QB
Staff of QB
The mountain air sends my breath aloft as my footsteps crunch icily over the morning’s path. I’d come for pine-scented solitude, but instead, I found you.
Perhaps you’d hiked the selfsame path, enchanted by this deep forest. Now, you’ve rested here quietly for years. All that remains are your bones, mossy with abandonment and neglect.
As the forest reclaims you with this youthful pine growing through your ribcage, I have to wonder: Who were you before you fell, forgotten? Where have you gone?
I crouch beside you, whispering your last rites, and lay a gathered pine cone at your feet.
Moira writes weird stories and pretends to be a rat on the internet. @moirariom.bsky.social www.ohmoira.com
Through the window Calum could see the pleasant grass lawn studded with brilliant buttercups, the trickling stream that bordered the garden and beyond that the soft, rolling hills that stretched into the distance. It was a vista of pure joy and relaxation that he never grew tired of.
“You’re doing it again!” The shrill, whining voice interrupted Calum’s reverie. He blinked and looked away from the window, briefly, at his haggard looking wife. “Why can’t you pay me half the attention you pay that, that window?!”
Calum shrugged slightly and turned back to the window.
“It’s all we have left,” he murmured, “all there is of Earth.”
A thin screech was all the warning he got as his wife advanced with a heavy saucepan and swung it with all her strength. The pan collided against the window with a sharp crack and the view disappeared in a haze of static and a spider web of cracks. A quiet electrical fizz was all that broke the stunned silence.
“What have you done?” Calum looked aghast at his wife, who stood there panting, pan held limply in one hand. “Now there’s nothing left. It’s all gone.”
Outside, through several feet of solid rock, the toxic wind howled across the barren landscape, blasted rock showing no sign that life had ever had a hold there.
Gareth is unofficially the second most widely translated SF short story author in the world.
Emilia is a bag of glass. She’s a fractured humerus. Snapped ulna. Fingernails peeled from their beds. She tries to piece herself back together, slathers porridge on her broken bits like salve, waits for it to dry. The doctors say it’s useless. Accept the inevitable. The inescapable decomposition of a childhood memory, putrefying on the windowsill until mice gnaw at its pulpy rot. Her husband’s name goes sour in the refrigerator next to the spinach. Her own face goes missing, and her head is all mycelia.
Angel T. Dionne is a surrealist professor. She likes her coffee black and her fish tinned.
The descending ball sparkles on TV. I navigate the potted trees, looking for the right guy.
FIVE!
The excited crowd drowns out the revelers twenty stories below.
FOUR!
He’s in a corner by himself, peering over the protective-perimeter of plants. A chill races up my spine when he turns my way.
THREE!
My mouth is dry. I lick my lips in anticipation. Only one thing can sate my thirst.
TWO!
I press my hands to his chest. Hard.
ONE!
His scream is swallowed by the fireworks’ roar as he falls. I join the crowd, singing, “Should old acquaintance be forgot…”
Natalie dislikes being perceived on the material plane. Check out her work at https://nataliewriteson.com/
humans surpass meerkats
in monogamy
but fall short of beavers,
she read in the news and felt
that somehow
she’d let the meerkats down
Elena Shakhnovsky is a writer and poet, living Hemingway’s dream.
The day I died and went to Hell, I was shocked. I wasn’t supposed to go here! I marched through the brimstone bogs and burning fields until I reached Lucifer himself. The Devil was a colossal snake with red eyes aglow.
“I can’t be in Hell, that makes no sense.”
“That’s what they all say,” He chuckled maliciously. “You know what you did.”
“No, not like- I mean it makes no sense because I’m Jewish.”
“Hmm… Are you sure you’re not just a wee bit Christian?”
“No. I’ve never even eaten pork.”
Lucifer paused.
“You know what, you’re right, it really doesn’t. We’ve never even gotten a Buddhist before. This is a first.”
And so Lucifer sent me on my way to my proper afterlife. He’s really a nice fellow once you get to know him. I don’t know why he gets such a bad rap.
Ethan Luce is an author. He has been published in Dear Human and Borderline Tales.
The poetry of artificial intelligence
bends the circuits of my knees
Exuberant, two-toned humming
with love like
large language models love
of the em dash
That straight lightning bolt —
the em dash
Imitation breath in place of depth
My mortal mind
dash deficient
fails to pause
buffering and empties
bit by brittle bit
If only I were digital!
Binary by design — I could flee
this high-key Pantone
posing as existence
Are one and zeros made of
atoms? I ask my eyesight
Chris Dolan writes out of Iowa, where water nitrate levels are far too high.
Cynthia affixes her head on the mantle, beside her others. Really, which to wear for those who'll come knocking?
Perhaps… Indiana State Fair, 1963? Her grandmother's burnt and blistered lips grimace down at her. It's a face for keeping neighbors off the lawn.
Home, 2009? She tries on her old head. Cracked jaw. Bruised eye.
No. Something softer for the kids. They deserve soft. She hesitates over the last head. Caresses it. Yes. It’ll be like a friend.
She answers the first bingbong of the night.
“TRICK OR—”
Their devilish smiles invert. Tears well.
Strange.
“You don't like Preschool 2020?”
Monica is a speculative fiction author, poet, writing contest goblin, and “the best mommy ever.”