under the bridge where I went to sleep sometimes on hot nights. He was playing with Ginny, a stray pit bull that I was feeding with scraps whenever I had the chance. Before Ginny got inexplicably agitated and ripped his throat open with her bare teeth, he informed me that:

It had all started with just one lottery ticket that I would win five years from now, given to me by some stranger as I'm begging outside Grand Central Station.

David-7, baffled by the fact that I jumped right to the point as he sat by me on the park bench and confused by my knowledge of his identity, tried to find out how I could have possibly known all this before a stray bullet fired by a police officer during a crack-house bust got him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Overall, David-7 would have been useless, had he not served to provide me with the following very useful bits of information:

Each David had no knowledge of the actions or fate of every David before him. Each David acted of his own accord, but each David had the same purpose — to make me rich before the appointed time.

I attempted to inquire of David-8 when we met inside the abandoned 50th street subway station. It had been an old hideout of mine, away from the prying eyes of my fellow homeless and without any living creature in sight. I had picked an old ticket booth to meet with him in, one that seemed stable and would allow for an extended discussion.

David-8 let out an effeminate scream of panic as I tapped the dirty glass and motioned him over. I had him sit down. I didn't offer him anything to eat or drink, despite his protestations. I told him:

"You've come here to tell how I am going to get rich and get Sheila and the kids back five years before I win that lottery ticket."

"How... how could you know that?"

"You've told me. Well, to be fair, you didn't exactly tell me. Not you, anyway."

David-8's expression was that of such confusion, it looked as if he was watching crabs forcing themselves on a dolphin.

"You've been at this seven times already. Eight, with you included. Each time you die."

"I..." he stuttered. He'd gone whiter than paper. "I... died?"

"Well, not you. The seven ones before you."

"Seven times? Seven... oh dear God, no..."

"Oh shut up. I've watched me — that is, you people — die each and every single time, right in front of my eyes. I've had to live with that crap, while you didn't! Now, man the hell up and give me some answers, before you bite it too!"

"What? No, no, wait! I can't stay here! I need to go back! What if I die? Then it'll all have been for nothing! Oh God..." David-8 made a move for the door. I grabbed his sideburns like Ms. Forager did back in Sunday School and tugged hard. I knew that the sensation would make him sick to the stomach.

"What were you trying to tell me? How can I get the hell out of this life? How will I get rich five years earlier? Tell me, you bastard!" He was mewling now, a sickening and pained sound. I never thought such noise could ever come from my mouth.

"Experiment... small time scientist research team... they're experimenting with time or something... never quite figured it out... please stop it, please!" he squealed and I let him go. Wiping the tears from his eyes, he kept talking:

"You're... I'm... we're going to volunteer for it in six months from now. There's going to be just one test, where they'll zap us—"

"Zap me. It's me they're zapping, not you."

"Sorry." He looked so pathetic. "They're going to zap you with a beam. Nothing will happen. They'll pay you anyway and stop the experiments. It's going to be four years before you get real sick and you unhinge from time while you're in the hospital, dying. You're going to see how you get the lottery ticket, and you're going to stick around the station waiting for the guy to drop you the ticket."

"Four years? It takes me four years to start time-hopping?" We were both silent for a while, then I asked: "What am I dying of?"

"Liver cancer. When you're rich, you'll have two years to live, tops. You'll do a lot of procedures and try all kinds of treatments, but you won't make it. I'm from six months before you're dead," he said. I felt as if someone had casually dropped the Grim Reaper's great big chariot on my shoulders, then ran away.

"How do I get it? How do I get the cancer?"

"Well, you live like shit, David. You spend the nights in shelters if you're lucky, but mostly under bridges. You eat terrible things, you drink worse, and you smoke a lot when you can get it. You also like sleeping over sewer gratings in December because they're warm, but that is way worse for you. Also, you burn plastic bottles when you need to stay warm whenever you can't get any wood or paper."

"So what do I have to do? Wait six months, so I can get zapped?"

"Well, you could do that," he said, grinning like a fox, "or you could try playing these numbers on next week's lottery."

His hand was reaching for something in his jacket pocket, when a loose beam creaked and fell, tearing down the booth window and knocking its glass loose, which in turn fell on his head. His skull cracked upon impact with the reinforced glass, and David-8 was deader than a doorknob, just like that.

Yes, I did check his body. No, I could not get the ticket, since his fingers had locked around it the minute he died. Yes, I tried to pry it loose. No, do not ask with what. When I did finally get my hands on it, the number had been smudged with David-8's blood. I spat, left him where he'd fallen and waited for the next one.

David-9 was waiting for me in the soup kitchen on Meatball Night. I sat across from him and picked up the conversation from where I'd left it off with David-8.

"Any way I could get to the scientists to zap me with that beam sooner?"

"Wh-what?" his confidence and that weasel smile of his melted away. I got to the point, told him what had happened so far. He was about to go pale, when I snapped my fingers right in front of him, like Sheila did when I wasn't paying attention to something she was saying (for example, that she's divorcing me, or taking the kids and the house, or accusing me of mediocre performance in bed). Snapped the bugger right back to planet Earth.

"Not unless you have two million dollars handy," he said, in response to my repeated question.

"You and I both know I don't. So what can I do?"

"Well, have you considered trying the—" I grabbed him by the wrist before he even began reaching for his jacket's inside pocket.

"Don't. Any other ideas?"

"Nothing I can come up with right now. Give me a minute, why don't you? I'm going to pop back to my time, make a withdrawal then come back here and give you the money. What do you say?"

"I think that's a terrible idea."

"Oh?"

"See, I was thinking about why you people die every time I see you. It's because you keep trying to make a drastic change in my life. I know you all come back here so you can get me richer five years earlier, so I don't get liver cancer, so you don't die six months from now. But the problem is, you all keep trying to give me money. Which is obviously going to mess things up, which means it gets you killed."

"So what are we going to do? Just let things keep going the way they are? Let you kill me with your shitty way of living? Let me live my remaining days, hauling the spoils of your failed pyramid scheme idea?"

I bet he could perfectly interpret the look of my face, the one that threatened him with grievous harm. He kept going anyway, the bastard.

"You blew half a million bucks on this! You took Richie along with you! You sold your business; you blew your kids' college fund! What the hell were you thinking?"

"Same thing you were, chum. Spend money to make money."

David-9 turned a very deep shade of red. He remembered spewing that mantra at everyone, using it as a multi-purpose aphorism for every occasion, even as he flushed his family's (and best friend's) life collectively down the gutter.

David-9 said, "Poor Richie. You shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have talked him into it."

"I? You mean we. Don't think you're better than me, just because you've got money now. Besides, he avoided the worst of it, didn't he? Heart gave out and that's that. He didn't have to eat crap and live off garbage, like I do."

David-9 looked up at me, a look of utter disgust and unfathomable sadness on his face. He looked so miserable and disgusting, the way his lower lip trembled. Bet Sheila thought that was cute.

"You're... you're disgusting!"

"No. We're realists. Now, shut up and let me think."

David-9's fist crashed into my face with a speed and ferocity I wouldn't have thought possible, nearly knocking some of my teeth out. I stumbled and fell back, watching David-9 walk out of the soup kitchen, slip on ice on the stairs and break his skull, five seconds later.

He'd been useless. I slept that night and thought of that miserable expression of his. It reminded me of how I looked in the hallway mirror, that night when Sheila threw me out.

There were ten more Davids after that, each less effective than the last. They couldn't give me money to speed up the experiment and they couldn't go back in time and stop me from making the mistakes that had got me where I was in the first place. None of them had thought of that and every time they decided to do something about it, they ended up dead.

So I decided to play it safe. I tried to save money so I could get more decent food or, at the very least, a proper bed to sleep in at night. I tried to cut down on the booze and drink more water. I tried to get a job.

But most of all, I tried to not miss the date of the experiment.

The scientist found me squatting by the old tram tracks on 45th and Robespierre. I was holding a cardboard sign that said: "Will give my body to medical experiments 4 food." He thought it was funny and that I was desperate enough to participate in an incalculably dangerous and potentially lethal experiment.

I signed each liability waver, had a shower, shaved, and stood inside the test chamber. I looked down on the device with the Flash-Gordon ray gun pointer and spread my arms, pointing my chest at it.

I screamed as the device's whine increased in volume, from a slight purr to the orgasmic contralto throes of a soprano in heat. Something ran through me and permeated every inch of my being. It felt a bit like the glue that was holding me pinned across the surface of time suddenly gave up its hold and I slipped just a tiny fraction of an inch.

There were no side effects. The scientists measured me with more strange devices and noted my increased radioactivity, but other than that, they saw no change whatsoever. They debated whether they should zap me again, but they couldn't form a consensus. In the end, they gave me my hundred bucks and let me go.

