by David VonAllmen
No, Maddie’s seven. This is Maddie, this is my daughter. Where have I been for the last three years? I’ve been here, in this house, I’ve put Maddie and Ben to bed and had romantic dinners with James. But I’ve been distant, giving all my affection to my husband. I haven’t loved Maddie, haven’t loved her little brother, like a mother should.
by Holly Schofield
'Lightning slashed the night, putting the mountaintops into stark relief. The rain turned to sleet. A predictive algorithm pronounced the storm was worsening. The Steward diarised to shift the wolf's body underneath a calcium-deficient mountain ash tree after the storm was over. Simultaneously, it ordered the bot to return to the maintenance shed. The bot extended all six of its legs.'
by Michelle Ann King
'There, there,' she says. 'But don't forget, Reg, that's not the only thing people might want to say. They might, for example, want to remind the person who killed them that they hate him, they don't forgive him, and they're enjoying every minute of watching him suffer. Don't forget that.'
by Josh Sczykutowicz
I had known that God would allow for horror, even welcome it, but it was when I gazed into Lenora’s delivery room, the room in which her life was traded for this new one, that I knew it to be true: God created darkness, and darkness was God’s alone. All else stood merely in His shadow.
by Mark Patrick Lynch
She journeys around the side of the building, aware of the fractal clouds coalescing and evaporating at super-charged speed. There are stars bright enough to be seen during the day here, wherever and whenever the planet has brought them this time. She stops behind the man who fashions trees. He has his specialist equipment with him, tools she has never seen before. Some look sharp and wicked, others like kindnesses to ease unbearable burdens.
by Dan Micklethwaite
He starts to think about conspiracy theorists, about the naysayers who in turn thought about Armstrong and Aldrin and called bullshit on that. Who said they couldn’t possibly have gone there and wandered around. That they couldn’t have planted a flag on the moon. Colonized it. Claimed it as their own.
Because the flag seems to move, and there is no wind on the moon.
by Daniel Carpenter
It is the space that was once an office. The building remembers where the desk was, where the papers were filed. It was a mill, once upon a time; spinning cotton and stinking of oil and sweat, floorboards creaking beneath the weary feet of workers. The smoke billowing across the floor, never escaping, collecting at windows, tapping on them. Let me out. The shadows of the afternoon creeping underneath machines like children. There were children then too, as there are children now, but they did not last long. There was disease, and accidents. Things were lost.
by Barry Charman
The Decadence had taken over most of the cities; the only messages that got out now were numb recitals of daydream rhetoric; jazz whines and bursts of static. Nobody knew what it had been, not really. It had simply occurred, like a passive disease, like a pandemic without a clear means of infection.
by Julia August
The year after Jenny’s father died, the sea swallowed St. Mary’s churchyard and spat him back up again. Half the village was empty now and a third of it was under sand or saltwater. Jenny opened her door one sultry evening to a listing figure, gaunt and salt-crusted, whose footprints dripped unsteadily down the street.
'Hello, Jenny,' he said, in a voice as hollow as a bell.
by Ilana Masad
She paused to lean on the stone balcony that separated the raised boardwalk from the beach. She sucked the wrapper clean. The waves and the seagulls called to her. How many hours of her life had she spent watching this vastness? She didn’t want to count. The tally would be too plentiful, too painful.
by M. Kelly Peach
It took only a few minutes to traverse the half a kilometre to the treasured object. It was covered with flies: those jackals of the insect world. At the sound of thousands of approaching beetles from north and south, they quickly dispersed to a safe distance. The armies converged as the sun touched the horizon.
by Keyan Bowes
'Dammit, there it goes again!' The computer screen blinks at me, followed by the tinkling sounds of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. At 'Up above the world so high,' the screen goes black. A narrow band of light at the top contracts into a sparkling point. Exasperated, I turn to John.
'John? Are you having computer problems?'
