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.
The highway is not safe. There are things that will consume you in the blink of an eye. Creatures born out of the radioactive scorched earth. They are hungry for human flesh, prowling the area constantly.
He sees them on the road from his vantage point up on the hill.
Amanda Thompson is a South African writer who has written several short stories and novellas in different genres. She loves to read, write, and build miniatures.
When the last M&M had been savored, she threw the candy wrapper to the wind. It scampered past empty buildings. No litter police here.
A tattered flag whipped in the gale, golden horse on a blood red field.
The war ended abruptly. The virus had killed everyone. All but her.
Hawk and Young are two sci-fi/fantasy authors, joined by a single mission – to write! We live 550 miles apart, are best friends, but have never met in person. See more at hawkandyoung.com.