story

“Wait!” Someone shouted at Noah. Someone who sounded like him.

Someone who looked like him, too, except for his bandaged wrist and dirty clothes.

“Don’t do that.”

Noah stopped with his hand on the time machine door. “Are you me?”

“From the future. I came back to stop you.”

“Wait, it worked!”

“Not exactly.”

“But it worked. I gotta warn them.”

“They won’t listen. Save us the trouble. Don’t go.”

“I have to try.”

Noah entered the machine before he could stop himself. Another dirtier Noah ran up to the time machine. They looked at themselves.

“We didn’t listen?”

“Again.”

Monica lives in Minnesota with her family and cats. She teaches high school Spanish.

A small village, and me with big ideas. I don’t belong, but expectations trap me.

Fate intervenes; a beloved father lost, an enchanted castle found. A giant, snarling beast. Illusions hide beauty within, but I only use my eyes to see. I flee, and wolves come—giant and snarling.

I am rescued by the beast, unexpectedly. I soften and bend, unexpectedly.

So does he.

But a gentle beast doesn’t belong, doesn’t fit expectations. Small men come, beautiful outsides hiding snarling monsters within.

They kill the beast.

I fall with him. Expectations flee with our last breath, and the world finally opens up.

Death sets us free.

Meredith Kinrys is a multidisciplinary artist/writer exploring society, empowerment, and the occasional fairy tale.

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.

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.

Apprentice wizard Fortio pulled up a chair, grinning in anticipation. He set his pint of foaming beer on a coaster and covertly studied the humans at the table from under shaggy eyebrows.

Friday was games night at the Boar’s Head Pub. He’d been longing to join in for months now. He’d had to sneak away from his master, the great wizard Greybeard, to get here tonight. He hoped the jeans and sweater he’d liberated from a neighbor’s laundry line would conceal his identity. Better than wearing my robe and regalia, he told himself.

Fortio shook his head as he remembered the veiled warnings the wizards back at the School had given, about the dangers of mixing with humans. Overdone, like most of their warnings, he thought. How could these weak creatures harm him?

He took a long pull on his beer as he checked out the game box on the table. Pandemic. He’d never played before, but if humans could do it, surely he could manage.

On his first turn, he flipped a card over.

In a distant city, a child began to cough.

Lisa Timpf’s writing has appeared in Star*Line, Polar Borealis, Scifaikuest and other venues.