David-20-something met me in the diner I had begun frequenting and bought me a T-bone steak with all the trimmings. It looked like it has been cut off the flank of a wooly mammoth. I was stuffing my face as I was bringing him up to speed. I barely gave him any time to stutter or gasp. I'd grown pretty good at this.

"Now, this is the tricky part," he said. "Normally, you'd need some time. You'd need to get the cancer to grow, get worse and then almost die before you find a way to pry yourself off time and start jumping around history."

"What do you mean 'almost die?'" I asked. David-20-something gave me the kind of look I used to give Richie every time he dared question the soundness of my next big scheme.

"What does it sound like? You need to get real close to dying, but not quite, you know?"

"And how am I going to achieve this almost-dead thing? It doesn't sound like you've got a plan."

"Actually, I do," David-20-something said and pulled a gun out of his jacket pocket, which he proceeded to point at my face. The other people in the diner gasped and screamed in panic.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"Don't worry. I've looked into this thing, I took classes. All I need to do is shoot you somewhere where you'll bleed real bad but cause enough of a commotion so the doctors can get to you before you bleed out. This way—"

"What if you miss? What if the bullet rips through my brain and I die?"

"You can't die, you idiot! If you die, then you never become me so I can't get back in time and shoot you!"

"Yeah, but right now you're trying to change history by shooting me in the face, which will erase yourself from existence!"

"No, no, because if you're dead, then I can't have been here in the first place! Trust me, okay? This is solid!" He cocked the gun and was about to pull the trigger, when the chamber jammed and the gun misfired back at him. The bullet ran through his throat and into the diner's wall.

David-20-something had bled out by the time the cops arrived. They took me in for questioning and I suddenly realized that I could very well end up having to explain the two-dozen identical corpses with my I.D. that had been popping up all over the city.

Funny how this had never really occurred to me before. I couldn't stop thinking of a Precinct Morgue just chock-full of Davids, of morticians of every age, creed, and color digging their hands into my flesh and looking at my insides. Wondering why twenty-four identical men with twenty-four identical cases of advanced liver cancer were all conspiring in unison to kill a hobo with the same name and I.D.

I kept thinking of paradoxes and whether or not trying to explain this to the police officers would unravel the universe or not. I was halfway through fabricating a complex explanation involving cloning and government conspiracy, in order to cement their view of me as 'another crazy old homeless guy,' when we pulled off at the precinct.

To my horror, they did not interview me. They did not question me or even console me. They just patted me on the back, bought me a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie, asked me a couple questions about the 'unidentified shooter,' and sent me off.

I was insulted, to be perfectly honest. But I barely had time to make a scene. I needed to almost kill myself as soon as possible.

David-20-something-2 came to the rescue the very next morning, standing over me as I slept on my shelter bed, his hand on the gun's trigger. He was shaking all over.

"Don't mess this up," I told him, and he panicked. He was about to start with the usual stuttering and the questioning, but I slapped him to shut him up and put the gun muzzle under my chin. He got cold feet and tried to stop me. We fought for the gun a bit and one of us must have squeezed the trigger, because a round went off in his gut. I screamed, kicked at him, put the gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger.

Want to know what time travel feels like? Drink yourself silly and then go straight to bed. The bed will feel impossibly soft and comfy at first, but then you'll feel like you're sinking in it. The mattress begins to sink all around you, like space around a black hole. Your pillow will wrap its soft, comfy jaws around your head and attempt to swallow your face. After a while, you'll be sunk so deep inside the mattress that it will feel as if you're completely submerged in a stifling, soft prison. By then, it will feel as if you've fallen down a hole in the world, a million million miles deep, with a hole the shape of your sleeping body somewhere in the impossible altitudes above.

Time travel is exactly like that, only instead of a mattress and a pillow, there's history. You glide through time and when you want to stop somewhere, you wake up and presto! You're there.

I found myself looking across the street at my own hunched form, looking at a man down on his luck who had just tossed a lottery ticket in my hat, six months from now. The David that was begging looked up at me and he cackled. I woke up, in a hospital bed, knowing the secret to time travel and with a gash across the right side of my face where the bullet had scraped against my skull. The doctor said that if it had gone just two inches to the left, I wouldn't be here now. He also told me that I had been diagnosed with liver cancer.

I tried to protest, to tell him that this wasn't the plan, but try complaining while missing the right part of your jaw.

Davids kept coming to visit me every day while I was in the hospital. They told me that I'd find a good plastic surgeon and an even better dentist for my face. They helped me follow my chemo and they were even there for me on the day I left the hospital. They each died, of course, in increasingly improbable ways. My favorite was the 30th one, who accidentally stuck his hand inside a medical waste basket and got himself pricked with a needle that (as it turned out) had been used on a junkie who was an asymptomatic carrier of a strain of Marburg virus. I remember watching him bleed to death inside that makeshift containment unit and go, "Oh, well."

So I waited and I got my hands on that ticket and I won me a few million dollars. Sheila came back to me, along with the kids now that their dad was finally somebody. But he was being eaten alive from the inside out, and the doctors were telling them he barely had six months to live.

So I locked myself in my study, trimmed my beard, grabbed my briefcase filled with unmarked hundred-dollar bills, and let myself fall through time, looking for the perfect point in my past, the past where I could make the greatest improvement to my life. I found the point, the one where I had just spent my first month homeless, cowering under a bridge. I saw myself, a shivering bundle of rags. The plan was simple: kick the briefcase at him, then make a run for it. Let him figure it out, he's a smart man.

And then the cornerstone of the railway's arch gave way, just as the last car of the train rolled over the bridge and a half-ton of bricks crushed me and the briefcase into an indistinguishable pulp.

Konstantine Paradias is a jeweler by profession and a writer by choice. His short stories have been published on OHP's Petulant Parables Anthology, Breathless Press' Shifters anthology, EveryDayFiction.com, Schlock! Magazine, Static Movement's Behind Closed Doors and Long Pig anthologies, as well as Black Cross Productions' 'Heroes Wanted' anthology, Aphelion Magazine, DarkFire Press and the StoneForger's Den. His first fantasy e-book, Stone Cold Countenance, has been published by bibliocracy.com. His website is Shapescapes.blogspot.gr.

(Back to Table of Contents)

# The Dream Eater

by Priyadarshini Chatterjee; published May 21, 2013

Second Place Award, May 2013 Fiction Contest

For years the people in my village had not slept. The dreams did not let them sleep.

During the day they went about their mundane chores in a sleep-starved stupor, their blood-shot eyes sunk deep in dark, hollow craters; their limbs flaccid and steps uncertain, like addled bacchanals. They all looked strangely alike.

And at night they sat, in their courtyards or in the open fields, staring blankly into the darkness. If the newborns cried in hunger their mothers stuffed a piece of cloth in their mouth. And if an ailing man coughing blood cried out for help, the villagers hurled at him such appalling curses that he shriveled and festered to death that very night. Such was the state in our village.

My family's plight was no different.

My grandfather must be a hundred years old and he has not slept a single night for as long as he could call to mind. All night he would sit on his bed, his tongue stuck out, a sign of heightened absorption, and rock. At times he would groan and whimper as if he was in pain. He said he couldn't sleep for he dreamed of the flames of hell; and giant pots brimming with boiling oil in which scalded, disembodied limbs floated; and headless bodies that shrieked and bawled.

But he was a pretty innocuous old man. Only once did he show a sign of violence and that time he had merely brandished a scalpel at the milkman because his dead wife had warned him that the bastard was stealing from them. And there was this other time, but that time it was hardly his fault. When an unsuspecting guest woke up thirsty in the middle of the night and headed for the kitchen, she found my grandfather, squatting by the hearth, naked, swaying slightly, his eyes fixed on the glowing embers. The poor woman threw a fit, and the next morning we had to send her home wrapped in a blanket for her fever refused to subside. She never came back again.

My sister, her beauty is unsurpassed, did not dare shut her eyes for every time she did she dreamed of a pack of frightful dogs, their eyes like burning coals and their teeth stained with fresh blood, tearing her apart. So, she was terrified of sleeping and of dogs. She had managed to poison every dog in the village, luring them with dead mice that she caught on a trap and doused in poison.

She loved cats though. But as ill luck would have it, one night my sister, for she often walked in her sleep-starved daze and has been found miles away from home several times, stepped on the tail of a cat as she tottered across the courtyard in the dark, crushing it under her feet. And the rotten rascal had bitten off a blob of flesh from her belly. A gaping hole still remains where the cat had bitten, right next to her astonishingly deep navel. Henceforth, she has been terrified of cats too.

