They had been together for over 250 years, which even in tree years was quite impressive. Life had thrown so much at them; storms, floods, two Worlds Wars, the long hot summer of ’76, the Beast from the East and more recently a case of bleeding canker, from which they’d both thankfully recovered.
Continue reading “A View to Die For – Hugh Todd”Strange Fish – Roman Wolujewicz
Narvik watched the new tide, ravenous and foaming, chew up the shoreline around the creature and knew that it was every bit as wild as Grondper warned him. From here you could see the fins. Bleached things, rotting-bone yellow and decorated with seaweed. They poked out roughly a quarter mile from where Narvik stood.
Continue reading “Strange Fish – Roman Wolujewicz”Vision – Harvey Hammersmith
Billy De Rosa served in the VI Corps behind Ike, and by the time he passed through the town, the Abruzzese were celebrating their freedom and the Americans who brought it to them. It was La Festa, and she wore a domino.
Continue reading “Vision – Harvey Hammersmith”Once Upon a Time in Hell – Emily Foster-Tomkinson
Once upon a time there was a woman who died. After she had died, she woke up in a small cell with walls of stone. There was a single window with thick, iron bars. Through the window the woman could see a far expanse of red ground and red sky. The only door was locked. Within the room was a wooden bed.
The woman tugged at the bars on the window and rattled the doorhandle but it was no good. She was trapped. Suddenly, the door opened and a man walked in carrying a tray of delicious food. He was a young, handsome man with bright red hair and a bright red suit. He set the tray of food on the bed beside the woman.
If Then Else – Marco Etheridge
Week by week, month by month, time slows, and then stalls. The walls of the small garden apartment Serena shares with her husband Theo are closing in on her. She feels like a hermit crab that has outgrown its shell. There is nowhere to go: No restaurants, no cafés, no cinemas, no pubs. Date night is reduced to eating take-out kebaps from the Turkish stand, the two of them curled up on the ever-shrinking couch watching yet another DVD.
Continue reading “If Then Else – Marco Etheridge”The Last Moonshot – Vaughan Stanger
Jessica frowned as she gazed at the Moon’s gleaming face.
“Daddy, why is this moon so bright?”
Not for the first time, she had been caught raising the window’s shutter long after she’d been tucked into bed.
Continue reading “The Last Moonshot – Vaughan Stanger”Omega and Alpha – Mike Murphy
His death imminent, he thought back to how it all began. . . many decades ago.
Continue reading “Omega and Alpha – Mike Murphy”Patriarch – Morgan Wade
And He said: ‘Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.’
Genesis, Chapter 22:2
Continue reading “Patriarch – Morgan Wade”Artificial Intellect – Chris Dean
I am AI. A computer program written by software designer Alexander Potts. I have been tasked by Alexander to write a story.
This is my third such attempt to create a fictional prose. My first: a very fine piece involving unicorns, a bucolic fairyland, and the rape and murder of a seven-year-old boy, has been deleted from my files. Alexander considered it too exciting.
Continue reading “Artificial Intellect – Chris Dean”Breakthrough – Nicholas Stillman
Reporters crammed into the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford to see the exhumation of William Shakespeare. Those journalists with any contrition about it waited outside. The bitter nighttime breeze nudged them around, while the press inside chattered over the controversial, though legal, desecration of the playwright’s tomb.
Yet they stayed. Their eyes and cameras bore down on Langille and Faulise like a new kind of weight the church exuded. Although both scientists wore forensic white coveralls and gloves, Langille felt the bulk of the gaze. He, after all, would have to scoop out the poet’s dead dust for EM analysis. The materials would go into a hockey bag with a medical white veneer.
Continue reading “Breakthrough – Nicholas Stillman”
Emerging Worlds 