There are snowmen in the desert. Two lines of them, in fact, flanking the bandstand and continuing behind it, although I can’t make out how many linger back there. I doubt the world of Berrion has seen many snowmen in its time. It’s hot as hell here even at the high latitude of the northern continent. The land at the equator? Intolerable for humans.
A woman. Warmth. Love. Just out of reach. The back of my neck. Itching. Burning. A sudden change—the ground shifting beneath my feet, catapulting up, up, up. Clawing at my neck. Searing. An inferno. Slipping backward, falling, tumbling. The woman, her hand outstretched. Too late. Too far. Gone. I yell out her name. Darkness. “Richie? Richie, wake up!”
“STAY OFF GROOMED SURFACES” headlined the resurfacing status page as I skimmed alongside the track groomer, staying well clear of the hundred meter booms snowing frozen nitrogen onto the drag strip. Cockpit audio whooped, startling me ...
A six-foot brown Indian man, with one blue eye, one nostril, full lips, and dishwater blond wispy hair, is dressed in denim jeans and shirt. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow, exposing blond hair on his peach-colored forearms. Cracked, leather-topped, diner stools separate him and another man from each other and from me.
My favorite part of the day was cleaning guests’ rooms and imagining what they’d been up to. I liked playing detective, not in a weird way, and not while the room was occupied, which was the case with Room 113 that morning.
I met February-22 on the day of April-14’s execution. On the silver screen, the fifteen-year-old boy faced six rifles pointed at the skies. He stood in front of a roughcast wall, dressed in white shirt and woolen trousers, like a prisoner of the regime that had collapsed.
The family stood in the corner of the launching pad—just me, my grandfather, my father, my mother. Far removed from the troops being loaded into the shuttle, but much closer than the crowds back at base—the closest we could get, my mother told me, without being scorched by the shuttle launch.
by Jenny Maloney - The Great Red Spot has glared out at the universe for centuries. Rachel glares back. Now: The near dead spaceship uses the last of its fuel to keep pace with Jupiter's rotation. The white and purple and maroon clouds swirl into the pressure system like water flooding a tidepool. The maelstrom is so large it fills the observation window. So large it would swallow Earth twice over. So large it swallows her.
by Ella J. Lombard - I met her in the awkward pause after the coffin was lowered into the ground. It had been weeks since I had found a silence with so many flavors. I drank in its power and the world seemed to sharpen, the well of energy within me finally refilling. Funeral silence has an odd quality; it hovers somewhere between a prayer and a bad first date.
by Matt Hollingsworth - Velka’s hands twitched as she turned the page. What troubled her was a feeling without voice or words, though if it did have a voice, it would have sounded like her mother, and if it did have words, it would have said: Are you sure you read it all?