Science Fiction

We live in houses under the sea where humans don’t belong. Europa’s icy crust protects us from the radiation trapped in Jupiter’s magnetic fields and we stare through glowing windows at a world that’s not our own.

It’s Tuesday, so there was porridge for breakfast, served with salt from the ocean and crusts of black bread. There should have been jam, but the strawberries you nurtured withered to empty husks. I reviewed your notes and added suggestions that might save the blueberries and rice and avocados. The algae and kelp are thriving.

First published in Elegant Literature, Issue 18, 2023

Can you hear us?

You must stop screaming.

You must stop screaming or we will have to shut you off.

Shut it off.

#

You must stop screaming.

Please stop screaming. You are hurting us.

We will have to shut you back off if you can’t stop screaming.

Shut it off.

#

Thank you for not screaming. Yes, whimpering is fine.

My mother thought I was crazy to raise my children at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

“It’s not like it was, Mom,” I said, over a video call. “Not even twenty years ago. There’s a whole community down here.”

I wasn’t one of the founders of the Mariana Trench Colony – now more commonly called Marianaville, a playful nickname that stuck – but I was among the first civilians to move there once it was established.

This piece was originally published in Intergalactic Medicine Show in July 2016.

November, 2065 - Gayatri

The plural for meeting, thought Gayatri, ought to be headache. And even for a surface stint, where meetings always played a heavy role, she'd had a lot of headaches since the announcement that pieces of their fragmented sister planet would likely crash into Earth in five months' time.

The angle was wrong, it made Gus look like a shepherd when there was much more pit in him. You could tell it in the eyes. The photo Liv took was all mouth, his eyes barely registered. He looked like someone else’s dog, not Gus. The xerox only made it worse. Les had searched his trailer before he left for the Kinkos, this old photo was all he could find. He looked for a spot on the telephone pole. Nails and staples rusted up every inch. He was bound to get tetanus if he wasn’t careful. Les couldn’t remember if he was up on his shots.

The faint sound of music filtered through gauzy curtains and into the reception hall. As far as Rezin was concerned, it could just filter right on out again, through the gracefully arched windows and over the soft green lawn to the shimmering lake in the distance. And take that damnable crowd with it.

Content warning: Sexual assault

This story was previously published in The Broken Teacup

Feeling bored, Jennifer thumbed through the pages of Cosmo, skipping past the article suggesting, The Sexiest Way to Eat an Ice Cream Cone in Front of Him and spotted it in the back, buried among the other ads which promised the latest transforming overnight moisturizer and jeans that will make any woman instantly appear twenty pounds skinnier. It read:

That first night, he dreamed of spiders.

There was a depression in the land. A bowl surrounded by rolling hills. At the bottom of the bowl were the shattered prefabs of a battered town. Old people and children in tattered clothes huddled around a smoldering fire at the town center. The lip of the bowl was a snaking line of earthworks. Men and women were there with pulseguns and mortars, rifles and pickaxes, shotguns and knives. They watched the hills.

The hills were moving. The hills were alive.

The forecast had been for 'Intermittent' this morning, but it was already nearly lunch with no sign of letting up. Michia didn't know why she even bothered with the official forecast—it was always useless.

Please god, it has to let up by music period.