The metal frame lay across the pasture, its ironwork rusty red. Edward mused that it had once stood erect, envisioning a tower that would have pierced the very sky.
“To have seen such a thing!” he marvelled.
The wind howled its agreement, as it roared through the ruins of Paris.
Bill lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. He doubts his sanity all the time, and sometimes it doubts him right back.
Tell me a story with a happy ending.
That genderless AI voice bounced through the sterile capsule, the low gravity seeming to slow the pronunciation.
“I can’t, Sam.”
Did God create the virus?
“No.”
Did I?
“Yes, Sam.”
Through the port window of the capsule, the lights on Earth faded.
Rob Spielman’s short stories and poetry have previously been published in The Blue Earth Review, Allergory, Pif Magazine, and other journals. He has an MFA from Concordia University and currently makes a living as a writing consultant while living in Minneapolis with his wife and two children.
Dolly squinted up, stolen from her busy holopad by the boisterous burst of blue-hued starlight. Her pupils adjusted. She caught her breath.
“Oh!”
Her Comet-class space train, cantering along the networked velocity gates, weaved a shimmering silver thread through the dense asteroid cloud.
“…I’ll need celery for soup,” she remembered.
Ben Toovey is a Brit living in Germany, and a keen procrastinator.
The curator stands next to a tall glass case filled with a dark liquid and pauses a moment, before flipping a switch to illuminate the creature inside it.
The visitors recoil in shock at its bare flesh, piercing eyes and white teeth.
“I present to you our predecessor: homo sapiens.”
Daniel doesn’t visit museums much these days.
The filament flares of our violet sun act like milestones of the day; less so, the red night sun that chases—it’s too weak to emit much of anything.
A lot like my father and I.
I wiped the knife. “You won’t call me your red son anymore, I suppose.”
E.O. figures that people on other worlds probably still have daddy issues and bad blood. But they also have space cars, e.g. a flying Maserati. And that’s pretty cool.
You and a friend have been stranded for over a decade.
You have searched for years, covering hundreds of miles, finding no signs of others.
You hear a loud roar and see a spacecraft approach.
Is it a rescue, or an unknown danger?
Markings on the craft read Earth One.
Denny E. Marshall had had art, poetry, and fiction published. One recent credit is fiction in Night To Dawn 35, April 2019. See more at dennymarshall.com.
It all started as a joke, but thousands of us did end up camping in the desert. We couldn’t get any closer than five miles from Area 51 because of the military roadblocks, but a large tent city quickly emerged. When the alien ships arrived, the joke was on us.
Eddie D. Moore travels extensively for work, and he spends much of that time listening to audiobooks. The rest of the time is spent dreaming of stories to write, and he spends the weekends writing them. His stories have been published by Jouth Webzine, Kzine, Alien Dimensions, Theme of Absence, Devolution Z, and Fantasia Divinity Magazine. Find more on his blog.
The man used to chastise the dog for drinking from scummy puddles beside the road.
That extra-hard leash-yank was what returned to him after the water was gone, when he and the dog both lapped at rare graces of liquid, the man’s knees muddied.
Eventually, the dog had to go.
Evan McMurry’s fiction has been published in more than one dozen journals, including Post Road, Euphony, Arcturus, Oddville Press, Lotus-Eater Magazine, Palaver, Mulberry Fork Review, and more. His story “Nothing Kinky” won the New Millennium Fiction Prize, and his story “Nixon in Heaven” won Exposition Review’s Flash Fiction contest. “The Fall of Rabbi Gold” was selected as a finalist for the Al-Simāk Award for Fiction from the Chicago Review of Books.
A writer daydreams of outlandish worlds, in which man can fly: in which space is no longer off-limits.
Then, having signed another imaginative story, he slowly gets to his feet, snuffs out his candle, and lays down his quill, while the sound of a horse-drawn carriage fades into the distance.
Maico Morellini was born in 1977. In 2010 he won the Urania Award with the sci-fi novel “Il re nero”, published in 2011 by Mondadori. In 2014, for Delos Digital, he penned the sci-fi series “I Necronauti”. In May 2016 he published his second sci-fi novel, “La terza memoria”, out from Mondadori. In December 2016, his sci-fi anthology “Voci della Polis” was published by Vincent Book Editore. His novel Il diario dell’estinzione (Watson Edizioni, November 2018) won this year’s prestigious Premio Italia for best Fantasy novel. His Sci-Fi, Horror, and Weird short stories have featured in numerous anthologies.
This story was translated from Italian by Sarah Jane Webb.
Our peaceful mission
which commenced in Roswell in 1947
is complete.
Agents infiltrated the planet on periodic visits
successfully morphing into intelligent life forms to deliver our survival doctrine.
Warnings of the dangers of pollution, climate change, and chemical toxicity
were ignored
Mission conclusion:
Earthlings will destroy their own planet
John B. Sinclair is a much-travelled Scot who has now returned to Scotland, where he enjoys freelance writing on a variety of subjects.