The happiest day of my life happened when I was eight years old. I can still picture it vividly, even after all these years: racing toward the playground on my bicycle while my father ran alongside me on the bike path, offering cheerful words of encouragement. The air was filled with floating dandelion fuzz...
I never told her I loved her. Yes, I asked her to be my girlfriend, and yes, I asked her if she would marry me, and to both questions she answered, “Yes.” But that was before I looked at myself with the eyes of the universe and saw nothing but emptiness...
The roots writhed, like gnarled fingers seeking purchase. “There, there,” Anthea crooned, “nearly done.” A pernicious root encircled one wrist. With a snip from her secateurs, the offending appendage dropped to the conservatory floor and lay there, twitching. Content in the warmth, surrounded by the rustle of leaves, she hummed as she worked...
My mother died when I was very young. I don’t remember much about her, just that she went out for food one day and never came back. I was scared, hungry and near hysterical when the old man found me. I’d never seen anyone like him before...
Eyeliner on so thick it will make him look her in the eyes. A hot pink bra glowed under TC’s white tank top. The top’s material was thin enough to show the freckles on her shoulder blades moving like schools of fish as she danced...
The first time I went over the top, I pissed myself. We stood in line like a huge grey centipede, uniformed bodies stretching away in both directions. To my left was Sanders, a toffee-haired girl with scars and dirty patches on her face. “You’re Malevsky, right?” she said. I nodded. “This your first time?”...
My mother was washing a rag in the sink again. Sometimes she’d forget we went to the laundrette, didn’t wash our clothes at home any more. The soap would crack our skin, made it difficult for me to play guitar. The guitar was my lifeline, the only way I was getting out of town...
1. The werecat’s blood slid off the stainless steel table and onto the tiled floor, only to be smeared under Doctor Squeaks’ slippers. Trent tried to ignore the blood. Having recently arrived at the reclamation shelter, he was eager to prove himself. “Put a hand on her leg,” said Dr. Squeaks...
I knew the pale lady was real the first night she appeared at the foot of my bed and whispered, “You were warned in two weeks, but you will ignore me yesterday, Silas,” her raspy voice so much like crumbling parchment carried on an astral wind. It was 3:14am when her coal-black eyes pierced mine...
The Deep Ones, they called us. The High Priest of those, they called me—yes, and worshipped me as High Priest of themselves as well. You did. Well, some of your lowly, straggling, mortal kind. All around this tiny, tired rock; in South America, Hawai’i, in Africa, in Greenland, in dull, dank Dunwich, even...
Erin had successfully completed more than one hundred skydives before her fateful jump. On that day, a small airplane took her and five others to four thousand metres. One after another, they leapt through the open door of the airplane. “You gonna jump?” The pilot yelled over the sound of the rushing wind...
I am swimming against the current of time. This is a language we brought back from the fractal sea within which we move—it is how our brains interpret the complex machine-filtered universe. All the strands of what-if stretch out into the future, all events and decisions are nodes in a whisper-fine net of potential...
I think I have officially hit movie burnout. It was Date Night last night, so the Mrs. and I went out for dinner and a show. The show in question was the latest remake of The Magnificent Seven, for the very good reason that the Mrs. adores Chris Pratt...
Continued from: Part One | Part Two By the Fall of 2014, we seemed to have our ducks in a decent approximation of a row. True, my eyes were watering from studying and comparing perhaps a hundred or more WordPress themes, but in the end, we’d settled on a design...
The con had wound down. The fans were all gone back to their mundane lives, leaving the five of us in the con suite. Our host, the Gaming Director, passed around what was left of the free sodas. We drank and stared out the window as darkness gathered in the skies above the hotel...
Stellan slouched against the bar, hands cradling a shot glass as if he were warming an unhatched egg. For hours, he’d kept himself to himself, tipping back an assembly line of shot glasses, not bothering to look up long enough to notice anything beyond the increasing blur of wood grain on the counter-top...
When the ships like hovering nightmares appeared over our cities, their three-mile-wide hulls dripping with pure-blue lightning, the creatures made their demands known. They tapped into every audio and visual output in the world, calling forward six particular delegates of the human race to answer a rather complicated question: Why should we not obliterate humanity...
My dearest Angelica, Pen and paper are all I have left. The sky split in half six weeks ago, and since it did, New York has been in the dark. No electronic devices, no electricity of any kind. Do they have thunder beings in Boston? Do they stomp around your mother’s street...
They used to say the best marketing men could sell ice cream to Eskimos. Max Pfalznagel could have passed the test easily; any self-respecting account executive, he used to say, would just kidnap a few Eskimos, strand them in the Mojave, and then drive up in an ice cream van...
Max plunged the sensor into the ground, waiting for the battered LED in the hilt to show if the decomp level in the grave made it worth digging up. If it was daylight, and if the cemetery management would cooperate, he or Jerry could have asked, saved themselves the trial and error. If, if...
Marc hadn’t realized the time jump would cause vertigo. Great. Another glitch that would make potential investors run for the hills. He materialized in the bathroom stall and almost lost his balance...
Continued from Part 1 With SHOWCASE #11, we cut over to the “Crevasse” site design. It seemed like a great idea at the time. The original SHOWCASE site was, to be blunt, old, and very much a product of old-school browser-based desktop-oriented thinking. As outlined in “Show Your Work”, by late 2013 I’d concluded...
Wow. September already. First off, I want to give a shout-out to eagle-eyed proofreader Chris Pearce. No sooner did “Death Comes to Agratha” go live than she sent me an email pointing out a typo in “The Mission,” the story to which there is a link in the author’s bio. To correct this...
The Grand Bazaar of Agratha, fabled capital of the Zethyrean Empire, had been busy since dawn, yet it was nearly noon when the farmer saw his first customer, a stranger who paused before the farmer’s stall. “Good morrow, sir!” exclaimed the farmer. “I see my wares have tempted you.”...