My father dreamed of far-flung lands with outlandish names and odder people who spoke bizarre languages. They were terrifying people, he would say. He was an eccentric man anyway and often vanished for months. We stopped worrying for he always came back. But every time he returned he looked more haggard and battered than the last time we saw him. He said the dreams followed him wherever he went, like a halo around his head. And for nights after he returned, the village would echo with his cries of agony, until one day he would be gone again.

But I, for as long as I can recall, have not had a dream. Every night while my grandfather sat rocking on his bed and my sister whimpered in the kitchen and my father wandered in search of a land where the dreams wouldn't find him, I slept.

The whole village loathed me, and my own family would have hauled me over burning coals if they could. Though I can't think of a reason why they didn't. The villagers spat on my path, called me spiteful names and refused to step on my shadow. They said I had sold my soul to the devil in return for sleep. The village boys — they'll burn and rot in hell — threw stones at me every time I passed by.

But the more they hated me the more I wanted to be one of them. In fact, every night as I lay crouched under the bed where no one could see me asleep, I tried to summon dreams. I tried so hard that I feared my skull would crack. But eventually I would drift into the complete darkness my nights were doomed to.

When my grandmother was alive, she tied me to the bedpost every night so that I wouldn't sleep and knocked my head against the wall every time she found me dozing off.

I was fairly glad when, one morning, my sister found her in her bed stiff and cold, her eyes, the color of curdled milk, popping out and her face contorted in a sickening smirk.

My sister said I would dream if I fell in love. Lovers are known to be dreamers. But that was not as easy as it sounded, not for me. I was fat and dark and far from attractive. I even had traces of beard, tufts of hair, on my chin and throat.

Once, a few years ago, a band of gypsies came to our village. When they arrived the villagers squirmed in suspicion and frowned upon the filthy nomads. But when the word spread that the gypsies had mysterious powers and secret potions that could rid the village of their dreams, people flocked to their colorful tents on the fields, with pouches full of coins. Inside their tents the gypsies lit sacred fires and performed elaborate rituals that promised the villagers escape from their frightful fate. They brought out boxes engraved with strange inscriptions and in them were stones smeared with vermilion and sandalwood paste, barks of exotic trees, strings of beads, all of which they said had magical powers. Their leader, a fat, bald man with a mustache the color of the setting sun, wore a long, decaying tooth on a black thread tied around the sagging folds of his flabby neck. He said it was the tooth of a virgin tigress and had the power to perform extraordinary miracles.

Soon the villagers were drifting away on a tide of unrestricted merriment and unabashed profligacy. The fields where the gypsies had erected their tents turned into a carnival ground. There were fire jugglers and fortunetellers and acrobatic geniuses and light-eyed whores who wore enormous rings on their nose. The revelry went on for fourteen days and nights and during that time no one in the village had the heart to return home and leave behind the carousing.

And then fourteen days and nights later, when the villagers, delirious with joy and exhausted from the intemperance, retired to their homes to catch their breath, the gypsies left the village quietly. The only traces they left behind were mounds of excrement strewn around the field and ash pits where they had lit fires. The villagers sighed in despair when they returned to the fields in the morning to find them gone. Nonetheless, they blessed the gypsies for bringing an end to their anguish. For the rest of the day they went about their jobs with a zeal they didn't know existed, looking forward to a night of soothing slumber.

But when night came they realized that they had been deceived, for the dreams were far from gone. They cursed the devious scoundrels, swearing to burn them alive should they return to the village again. And in all this while I slept especially well, dreamless. Naturally, the wrath of the village fell on me. And they cursed me more.

My only relief was my aunt, my father's half-sister who was abandoned by her husband on the third day of her marriage. She returned home on a drizzly evening with bunions and bruises all over and has ever since refused to step out of the house. She was the only one who loved me and when I was a child she would hold me close to her bosom and in her coarse voice sing me a lullaby every night. I could hear her heart beat at an impossible rate and all night she would sweat so much that my clothes too would be soaked in her sweat.

And then on a day like any other a stranger arrived in the village. He knocked on our door while we were eating our evening meal. He said he needed a place to stay for the night. Though I wasn't too keen on letting a stranger stay in the house, he took my grandfather's robotically bobbing head as a yes and showed such gratitude that I had not the heart to throw him out. And while we finished our dinner, the stranger eating from our plates too, we talked about many things. The others ate in silence. I doubt if they heard us talking, because by evening all their senses became numb and they wouldn't know if a limb was severed from their bodies.

I asked him what it was that he did for a living and he said wryly, "I eat dreams."

I laughed, called him a clown and then, because I somehow knew he was not lying, I begged him to devour every dream that haunted our village. I would have to pay a price, he said.

I was ready to pay any price.

He spotted my grandfather first. The nutty old man was crawling in circles around the courtyard. He stopped every now and then, spun on his rickety knees and crawled again. At times he lay flat on the ground and stared at the red sky. And then he leaped up and went back to crawling. The stranger bounded across the courtyard and landed on my grandfather. I feared his weathered bones would crumble. I watched as he lay writhing on the ground, blubbering and moaning, as the dream eater wolfed down his dreams, gobbled them whole, slurped the little that trickled down his arm and gnawed at the tiny bits that lay scattered on the ground.

My sister and aunt came running. They froze at the sight. Before they could make sense of what they saw, the dream eater was tearing away their dreams too. Once done, the dream eater burped with pleasure, rolled on the ground and hobbled across the courtyard and into the darkness. Soon the entire village reverberated with the screams and wails of the villagers. I sat in my room and chuckled.

When I woke up the next morning, the stranger — I had not asked him his name and I didn't quite remember his face — was nowhere to be seen. I went out to look for him but the sun-drenched courtyard was empty except for the cat, the same one that had bitten my sister. I went around the house once, and then again. But the man had simply vanished.

I went to the kitchen. "When did he leave?" I asked. My sister looked at me puzzled. Then she returned to straining the starch from the rice. My grandfather sat in the corner burbling as usual and my aunt continued to stare out of the window, the hint of a smile on her puckered lips.

"Where is he?" I asked again.

"Where is who?" my sister asked.

"The man," I said, irked.

"What man?" she snapped.

"The one who stayed with us last night," I said.

She said she knew of no such man and that I had lost the last dregs of sanity. I told her she was a lying whore, and my aunt threw a ladle at me. My grandfather roared into laughter and skipped about in the kitchen like a happy child. My sister said she wished I had been dead in our mother's womb.

So, I went out again. The villagers would know, I thought.

It was a day like no other in our village. The women prattled excitedly, and the men hugged and kissed each other on the cheeks as if they were meeting after ages, and the boys who once threw stones at me didn't notice when I passed. The portly woman next door even called me into the house to chat. But when I asked her about the dream eater, she laughed first and then looked at me warily. She said she had an errand to run and I should leave.

And not just the fat hag next door, no one remembered what happened the night before. I tried to remind them how they scuttled here and there like disoriented animals struggling to drag their numb legs behind them, and how the entire village echoed with their screams as the dream eater chomped on their dreams.

"You must have been dreaming," one of them told me. "Why we were all asleep. Have you gone mad after all?" said another.

They remembered nothing of their sleepless nights or the dreams that had haunted them for so long. By afternoon, I stood on the middle of the road screaming and yelling, reasoning, cursing, and crying, but they simply frowned and clucked their tongues and moved on.

So every night I stand here waiting for the dream eater to appear again. Sometimes I spot him scampering down one of the narrow alleyways that crisscross our village, keeping strictly to the shadows. But my legs have turned to stone so I cannot run after him. At times blood wells up in my eyes and they burn so much that I have to tear tufts of hair off my balding head to make the pain go. I cry out to the villagers, begging them to remember so that I can sleep. But so deep is their slumber they can't hear me.

They sleep.

Priyadarshini Chatterjee is based in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India and currently working as a Sub Editor with a reputed English News Daily. She holds a Masters Degree in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Though she has been contemplating it for long, she only recently started trying her hand at fiction. The Dream Eater is the first story she has written.

(Back to Table of Contents)

# The Face in the Moon

by Eric Kiefer; published May 24, 2013

It was autumn — the time of the Weeping Moon — and the harvest was finally done.

The boy's fingernails were dark crescents after a day in the fields, and he was tired. He was in bed and on the verge of dream when Grandmother finally came to his bedroom and asked if he remembered to follow the tradition.

"Tonight," Grandmother said, her voice always and forever a wistful rainbow, "is the full moon before the equinox. You had better put your seed out now, child."

Slowly, the boy rose from his bed and did what he was told. He went straight to the kitchen, where he took a single pumpkin seed from its place in the jar and placed it on the windowsill. It joined two other seeds, his father's and Grandmother's. The boy's sister had recently become a young woman, and instead, according to the custom, had eaten her seed that year for good luck. The trio of amber pumpkin seeds shone in the moonlight... little daggers... little gems... but the boy was tired and barely noticed. He returned to bed, and was almost asleep before Grandmother returned.

