QB
Staff of QB
Man or Mouse
MIKE MURPHY
Lt. Bonner knew the starcraft needed repairs and that he – a mere cook – couldn’t fix it. Shortly, the vessel would crash onto the planet below.
He’d have to try the genetic accelerator again, though it hadn’t been reliable. He had emerged from its chamber as a janitor and a florist, among other things, even though he believed he’d set the dials to engineer.
He walked into the booth. After the orange glow ended, he emerged. . . a lobster. The crash was imminent now.
He chuckled a “lobstery” chuckle, thinking about confused future archeologists wondering how crustaceans got into space.
Mike has had over 150 audio plays dramatized, won many awards, and had two short film scripts produced.
Rollercoaster
NADIA SHARP
“Are you out of your mind?” Mandy yelled at Jim.
They were an old couple, used to that type of bickering day in, day out. But Jim would not let go of the crazy idea.
“Do you want to go to Canada Wonderland?” Mandy went on. “After all these years? We’ve been nestling here for almost two hundred years, and now, out of the blue, you want to jump off a roller coaster?”
Jim chewed on his tobacco leaves—his only sin in this nice place in the afterlife—and muttered, “I would’ve gone there eons ago, but I was just trying to be mindful of… of…”
Exasperated, Mandy huffed. Her thin rosy lips tightened. She was about to say an obscenity but refrained at the last minute. “I’m not setting foot in Canada Wonderland again…”
Her voice broke, but she held her head up high. Jim felt sorry for her. Even though she got on his nerves with her meticulous cleaning habits and fanatic organizational skills, he still loved her. But he was determined to jump off that huge, snaky track from the highest peak into the void. What a feeling that would be!
He looked at his wife for a while. She was as beautiful as she had been on that fateful day, although half her face was a little flattened because of that three-hundred-foot fall.
He got an idea. “You can ride in one of those enclosed cars—yeah, why not?”
Mandy shook her head. “Unbelievable!”
Nadia Sharp is a Canadian writer. Her work blends the speculative, paranormal, and fantastical with the real.
nadiasharpauthor.com
Excrescence
R. F. DANIELS
It began as an itch in the back of my throat. Indistinguishable from the first hint of a cough, nothing that I would have paid attention to at the time. We were all coughing back in those days, with the acrid smoke from burning cities blanketing us day and night, and what few respirators we had being set aside for the Scavengers.
We all coughed back then. And when my cough moved into my lungs, taking up residence with nothing but a tickle to announce itself, I would have been hard-pressed to distinguish that from our new normal. Everyone had their own ways of coping in those days; I tried not to think about the damage being done to my body, mirroring the damage done to the planet in the decades prior. Keep looking forward, I told myself, focus on what you can control.
Maybe if I had paid a little more attention, I would have realized what was happening while there was still time to stop it. But I hadn’t, and one amber-bright September morning, when I opened my mouth to speak and instead fungal blooms spilled out like so much pastel vomit, I knew it was too late.
R. F. Daniels is a queer nonbinary writer of speculative fiction based in Helsinki and found online at rfdaniels.com.
fruit
STEPHEN GROUND
if pineapples breathed,
if they walked & talked & fucked,
I would still eat them
Stephen Ground is a writer and filmmaker based in Treaty Six Territory [Edmonton, Alberta, Canada].
Your Sacred Resting Place
MOIRA RICHARDSON
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
Gone With the Window
GARETH D JONES
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.
Dementia
ANGEL T. DIONNE
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.
Auld Lang Syne
NATALIE BUCSKO
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/