Fiction

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

“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.

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.