As she entered the room, the flame from her candle cast a brittle glow on hands that had seen seventy-seven harvests, and which were now little more than gloves of skin over bone.

"Did you put out your seed, child?" Grandmother asked.

He nodded, and she patted him on the shoulder and turned to leave. But suddenly, the boy called out with the request that they both knew was coming.

"Grandmother... will you tell me a story?"

Grandmother turned back to him, letting the kind light of her smile nestle on the boy's face. She paused in thought, wondering if the moment had come for the story she had in mind. It was the time of the Weeping Moon, after all, and the boy would be a man in barely six more autumns.

"Perhaps I can, child," she said at last in a teasing voice. "I can tell you about the Face in the Moon if you like. But it is an old story, from the days of Machines. You wouldn't be interested in such things."

The boy shifted in bed and flexed his hands, revived by her taunt.

"Pleeeeaaase," he implored, until Grandmother acquiesced and sat on the side of the bed, brushing aside a small spider that had settled beside them. They sat for a moment silently, like two birds in a nest, until the boy got the sense that she was trying to tell him something important.

"The best stories are always lies," Grandmother said, looking down at him. "You understand this, right?"

The boy nodded, his eyes wide.

Grandmother smiled and nodded. "We'll see, my child... we'll see."

And she began her tale.

"It all happened many ages ago in the days of Machine, when our kind controlled the elements and had forgotten the gods. In those days, our ancestors mastered the ability to create iron from raw ore, just as we do. But unlike us, they could breathe life into their creations, just like gods. With this powerful magic, they manufactured minions to serve their every whim. They smith'd iron horses that could travel for days without slowing. They wrought steel veins through their homes that could siphon water from the rivers and lakes. They replaced their eyes with Machines, their ears with Machines, their arms and legs and hearts with Machines. And slowly, our ancestors began to surrender their lives to the might of their iron children.

"But all great civilizations have their liabilities, and their biggest was power. You see, the world that our ancestors created needed immeasurable energy to exist. The Machines were hungry — forever hungry — and our ancestors had placed their lives in the hands of Machines. The mother of them all was a great, ever-hewing creature — the Queen Spider — that exhaled smoke and weaved webs in the spines of all human creation. The Queen Spider's legs stretched o'er the world, connecting every Machine to her will, feeding them all and drawing from their strength.

"And she felt each of their hungers a million-fold.

"The Queen Spider's hunger was so consuming, our ancestors sacrificed all the riches of the Earth for her. They burnt the forests, corked the rivers, and caught the winds in colossal flowers. They dug enormous pits in Mother Earth herself, and tapped her fiery breath as easily as we leech sap from a maple tree. But most of all, our ancestors craved a secret elixir, distilled from the bones and blood of the huge, dead beasts of our world's past. The elixir was black as midnight and just as powerful, tho', thankfully, it was not as powerful as Dream.

"All of these treasures our ancestors sacrificed to the Queen Spider, and yet she was always ravenous, and her Machine children were always multiplying."

The boy looked out at Grandmother from under his wool blankets, awed and puzzled by her tale.

"But why did they need so many Machines?" he asked.

Grandmother shrugged.

"They needed Machines to make themselves happy back then, or perhaps they desired to be Machines themselves. Who knows? The Machines simply were. Do we ask why there are birds, or fish, or frogs, or grain? Perhaps it was the same way for them... now back to the story, child, and try not to interrupt.

"Now, our ancestors were good diggers, just like our people. They were even better, in fact. Their Machines could tear down an entire mountain in a day and carve a lake before two suns could set. With the help of their Machines, our ancestors dug into the caves, under the ocean, and even into the ice of the cold, forgotten lands. But eventually, they dug too deep, just as all the great people through time have done. The black elixir they needed so desperately began to disappear. The Queen Spider began to gnaw her own insides with hunger, and the ancestors' Machines began to fail.

"And their world began to fall apart.

"Now, I've told you about how our ancestors had conquered the Earth, muzzled her oceans, and subjugated her elements. But what you don't know is that they had also started to plunder the heavens as well. With the help of the Queen Spider, they created Machines that could withstand the tremendous cold and loneliness of the outer realms, and launched these scouts into the heavens with a giant sling. 'Find us food for the queen!' they commanded.

"And the Machines obeyed.

"They soared through the black of the heavens, blacker and colder than any human could ever survive, traveling for years, searching, waiting. And then one day, just as our ancestors had given up hope, the Machines finally found what they were seeking.

"They reported back to their masters in the secret language of insects — clicks and whistles — informing their lords and ladies that they had discovered rare gemstones — incredibly powerful — more powerful than all the black elixir that ever was or would ever be. The gemstones lay buried at the core of a distant land, deep within its heart, hidden away under miles of rock and dirt. They were enough to feed the Queen Spider for centuries — lifetimes — and all our ancestors had to do was claim them for their own.

"And so our ancestors decided to build a mighty ship, the likes of which had never been seen — the Leviathan. The ship's hull could not be burnt by fire, yet it was lighter than air and blessed with the ability of flight. Aboard this ship, they loaded their biggest digging Machine, the one they called the Mountain Killer. And then the crew of the Leviathan set off, through the million unknown dangers and beauties of the heavens, through time and thought itself."

The boy scratched a lice-bug from his head. "What did they do then, Grandmother?"

Grandmother glanced out through the wooden shutters of the boy's window, setting her eyes on the night, focusing on something faraway that the boy could not see. There was no going back in the tale now. He must know everything.

"The Moon, child..." she said at last. "They tried to steal the power of the Moon."

"But Grandmother!" objected the boy. "Weren't they afraid of the Moon Goddess?"

The Grandmother held up her finger for silence. "To our ancestors, the Moon was only an orb made of rock and dirt, the same as the earth that we dig in each day. They did not hold her sacred in the same way that we do. And they knew not the terrible wrath of which she was capable.

"When our ancestors landed on the shores of the Moon, the Goddess appeared to them in all of her glory. Her silvery gown hung immaculate in the still winds; her alabaster skin gleamed like raw porcelain; her phosphorescence lit the heavens themselves.

WHO ARE YOU? the Goddess demanded to know. WHAT DO YOU WANT?

"But since our ancestors didn't believe in the Goddess, her questions fell on deaf ears. To them, she had no more substance than a ghost. They couldn't see her, hear her, heed her warnings. And so they unloaded the Mountain Killer — the Machine that could tunnel a hole through to Hell itself — and started to dig.

"Our ancestors dug deep, grinding away at the Moon's alabaster skin like potters at the wheel. Deep their Machine clawed, exploring the Moon's innards unmercifully, like a clumsy surgeon's finger probing an arrow wound. And before long, they had exposed the core of the Moon where the precious gemstones lay — the source of all her power.

"A god's life is not free from pain, my child. But this new agony was different from anything that the Moon Goddess had ever felt. Until that point, the Moon had never had a living creature grace her surface, had never felt a plant root in her soil or an animal leave tracks in her dust. She had never known rivers or lakes, or even air. The Moon had known what it was to exist, but not what it meant to be alive, and those things aren't the same at all. For the first time in her aged existence, the Moon experienced fear... and it drove her mad. Because with the knowledge of life, comes the knowledge of death."

"Gods can die?" the boy asked, incredulous.

"Of course," Grandmother replied, clicking her tongue twice as her people do when a child asks a silly question. "Everything that exists can also be taken out of existence. Even gods. And not even the Moon can live forever.

"The Moon tried to frighten our ancestors away with deep, monstrous murmurs, such as the fluttering a heart makes during the body's death spasms. She tried to shake the diggers off her surface with terrifying quakes, as a dog attempts to flick away fleas. She tried to open yawning chasms to swallow them whole.

"But our ancestors were ready. They had Machines to plug their ears, and Machines to steady the ground beneath their feet. And always — always — the gnawing hunger of the Queen Spider lay in the hidden spaces of their minds.

"And so the Moon Goddess realized what she must do. Conjuring all her power, she waited until our ancestors had fallen asleep and entered their dreams. Searching their minds for nightmares, she made them imagine that their worst terrors had come to life. And then it was our ancestors' turn to go mad. In the end they slew each other to the last sailor, insane and demented, killing themselves with the very Machines that they had brought to steal the heart of the Moon.

"And through it all, the Moon smiled.

"As the Moon entered the mind of the last man, a digger named Goel, she decided to be cruel. She searched the man's mind — delved deep, as they had done to her — looking to find his worst fear and bring it to life in his waking dreams. And of course, my child, she found it.

