Fiction

Grame was punctual, although it had taken him eight hours to climb the free track up the shoulder of the Mountain. When he arrived, it took him less than eight minutes to discover that he was alone in the building with the night guard.

‘Patience is demanded,’ the man said . . .

Although they sat outside, to Captain Dlain it seemed like they had been swallowed by the planet, absorbed into its bowels. Down here, it was warm and stuffy, like being in bed with the blanket over your head, and everything in eyesight, from the soil to dead leaves and bark, . . .

Straightening the newly purchased old raincoat, flicking back a straight, mousy brown fringe, Berti adjusts thick tortoiseshell frames dulled by age long before Health Division reissued them, and decides there are no more excuses; it’s time to leave the flat.

Grame was punctual, although it had taken him eight hours to climb the free track up the shoulder of the Mountain. When he arrived, it took him less than eight minutes to discover that he was alone in the building with the night guard.

‘Patience is demanded,’ the man said . . .

Dear Megan,

Thanks so much for the photos you sent with your last letter! The girls are getting big now – it’s easy to forget how quickly they change at that age, when I only hear them on the phone. I don’t have any photos as we still can’t get . . .

When Dad arrives, he twiddles a dial in the panel, and SnapRoom gets brighter.

He’s wearing the same slacks and mustard-coloured cardigan that I expect Mum to have thrown out by now. His face is hollow, eyes empty. Strings of white hair fall from the ring of still-functioning follicles on . . .

It was dense night whenMaskull awoke from his profound sleep. A wind was blowing against him, gentle but wall-like, such as he had never experienced on earth. He remained sprawling on the ground, as he was unable to lift his body because of its intense weight.

As a young princess, she had often fainted, mainly through trying to maintain her figure by starving herself, but fainting was also useful to avoid attending all those tedious ceremonies. Now, although many times her youthful size, habit ensured that she fainted decorously.

EasyBoi
1.8k points·1 month ago
Just want to report a possible intruder moving across front lawn at Mapplethorpe Lane, Arlington. Ten notifications have popped up on my smartphone saying, ‘your doorbell detected a visitor’.

Stepping off the elevator platform, I can’t help but stop to take in the view of the city. Around us, artificial trees stretch up so far, their canopies almost reach to the top of the glass dome

We left Earth today.

My ma drove me up to Sutherland Spaceport herself, and I left Edinburgh behind.

She looked round the room and its sham antique oak, all solemn lines of fiddley curlicues. A great sloped mirror showed herself. Being still very young, she looked at that self with attention, but not too much. The room was deserted but for the waiter bringing the soup. Then she . . .

Hello, Ms MacArthur? Hi, there. This is a courtesy call from ASDaTESCo. My name is—

What kind of ice cream van, Beth asked herself, comes round in the middle of winter?

Ah wis abducted by aliens wance. Never tolt anywan but. It wis nearly forty year ago an ah knew whit folk wid say. The wans in ma class wid be aw, Did yi aye? Zat when yi had yir first anal probe? Zat why yir a fuckin space cadet?

Jonah’s father was a Sioux medicine man with a fearsome reputation, but his momma was the one who really jinxed him. She was supposed to have been a witch-woman who came West from the Appalachians, but there were some who said that she’d holed up in those mountains after she . . .

They finally found his body in a muddy abandoned brick tunnel siding a mile west of Great Waverley Terminus

I was born the same way you were: amid violent collisions in a hot plane of swirling gas, the accretions of our dead elders coming together to form new life.

“What the hell is that?”

The apple looked awful. A piebald runt in red and yellow-green, with a sandpaper roughness around its bear-stub stalk.

I’m a line cook. This is how I became a spy:

I come from a binary solar system. We don’t have what other beings might call day and night.

The meteorites had punched five perfectly round holes through the treble wall of the auxiliary pod, our home for the last three weeks. Macintyre had died more or less instantly.

Jen was Defence. No way was she going to get stuck with caring stuff: Environment, Education, Health… Girls always got these. Jen was having none of it.

(video: Debbie Cannon reads the story)

Hey what’s up you guys, it’s Pixie! And I’m back with a follow-up video that I never thought I’d make! [LAUGH]

She retraces her walking commute through the platform’s labyrinth. A dose of daylight might help, she thinks, but there’s no chance of that. At the end of her fifteen-hour shift at 2700 hours she’ll catch the last sunrays out on the viewing deck.

Edith drifted in and out of sleep. She was curled up on the old leather sofa, enjoying the warm, delicate weight of the baby on her chest.

My new lover has a cat, which, he says, hates everyone but him. I am warned not to go near her—she bites and scratches. I just smile…

Every writer wears a hat. Most people may not see it, but it’s there, a kind of halo which can be seen if you look from just the right angle.

Pull up a chair, my child, I want to tell you the story of how we happen to be living here, and where we come from. For we are one of the proud families of the inner city, and one of the oldest. Not many people around these parts can . . .

Leithen told me this story one evening in early September as we sat beside the pony track which gropes its way from Glenvalin up the Correi na Sidhe.

Security starlings flit and chatter in electronic bursts, warning each other of me. As well they might. They know my designation, know I am stronger than them, for I am a SEAGULL

It doesn’t matter how this begins.

I’ve had three glasses of what passes for gin in Eight to the Bar, and something that the bartender called rum but tasted like motor oil and gunpowder.

(with reading by the author).
The waves crest and fall as she travels endlessly in the deep. Existing through the generations, she calls out to relatives and friends. Back and forth as the currents guide, she gathers stories from continents and cultures, and they latch in her mind like . . .

The waves crest and fall as she travels endlessly in the deep. Existing through the generations, she calls out to relatives and friends. Back and forth as the currents guide, she gathers stories from continents and cultures, and they latch in her mind like the barnacles on her skin. Tides . . .

Arrivals was a nightmare, queuing for decontamination. But there was such a warmth to the wooden panels lining the walls. I had to lean in to smell them: printed. In between that thought and the long inhale, I imagined the ‘ponics needed to grow pine, bamboo, thick enough to create . . .