Micau’s Contract

Ash landed on Micau’s shoulders like delicate snowflakes. He was a dot among the scorched hills stretching beyond sight – burnt everywhere except for a narrow path of green. That path seemed blessed, protected from the once fierce fires as though the flames found a flowing rive of cool water in those blades of grass. […]

The Beast and Its Companion

Light was a fable that Micau heard about from snakes that looked like gnarled trees and from birds that rarely sang. The child listened to the sounds of these creatures stirring from above. Some hisses would slither into words – eyes, dark and damp – some calls into songs that made Micau walk a little […]

Red Water

Kali could’ve spotted Red Shui’s tower from miles away a few years ago. Its skyscraper height grooved on both sides like a vertical waves flowed into the Martian dirt – it seemed to be growing out of the ground. But with the dust storm now in its third year, Kali couldn’t make out anything but […]

Out of Reach

Ground control to Major Tom..

Commander Parker hung in the copula of the International Space Station, nodding his head to the song etched in his mind.

Ground control to Major Tom…

The Astronaut Gardner

The trowel felt like a string was pulling it towards the ground. Diane relented to the force and plunged the tool into the soil, satisfyingly sliding into the damp garden. Her gloves were sitting back on the bench, a lifetime of calluses nearly disappeared after a year orbiting on Station, and she had no intention […]

A Different Kind of Death

The future came in her blind spot at 74 miles per hour. Some tired driver, some careless teenager, or maybe April’s own fault she thought as the first nudge jolted her against the seatbelt. I should probably pull over, was her first subconscious idea as her bones began to crunch with the same ease as […]

True to Conspiracy

Julie’s phone buzzed in her pocket like a handful of bees trying to escape. Maybe someone looking for directions, she ignored both the thought and the buzzing phone. Everyone at the viewing party in her Tucson home stood around the television. Somehow the Chinese were convinced to air their Moon landing live, it was a […]

Time to Chance

Edvina smiled radiantly and stepped with a light supple touch that was startling at first to many people, but was eventually seen as having a grace on its own. Still fresh from the rejuvenating mist of the time stream, she twirled in her soft hand the standard black memory stick that decoded the assigned changes […]

No Take-Backsies

In 2015 an asteroid about the size of a suburban house, large enough to do major damage to any metropolitan city, was spotted. It was found not by NASA or the European Space Agency, but by amateur astronomers. Five years earlier the United States government launch the top secret X-37, a small space shuttle carrying […]

Skywind

Winoa hardly ever washed her hands growing up. Tiny hairs of caterpillars tickled her palms, dirt clogs parched from the drought fell apart between her fingers, she’d wrap herself around the coarse stumps of trees, picking apart the bark and searching for the sap that rarely came out. Winoa’s hands once had the soft callousness […]