"But it was then that the Moon learned her second lesson of the day, one that she could never have guessed from her infinite perch in the loneliness of the heavens. There are few things more powerful than life and death in this world. But there is one force that is stronger than even death, a sole invention of humanity, our greatest contribution to the universe. It is a force that even the Moon must bow to, even the Moon Goddess must obey and respect.

"And upon making this discovery, she gasped, and released Goel from her grasp."

The boy clenched his hand, and realized that he had unconsciously wrapped it around Grandmother's. "What did the Moon see?" he asked.

She squeezed his hand back. "Pumpkins... she saw pumpkins, my child. You see, Goel's worst fear was that he might never get to see his wife again. His dream was of their first night of sexual congress, when they had lain together in the soft earth of a pumpkin patch under an infinite sky. Goel had made her a promise that night, a pledge that everything would be all right as long as their love endured. He dreamt of her, and he dreamt of the only force more powerful than life or death.

"He dreamt of pumpkins.

"And it was then that the Moon knew that she had made a mistake. But it was too late, because in the waking world — in a fit of madness — Goel had pierced his own throat with a sharp tool and was dying on the deck of the Leviathan.

"As death took him, the Moon Goddess appeared to Goel in his dream.

"'I AM SORRY TO HAVE CAUSED YOUR END,' she said. 'PLEASE ALLOW ME THE HONOR OF GRANTING YOUR LAST DESIRE.'

"Desire can be cruel herself at times, twisted and self-serving, and many a mortal man has been granted a vain dying wish by a god. But Goel's last whispered plea was simply to look upon his wife's face one more time and tell her that he loved her.

"'Just let her see my eyes,' was all he asked.

"'Just let her see my eyes...'

"And so the Moon Goddess, humbled by such a request, took a knife and carved off her own face, replacing it with Goel's image. She displays this fully every thirty days, hiding her face in shame for the rest of the month. We in turn, assure the moon that our terrible transgression will never happen again by placing a pumpkin seed on our windowsill every year. And now, my child, you know why."

Grandmother stopped speaking, and for a moment the boy thought that she had fallen asleep. After a long while, she turned her creaky body towards the half-shuttered window and stretched a finger skyward, where a silvery light was warming the autumn horizon.

"Look," she said, her voice evaporating in the air like steam off chicken broth. "The Face in the Moon. It is the face of Goel, smiling at his love from across the universe, telling her that everything will be all right... in all places... forever and ever. He reminds his wife of their night in the pumpkin patch and the promise that he made. He reminds us all that there is something stronger than life, stronger than death, stronger than gods.

"And that is why we Diggers tell this story."

Grandmother then kissed the boy on his forehead, and tucked him back into bed.

"Dream well, child," she told him. "Dream well and free. Dream of love, and of Machines, and of all the things in between. Because the day may come when you too, get to make such a wish."

After Grandmother left, the boy peered out the window for hours, staring at the stars and picking the dirt from under his fingernails. He thought about the sorrow of gods, until the night wrapped its willowy arms around him, and the warmth of his blanket made him begin to float inside of himself.

And that night, he dreamed of the Moon

Eric Kiefer is a writer/journalist, a modern-day troubadour, and a 15-year factotum. In addition to his debut novel, The Soft Exile (a story about suicide, Mongolia, and the U.S. Peace Corps), he is fresh on the heels of his debut CD, The Spectre and the Dozer. Learn more at TheKiefer.com.

(Back to Table of Contents)

# Abraham, the Boy Prophet

by Michael Pacheco; published May 28, 2013

His first creation was a turtle. The round mound of clay was the size of a tennis ball sliced in half. Four little knobs protruded from its sides.

"Where's the head?" asked Jimmy.

Abraham crouched low to the ground and pointed to an indentation on the side of the mound. "There, you see that little hole? Her head is in there."

"Her head?" Jimmy was only six years old just like Abraham. Yet, he was old enough to know about males and females and how each gender possessed its own unique characteristics no matter what species he was looking at. "What makes her a girl turtle and not a boy?"

Abraham grinned. "It's complicated, but mostly it's because I made her that way."

Jimmy stared at his thin roll of clay. "Mine's a snake. No, wait. It's a worm; too short to be a snake."

They both chuckled. In the distance, they heard the clanging of a light musical tone. Abraham stood and craned his neck. Down on the creek side where they stood, a grown person could not see their house, let alone a six-year-old kid. But to Abraham, the sound was unmistakable. It was his grandmother, summoning the boys to dinner, ringing a metal triangle. "We should get back."

"Yeah, I'm really hungry, anyway." Jimmy gazed at their clay animals. "What do you want to do with our animals, pets, or whatever they are?"

Abraham looked at his obese friend and wondered whether Jimmy's diabetes was acting up. "Well, if yours is a worm, put it near the water. Maybe it'll crawl into the mud and disappear."

"Good idea," said Jimmy. "How about yours?"

A strange, tingling feeling came over Abraham, much like when he let the hot water in a shower trickle down his body. "My turtle's name is Tinka, and she's gonna have baby turtles."

Jimmy laughed. "You mean baby clay turtles? That's kinda funny."

"No," answered Abraham. "I mean real turtles. Check it out." He waved his hand over Tinka two times like a magician's wand. Jimmy froze in a stare locked on the little black hole on the mound. Then, as if by wizardry, a tiny brown head eased out from under the turtle shell. Jimmy's eyes nearly popped out of his head.

