QB
Staff of QB
A water bottle squashed in his hands, driblets against the inferno, he closed
his eyes.
He removed the hat from his head, held it against his chest with a silent
prayer. He could feel the embers chewing at his fat, and knew it was only a
matter of time. What a fool he was to not heed his own advice.
But you cannot prevent death, can you, Smokey?
You can only hope that the concrete jungle fairs better than the desert.
Maybe your last memory will be of water from above, or maybe you'll get
remade into a Deep Fake.
Samantha tries to write, but the radio is just a little too loud.
Smokey was a finalist in our Annual Drabble contest to capture the year that was 2025 in 100 words.
In a navy suit tailored for broadcast seriousness, shoulders rigid with ambition and face slick with perspiration, he stands at the podium as a red Breaking News banner crawls across the screen. He opens by acknowledging “concerns” and assuring the public that safety is the top priority. Reporters clamber forward and begin shouting questions: the death toll of the toxic frog plague in West Texas; the Secretary of Domestic Security’s posts depicting the destruction of Latvia; confirmation that the North American Vampire Coven is real. He only replies, “Who’s to say? We’ll keep you informed. Thank you, and God bless.”
Grace Crouthamel is a queer writer from Northern Appalachia, fond of strange stories, living with two dogs, a lizard.
As Always, We’ll Keep You Informed was a finalist in our Annual Drabble contest to capture the year that was 2025 in 100 words.
The crackling snap of shattered wood was troubling, though most of those folks had been dead for decades; beds, tables and beams quietly surrendered to the blaze.
It was the screaming palms that pierced the heartwood. In firestorm winds their long spines arched backward, heads crowned with flaming fronds, each tree a torch passing fire to the next.
But we knobcone pines have dropped our cones. The heat has burst them open,
scattering winged seeds to ride the wind.
We were shaped for fire. Our children will rise from the ash.
Ali McLafferty is a writer and artist who would like to be a tree.
A Knobcone Pine in the Palisades Fire was a finalist in our Annual Drabble contest to capture the year that was 2025 in 100 words.
This month...
Contributions from...
2025 Annual Drabble winners:
Ali McLafferty, Grace Crouthamel, Kenneth M. Kapp, Michael Wever, Samantha Sage
and...
Adrienne Rex, Angel T. Dionne, Chris Dolan, Chris Doty-Dunn, E. Florian Gludovacz, E.J. LeRoy, Elena Shakhnovsky , Ethan Luce, Etta Wynn , Gabrielle Bleu, Gareth D Jones, Ken Kakareka, LindaAnn LoSchiavo, Lisa Timpf, Mike Murphy, Meghan Murphy, Meredith Kinrys, Moira Richardson, Monica Lyrehart, Monica Wenzel, Nadia Sharp, Natalie Bucsko, Nicholas De Marino, R. F. Daniels, S.C. Mills, Stephen Ground
Cover art
featuring photograph from Sawyer Bengtson in Chicago, IL
PDF and EPUB zines of May's stories available exclusively to paid subscribers:
After centuries of speculation on the matter, there was now a definitive answer regarding the fate of an individual’s consciousness after death.
The sentence: fifty trillion years of torture, followed by an eternity of happiness and bliss.
God—actually a super-intelligent alien from Alpha Centauri – had devised the sentence as a means of testing the effect of long term torture
on creatures of limited intelligence—Earthlings. He had felt guilty about this, and appended a blissful eternity as some sort of reward.
A man named Lemming sat dying in a hospital bed. He was the first dying person to know what his fate would be.
Lemming addressed the doctor who was tending to him.
“Suppose—after, say, several trillion years – something kills the omnipotent alien. I’m tortured for several trillion years, and then at the mercy of some other super-intelligent creature.”
“The alien is immortal,”the doctor said. “You have nothing to complain about. A more interesting torture experiment would involve the subject being tortured for fifty trillion years, given a minute of extreme happiness, tortured again for another fifty trillion years, and so on.”
He died and the torture began. Every individual which had ever existed was being tortured with him, though some—those which had died in the distant past—were closer to the eternal reward than others.
When the reward came it was no longer recognizable to him. It felt like torture.
The author has sold dozens of works to numerous publications. He resides in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Taking a deep, hopeful breath, Barnaby exited the humming time machine into the same garage he left not long ago. Damn it. This could be a good sign, but it was unlikely.
His hope vanished when he heard them: His shrewish wife calling for him to stop his tinkering, come outside now, and help her; their two foul-mouthed, bratty kids; and that yippy dog whose goal was to pee in the house at least once a day.
Still?
How could his carefully calculated, happy hours of gleefully messing with the timestream have not changed one iota of his miserable life?
Mike has had over 150 audio plays dramatized, won many awards, and had two short film scripts produced.
There’s something crawling around. It’s in the walls. I usually hear it at night time. It moves in a hurried pace. It’s looking for something, or maybe it’s running from something. I can’t even tell. It’s been like this for the past two weeks. It’s scurrying inside the walls. It’s shifting as I sleep, or try to sleep. It’s moving like an animal. I can’t even tell how large it is, because it changes in size. Sometimes it’s like a roach. Sometimes it’s like a squirrel. It doesn’t even make a noise otherwise. It’s nocturnal. In the day it seems to be away. I think I need to tape up my vents, and all the cracks in the walls. Now that I mention it, there’s a lot of cracks in the walls, and they’re different sizes too.
Rickey Rivers Jr was raised in Alabama. Tree House can be found on Amazon.