That was over a year ago. Jimmy never told anyone about what Abraham did either because he did not believe it actually happened or simply because he thought no one would believe him. For Abraham, today that tingling feeling was back.

~~~~~

Abraham was not sure why he did it. He was alone, with his parents and older brother picking cotton. At seven years of age, he was too little to help pick the fluffy balls of white, so they left him in the car to watch over his younger sister, Magdalena.

He was standing at the edge of the cotton field, not tall enough to see over the plants that stood four to five feet tall. The voices of his mother and the others trailed off as they plucked the cotton step-by-step, gradually blending into the darkness of the field. Magdalena slept curled like a kitten when he last checked on her.

Abraham understood his responsibilities and would never consider leaving Magdalena alone or putting her in any danger. His father had made a special effort to impress upon him the seriousness of being a diligent babysitter just like Abraham's brother had done for him. He explained that little ones like Magdalena were likely to grab a poisonous scorpion or eat harmful berries or simply create their own hazardous circumstances. Abraham assured him he could handle any of those situations. In any event, in his mind, what he was about to do did not constitute a neglect of his duties.

The sun was still rising in the east and beginning to itch Abraham's skin. Earlier in the day, he'd felt that strange, tingling feeling of a year ago. He had told his mother that he felt a dust storm coming their way. He said it would be ominous and scary. Now, under a cloudless sky, he felt rather silly.

Even though it was late summer, his mother had dressed him in a long sleeved, plaid shirt and blue jeans, for his protection, his mother had said. He was covered from his wrists to his ankles. Still, he could feel the searing heat penetrate his clothing.

Abraham wasn't afraid of being alone, but he was curious how far his family had progressed into the field. They weren't moving fast because the cotton was plentiful that year. The trailing sack behind each individual slowed their pace. With every boll of cotton, he saw their backs bend under the increasing weight.

Something inside Abraham told him that he could see his mother without being there with her. It was more a feeling than words that spoke to him, but her image was just as clear. He obviously knew what she looked like, so conjuring up her image was easy. She wasn't much different than other petite Mexican women with raven hair, dark brown eyes, and a warm smile. But as his mother, she was unique, his flesh and blood, and in that regard she was like no other.

Abraham closed his eyes and tilted his head back. He heard the wind whistle through the cotton field and the cawing of a crow far away. He dug his toes into the soft soil. He was careful not to lose his balance, fearing he might fall into an irrigation ditch that ran perpendicular to the rows of cotton. The trench was less than a foot deep, but it was muddy and filled with smelly pesticides and he didn't want to fall in it. The crow went silent.

Abraham was facing west with the sun burning the back of his head. Yet, after he tilted his head far back, the brunt of the sun's rays bore down directly on his closed eyelids. At first, the sun pricked the delicate tissue, causing wild sparks and patterns of light to dance on the canvas that was the interior of his eyelids. He tried to discern whether there were specific images or simply random bursts of light. His head began to spin and the dizziness made him wonder whether he was headed for the fetid ditch.

Just then, the infinite number of lights that had lit up his eyelids started to die out. One by one they began to darken until they had all extinguished themselves. He was conscious of his arms and legs but could not move them. It was an odd feeling to have no sensation in his limbs. It was as if they belonged to someone else.

Then it happened.

One pinprick of light appeared directly in front of him. The light grew like the opening eye of a camera's aperture. It continued to expand until it came at him like a fast moving train with his frozen body standing on the tracks. However, instead of an object coming at him, it was a window of sorts.

Abraham found himself moving through the opening and then hovering over the valley floor. Up until that time, he'd never flown in an airplane nor traveled by any other means than his father's Crown Victoria. He glanced down at his feet and his toes were not moving. His hands and arms were positioned flat against his sides, yet he was moving through the sky! His heart swelled, not like someone's with a heart disease, but rather swollen with joy and awe.

He was at least twenty feet above the ground and began to recognize roads and markers on the valley floor, like the Palo Seco Mesa in the distance and the interstate highway running north and south. He didn't know how he did it, but he turned his direction of travel to where he expected the cotton field to be. Sure enough, there they were, his mother, his father, and his brother, as well as other workers he did not recognize. The cotton pickers had reached the opposite side of the field. Waiting for them was a large truck with a flatbed trailer behind it.

As he flew over them, his mother seemed to know that Abraham was near. She stopped picking cotton and gazed toward the heavens, shielding her eyes from the sun. Abraham wanted to wave at her, but his arms were still paralyzed.

Emanuel, his pudgy, oldest brother, was having trouble lifting his sack of cotton to the hook on the weigh scale that would tell him how much he'd picked. He tried to lift the sack and almost fell when the sack refused to move. Abraham's father took hold of the sack and between the two they placed it on the hook. His mother patted Emanuel on the back, apparently congratulating him on a job well done.

It then occurred to Abraham that Magdalena might have awakened and that he should return to the car. In mere seconds, his flight took him quickly to the Crown Victoria.

To his utter amazement, he saw a young boy standing near his father's car. As he flew closer, he realized the boy looked a lot like him. The boy wore the same plaid shirt and blue jeans as Abraham. The strangest thing was that the boy had his eyes closed and was facing the sky. Abraham willed himself to look in the car and thanked God; Magdalena was still asleep.

In the far distance, a menacing cloud was building. It was like a dark thundercloud, except that this one was touching the ground as it tumbled toward the cotton field. The rolling monster cloud would hit his family and shower them with unknown debris and danger. He had to warn them immediately. Yet, in this altered reality state, Abraham could not move an arm, a leg, and probably not his mouth or voice either.

He willed his mind to close the panoramic view before him and shuddered when a crimp in his neck shot a pang of pain through him. He suddenly was back on the ground and in his standing position in front of the Crown Victoria.

He glanced through the window and Magdalena had not awakened. He opened the door and observed her more closely to assure that she was breathing. His body relaxed when he saw her little chest rise and fall.

He closed the door and sprinted toward his family to warn them of the oncoming dust storm. The ground was covered with dried pieces of the cotton plants, and it felt like he was running over thorny blackberry bushes. He ran so fast that the dried leaves of the standing cotton plants cut his face. He felt the warm blood trickle down the side of his cheeks and on his forehead.

When he reached his mother, she screamed in terror. Abraham stood there, catching his breath, blood dripping down his face.

"What the hell happened to you?" asked his father. "And where's Magdalena?"

"She's asleep in the car. She's fine, Dad."

Abraham's mother dropped her cotton bag and wiped the blood from his face. "What are you doing here, son? Why did you leave Magdalena?"

"There's a big cloud coming, Mama. And it's not your regular kind of cloud. It's rolling on the ground like a big steamroller."

He spotted the cloud five or six miles away. "Look! There it is!"

Everyone turned to look at the sky where Abraham's finger was pointing. Directly above them was cobalt blue. Approaching them was an ominous blackness.

"Oh my God!" exclaimed Abraham's mother.

Abraham's father did not hesitate as he climbed out of the harness that carried his sack. "Drop the sacks everybody. Hurry, let's get back to the car."

Abraham's mother grabbed his hand and they all hurried back to the car. She shielded her son's face from the sharp edges of the cotton plants. As they ran, a rumble shook in Abraham's ears like when his dad drove fifty-five miles an hour with the windows rolled down.

Emanuel was the last one to jump in the Crown Victoria. Just as he shut the door, the sky turned black and within seconds, a sudden pelting of debris and dust befell them. With the windows rolled up, they stared at the darkness in disbelief. Magdalena finally woke up when a sizable piece of wood hit the roof of the car. She started crying. Abraham's mother turned and faced him from the front seat.

"Are you okay, son?"

"Yeah, I'm fine," he answered, lightly touching the scratches on his face.

Emanuel was still trying to catch his breath, wheezing as he reclined against the seat. He looked at Abraham with a frown. "How did you know that thing was coming? You're just a kid."

"I know, huh?" answered Abraham. "I saw it inside of me."

Emanuel looked at him as if Abraham was crazy but he couldn't argue with the fact that his little brother had correctly assessed the danger that befell their family.

After a long while, the dust storm passed, and an eerie silence replaced it. A thin layer of red dust covered the Crown Victoria and everything around it.

Emanuel leaned forward toward the front seat. "Are we gonna go back to pick some more, Dad?"

Abraham's father surveyed the area and shook his head. "I don't think so, Manny. Those were very strong winds, and our house may have lost its roof in this storm. We need to get home and check it out. The cotton can wait." He got out of the car and wiped the dust off the windshield with his bare hand. Abraham's family watched in silence. When he was done, Abraham's father slid back into the driver's seat.

"This reminds me of being under the volcano cloud of the Mt. St. Helen's eruption back in 1980 in Washington, except that ash was grey, almost white."

"Yeah, it was," said Abraham. Everyone heard him, but no one replied.

The Crown Victoria rolled slowly toward the highway. When they reached the shoulder of the road, Abraham's father turned north. Abraham was staring out the window as if in a trance.

His father glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. "Abraham, what's the matter?"

"Be careful, and take the next alternate route home. There's been a fatal accident up ahead."

His father turned and gave Abraham's mother a curious look. His mother gave him a barely noticeable shake of the head as if to say, "I have no idea what he's talking about."

Five miles into their drive, Abraham smiled as he saw the flashing sign on the shoulder of the road. It read: Caution. Traffic Accident Ahead. Use Detour.

Michael Pacheco's debut novel, The Guadalupe Saints, was published by Paraguas Books in April 2011 and won Second Place in the 2012 International Latino Book-to-Movie Awards. His poetry has appeared in "200 New Mexico Poems" and a novella, Seeking Tierra Santa, was released in May 2011. Other fiction by Michael has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bilingual Review Press, Southwestern American Literature, The Gold Man Review, Azahares Literary Magazine, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Boxfire Press, The Acentos Review, Red Ochre Press, Label Me Latina, VAO Publishing – Along the River II, St. Somewhere Journal, Emerge Literary Journal, Writer's Bloc Literary Magazine (Texas A&M), Valley Voices, a Literary Review, and AirplaneReading (twice).

(Back to Table of Contents)

# Transformation

by Katherine McIntyre; published May 31, 2013

Tonight was my third sleepless night in a row.

It started a couple days back when I noticed that man on the subway. I wasn't attracted to him, so I don't know why he stood out. Gimlet eyes didn't help his appearance, and wrinkles stretched across his face like railroad tracks. He wore a gray suit with a dark green tie, and if he could've gotten any more nondescript, he'd have faded into the background. His black briefcase marked him as a suit while the slightly balding gray hair and lingering smell of mild soap painted this man as utterly normal. So uninteresting and yet every night since then I've watched him die.

Each night I open the door to my dark apartment after work and collapse onto my bed. My head hits the threadbare pillow, and with the regularity of an alarm the vision begins. The Market Street sign, marred by graffiti, stands out against the cragged city skyline. This bland man crosses the street, suitcase in hand. Several thin wisps of hair are whipped the wrong way on his comb over. Darkened shadows overtake the barren streets and the one dim lamp encloses the area into a life-size snow globe. The pedestrian light flickers on. He starts across, but never makes it five paces before a white car whips around the bend. And then...well, it isn't pretty. The vision ends after lingering a little too long on the dead body. And it replays, over and over and over until morning.

Don't get me wrong, I'm human. Like everyone, I've had fantasies of smashing my boss's head into the counter, but I don't normally imagine folks dead. Not like that, and not some random man I've never said a word to.

Each time it replays I shiver, repulsed. The Market Street sign. The white car rounding the bend. The man with the suitcase, crumpled on the ground. The images parade through my head with the persistent precision of a carousel, but why? Deep down, I know that man is going to die.

Who am I to make that call though? I have no fancy abilities, no psychic voodoo like the dozens of crazies crammed in those Witch-Marts they called Wiccan shops. My greatest achievement amounted to employee of the month at my Grab N' Go and that was only because I'd worked there three years without quitting like the rest of the crew. Maybe going out to the club every weekend led me to start hallucinating. Grinding up with sweaty creeps smelling like _Lucky No. Six_ doesn't strike a high confidence note for me, but I didn't think desperation would sear these images into my brain just for some attention.

Great.

I swung my legs off the edge of the bed. My stomach rumbled, even though the neon glow of my clock read midnight. I bent down into the cupboard and pulled out a can of soup. The aluminum tore under my can opener and the slimy packed noodles slopped into the open bowl. Other people my age might be out at the bars right now, but they also didn't swill this crap for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I took a deep sniff of packaged, salty goodness. My weekday nights consisted of a noodle soup of some sort — more often the ramen variety — and a date with my secondhand television.

Goose bumps prickled along my arms. A chill swept through the open window, despite the boggy humidity. I popped the bowl of soup into the microwave and pressed the keys. The hum of the food churning under radiation comforted me in the lonely dark. The neon numbers ticked down as I tapped my foot against the floor, impatient for my bowl of chicken noodle.

A screech filled the air and burned in my ears.

Tires squealed against pavement. Then I heard the smack of bludgeoned flesh, and the sickening crunch of broken bone followed. The smell of burnt rubber hit my nose. The microwave beeped with finished soup. The thought of food now wrenched my stomach. I raced over to my sink where the remains of my chili dog came heaving out. I placed a hand over my empty stomach after I stopped vomiting. The crash must have happened outside my building. A nagging thought tugged at the recesses of my mind, that it might have something to do with this weird vision, but I shook it away. No black cat ever spooked me.

I raced down the dimly lit corridors to the front steps. The purple hue of midnight coated the streets. Several tall lamps brazenly cut through the gloom with sallow fluorescent lighting. The rustle of shredded McDonald's cartons mingled with the occasional scrape of the grates as debris skittered along the street. The sidewalks lay empty and barren. Silence dominated the air with a sobriety reserved for graveyards.

My heartbeat raced in my chest and my eyes widened with a realization that I tried to shove away. Any sane person would. Again, that gut wrenching twist seized my stomach, the same one that hit me night after night waking up from those horrors. If my coworkers, let alone my boss found out about these visions, they'd lock me up faster than I could push the register shut. My uncountable sessions with my high school counselor during the period I thought I saw ghosts would reinforce any of their crazy claims. Market Street was seven blocks from me and about a fifteen-minute walk. I couldn't have heard or smelled anything from home. It couldn't be.

Taking advantage of the adrenaline rush, I broke into a run. Dirty red-brick buildings blurred by me. Used condoms, aluminum Coke cans, and ripped up Durex wrappers littered the concrete sidewalks. If someone stopped me to ask what I was doing, I couldn't even tell them. Nobody took midnight runs around here, unless they welcomed a mugging or friendly gang beatdown. I winced, remembering the salty sobs of the last poor bastard who got caught loitering during late hours. Before my common sense could catch up with me, the crunching sound replayed in my head and the images flashed with the same frantic pace of my footsteps.

My sneakers slapped the pavement and smacked my ears with sound. Had my thoughts murdered someone? No logical explanation identified why I smelled rubber and heard screeching from my window. The street signs passed and I neared Market. As I got closer, a foreboding feeling chilled my core, the same one that had haunted me the last several nights. My blood froze and my pace slowed to a jog when the dingy green and white sign for Market Street flashed into view.

The closer I got, the more hesitation gripped my steps. Doubt and fear tugged on my heels. And then I saw it again, like I had night after sleepless night. The man from the subway lay crumpled on the ground in a pool of his own blood. It stained the road and seeped into the pavement cracks. My stomach flopped like a wet sack, and my breaths frayed at the edges. His blood coated the street. The man lay as limp as the dead rats littering the street side.

And then something new happened, different.

His heartbeat pounded in my ears.

I stood a good twenty feet away, but his pulse pounded, discordant with my own. It throbbed, but slowed with every ensuing beat. This poor man would die here, alone. Tears bit the corners of my eyes. A sudden compassion welled up in me, one I hadn't felt since my cat, Rusty, passed away.

Unable to control it, a wail ripped from my throat. The foreign sound jolted me like the emergency exit alarm in the back of the Grab 'N Go. I pawed at my neck and even though I fought to close my mouth, the sound continued. The ringing burned in my ears and surrounded me like wrapped cellophane. My throat shredded under the intense wail, but in my panic I couldn't stop it. Something had taken control of my voice, taken over my body, and it sent a thrill of terror through me. My hands shook; hell, my whole body shook and still the song tore from me. And then his heartbeat stopped.

The wail snapped, silenced. But the intense reverberations echoed in my ears like the pulse of club music on the taxi ride home. That man was dead. He passed with no one by his side but me, some weird stranger who had dreamed of him for nights. Like that made sense. My throat burned and I desperately longed for a Coke. I couldn't call an ambulance with this scratchy symphony. Glancing back, I tried to ignore the guilt that crawled over me like a spider at leaving that poor guy abandoned on the pavement. The vision of him as his life force waned and faded out of existence pounded in my brain, but each pulse just brought more questions. I shivered.

My apartment still smelled like crappy soup, and the shadows gave me the shudders. Those screams had made me feel like some monster had crawled inside my skin. Between the uncontrollable wailing and the death knells in my head, something had happened, and yet any guesses would get me thrown back into therapy. I grabbed some water from my faucet and tried to placate my raw throat. The cool liquid burned the whole way down. Maybe some ghost had possessed me, but somehow I didn't think Jonathan Edwards could help. I collapsed onto my bed and stared at the ceiling. For the first time in days, the vision didn't appear when my head hit the pillow. The tiles above swirled out of reach, and the truth nagged at me. I couldn't deny it any longer.

One thing wailed like that, but I hadn't heard it mentioned since Gran scared me with tales of the ghastly fairy whose shrieks filled the air and announced the dead. I'd been seeing all those people in my nightmares, like a carousel of the damned for the past couple of months. I ran my hands through my hair, trying to scrub out these ridiculous thoughts. All coincidence, right?

A strand of hair glistened between my fingers so I squinted to examine it. The pale hair gleamed white in the greenish yellow lighting of my apartment. Grabbing a fistful, I lifted it up to the light: equally pale. I threw down the strands in surprise. Gran had always described them with long, pale hair and a keening voice, but those were fairytales, not reality. Fae didn't live in Philadelphia, but the mirror begged to disagree. My hair glistened silver in the moonlight and my blue eyes had darkened to asphalt. A flush lit up my cheeks and a sparkle hid in my gaze that I hadn't seen in years, not since I was a kid and still believed in the chubby old chimney man who came at Christmas.

Deep down, I knew despite my denial that I'd seen that man's death. I knew the scream came from my throat, and I knew, stronger than anything I'd understood in years, that this was a baby step to something huge. The blood that ran through me tingled in my veins, like static electricity.

A knock sounded on my door.

My eyes widened in panic — those strange blackened ones staring back at me in the mirror. The knock sounded again. I turned on the faucet and scrubbed water over my face and my hair, trying to look somewhat normal.

"Coming!" I tried to shout, but it came out raspy, my voice still rough from that unearthly scream.

The door rattled as someone tried to force it open. I groped around the drawer under the sink for something sharp. Who the hell would be looking for me at this hour? The blood chilled inside me. Had someone seen me by the man's side? Was it the police?

A velvet click echoed around the room. I inched towards my bathroom door to peer past and see what had caused the noise. Darkness greeted my eyes, the thick murky kind that rolled in with the deep night. I sniffed the air, my heightened senses picking up a sharp charcoal that drifted through the apartment like smoke. My foot poked out from the door as I pushed myself out more, still trying to make out any shapes amongst the shadows.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder.

My heart spiked with anxiety and I opened my mouth to scream, but the air scraped along my hoarse throat without sound. Slowly, I turned my head around to look behind me. Three sets of eyes stared back, glinting gray in the darkness.

"Banshee, we heard you a wailin' from across three counties. It's been awhile since one of your kind has been awakened." A man stepped under the moonlight from the window, which highlighted his stark white skin with razor precision. His eyes were red — the deep carmine kind that glistened like rusty blood — and the tips of his ears ran to points. Fangs shone where teeth should be. After all the night's surprises and changes, I found myself less startled than I should've been. After all, I barely looked human myself.

"Welcome to the club. The gathering of fae in the city," a slim woman said, shorter than all the rest. She reached out and handed me a card. It was average cardstock with an address printed smack in the middle.

The man's grin widened, revealing more of his dagger-like teeth.

"We meet on Tuesdays."

Katherine McIntyre splits her time in pursuit of writing and her career as a massage therapist. As for hobbies, if it's creative, chances are she's dabbled in them, from soap making to tea blending. Her poetry and prose have been featured in a variety of magazines such as Abandoned Towers, With Painted Words, and Cause and Effect Review. Her debut novel, "An Airship Named Desire," was published in August 2012 through Hazardous Press.

(Back to Table of Contents)

# Book Reviews

Year Zero: A Novel — by Rob Reid

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination — Anthology edited by John Joseph Adams

(Back to main Table of Contents)

# Year Zero: A Novel

by Rob Reid

Review by Dan Hope

Perhaps you think you don't need a book in your life that combines sentient parrot villains, music piracy on a galactic scale, scrapbooking that will literally melt your mind, and a reality TV star dressed as a sexy nun, but you do.

And Year Zero: A Novel, by Rob Reid, has all those things.

Year Zero is a breath of fresh air in the science fiction market. Aside from Scalzi's Redshirts, there aren't many humorous science fiction novels being published lately. Make no mistake, Year Zero's primary goal is to be a humorous novel, and the science fiction is more set dressing. In fact, one of its faults is that at times it feels like it's trying too hard to be funny. But we shouldn't punish the book for such a minor transgression, especially when the majority of it is genuinely funny.

Year Zero follows Nick Carter, a struggling lawyer at one of the biggest firms in New York. If his name made you think of a particular member of the Backstreet Boys, you're not alone. Some music-loving aliens make the same mistake.

In fact, the entire galaxy loves human music. Billions of species in the galaxy are superior to us in every way but one: Their music is terrible. Since they first picked up the theme song to a sitcom broadcasted into space back in the 70s, aliens have been recording and sharing all the music they could get from little old planet Earth.

Until they found out that it's illegal.

That's right, just like the hacker down the street, the unprincipled teens in your local high school, and your mother, aliens are guilty of music piracy. Thanks to stringent rules about honoring the laws of primitive species, every civilization in the known universe owes us a lot of money. All of it, in fact. This has made many aliens mad, and more than a few have decided that it would just be easier to make the problem, namely humans, go away. Carter must do some of the most creative lawyering of his life in order to save Earth and settle the biggest potential lawsuit in the galaxy amicably.

Patent law and music piracy litigation isn't exactly the most exciting plot device in the science fiction canon, and Year Zero seems to labor under this weight at times. But it's a fresh idea, and Reid deserves praise for making it interesting and simple enough to understand. However, in some places, especially the end, the details can get a bit tedious and manage to slow down the otherwise fast pace of the novel. At least Reid, who is a former entrepreneur in the music business, is very familiar with the subject, and his expertise helps make sense of such complex legalese.

It's very tempting to compare Year Zero to the most famous example of humorous sci-fi: Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Both involve an underdog protagonist who is swept off the planet and gets tangled up in intergalactic hijinks. In some ways, the humor feels as manic and random as Hitchhiker's, but it's oh-so-different in other ways. While Douglas Adams wrote something that felt like it could fit in any decade, the satire and wit in Year Zero is very in the now. Painfully so, at times. Reid relies heavily on allusions to songs and pop-stars that are funny, but probably won't age well. And for someone who didn't come of age in the 80s or 90s, much of it will be hard to decipher. The upshot, on the other hand, is that music lovers and pop culture aficionados will find tons of quips and Easter eggs seemingly made just for them.

The pace of the novel is quick and it has some very steady beats until near the end. When a book takes you across the universe to spend time with weird and hilarious extraterrestrials, it feels like hitting a speedbump to settle down at the end and resolve a conflict centered on legal interpretations of the law.

Despite these minor hiccups, Year Zero is still a good read and an easy sell. It is just the right kind of zany, often inventive, and does an excellent job of satirizing the particular brand of crazy we call modern life (and the particular legal insanity thereof).

We need more of this. Not necessarily a sequel, I mean, but more humorous fiction. I recommend reading this book for its own merits, but also in the hope that strong sales for Year Zero will mean a market more friendly to humorous sci-fi in the future. If anything, the future will be just too absurd to take seriously, and that's no fiction.

Dan Hope, or the BSR as we call him, is Fiction Vortex's managing editor and resident sci-fi go to guy. Whether he is writing it or reading it, sci-fi is his thing. Yes, he has an opinion about which Star Trek captain is the best. And yes, he will fight you about it. Dan recently moved to one of the sunny regions of California. He periodically feels pangs of regret that he doesn't write as much as he used to, but he consoles himself with beaches and fantastic weather.

(Back to Table of Contents)

#  The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination

An anthology edited by John Joseph Adams

Review by Dan Hope

The idea of mad scientists seems so overdone, like an old relic of serials from the Cold War era, which is why it was so surprising to see such nuance in a new anthology edited by John Joseph Adams, called The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination.

The obvious expectation is a bunch of short stories about white-haired men in lab coats, cackling and rubbing their hands nefariously over a workbench covered in bubbling vials. There are a few of those in here, but the authors have given us a surprisingly wide variety of characters, goals, and motivations. Sure, there are guys, but there are also good guys with good intentions gone wrong, normal guys who are misunderstood, geniuses with broken hearts or broken minds, even children who don't understand their own power. Another laudable choice was to include stories where the mad scientist is a woman, instead of the traditional stereotype.

A refreshing aspect of the anthology is the variety of story forms. There's the traditional tale of world domination, told in third person. But there are also stories that use flashbacks, or unreliable narrators, or multiple twists to keep things interesting. In fact, one the most delightful stories is told in the form of an itemized list. Trust me, it works.

To Adams credit, the stories form a nice ebb and flow. He has ordered them so that one particular trope or writing style doesn't get too repetitive. Humor is interspersed with drama. Large plans of world domination are separated by more introspective, personal tales. And despicable protagonists are tempered with more lovably mad scientists.

The difficulty in reviewing an anthology such as this is that the quality of writing varies from story to story. The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination is no exception, although it's worth saying that the low points are few and far between here. And they're also not all that low. A few stories suffer from a slightly tortured premise or an unusual detour, but for the most part they are all well written and utterly compelling.

Such quality shouldn't be so surprising. Adams has managed to pull together stories from some famous and up-and-coming authors in the science fiction and fantasy world, including David Farland, Mary Robinette Kowal, L.E. Modesitt Jr., Naomi Novik, Austin Grossman, Seanan McGuire, and many more.

The greatest benefit of an anthology, and this one in particular, is that you can get a large variety of hilarious situations, fascinating characters, intriguing ideas, and compelling plots. But perhaps the largest difficulty in reading this anthology is that there will inevitably be characters that you don't want to let go. I promise you will want to read an entire novel about some of these mad scientists. But it's not a bad problem to have, and Adams has certainly given us an anthology that will have you saying, "I'll read just one more. It's only 2 a.m."

(Back to Table of Contents)

# About Fiction Vortex

Fiction Vortex, let's see...

A fiction vortex is a tornado of stories that pick you up and hurl you through a barn to find enlightenment on the other side. It's a whirlpool of fascinating tales so compelling that they suck you in, drag you down to the bottom of your mind, and drown you with incessant waves of glorious imagery and believable characters.

Nope.

A fiction vortex is an online speculative fiction magazine focused on publishing great science fiction and fantasy, and is run by incredibly attractive and intelligent people with great taste in literature and formidable writing prowess.

Not that either. But we're getting closer.

Founded in the 277th year of the Takolatchni Dynasty, Fiction Vortex set out to encourage people to write and publish great speculative fiction. It sprang fully formed from the elbow of TWOS, retaining none of TWOS's form but most of its spirit. And the patron god of writers, the insecure, the depressed, and the mentally ill regarded Fiction Vortex in his magic mirror of self-loathing and declared it good, insofar as something that gives writer's undue hope can be declared good. Thereafter, he charged the Rear Admiral of the Galactic 5th Fleet to defend Fiction Vortex down to the last robot warrior.

Now we're talking.

Take your pick. We don't care how you characterize us or the site.

Fiction Vortex focuses on publishing speculative fiction. That means science fiction and fantasy (with a light smattering of horror and a few other subgenres), be it light, heavy, deep, flighty, spaceflighty, cerebral, visceral, epic, or mundane. But mundane in a my-local-gas-station-has-elf-mechanics-but-it's-not-really-a-big-deal-around-here kind of way. Got it?

Basically, we want imaginative stories that are well written, but not full of supercilious floridity.

There's a long-standing belief that science fiction and fantasy stories aren't as good as purely literary fare. We want you to prove that mindset wrong (not just wrong, but a steaming pile of griffin dung wrong) with every story we publish. It's almost like we're saying, "I do not bite my thumb at you, literary snobs, but I do bite my thumb," but in a completely polite and non-confrontational way.

We've got more great stories online, with a new story twice a week. Visit our website FictionVortex.com, follow us on Twitter: @FictionVortex, and like us on Facebook: FictionVortex.

(Back to Table of Contents)
