Damned Words 64

Choices
Marge Simon

Where am I? What happened to our ship?

A plain of sand spreads to a forever horizon, cold and barren. I could see the outline of our ship on the far side where it landed after a technical malfunction. I hear your voice calling, begging for help. To reach you, I must cross the sand, using a string of huge stones for protection against hostile indigenes who could be hiding in wait. I begin making my way, clutching the stones with shaking hands.

“I’m coming Martha!”

But now I’m thinking about how typical this behavior is of you. Just like on our home planet, bothering me constantly to pick you up from the hairdresser or fix some appliance, or find the key that you lost, and that’s not the half of it.

I stop midway and turn back. You’re on your own, baby.

Bottom of the Sea
Elaine Pascale

Alyssa, from her watery resting place on the sunken ship, rides waves of depression and euphoria. She is depressed because she can no longer feel the sun on her skin. She is euphoric because Ken can no longer feel anything, either.

She looks at him, lying on the ocean floor. Time has not been kind to him. The crabs have taken a liking to his taste, as she once had. The crabs played the game of amorous lovers. They craved and grabbed and grabbed and craved.

Only one of Ken’s blue eyes remained.

The cold water had helped to preserve her. She wondered if she should be offended that the crabs left her alone. If they knew the true story, they would choose her. While Ken deserved violation, he didn’t deserve adoration.

She remembered the sun even from the depths. She remembered that boating day had been sunnier than most. A brightness that held all other senses hostage. She had taken the wheel, a manipulation guised as playfulness.

She had wanted him to fear as she had feared. She had wanted him to hurt more than her cumulative wounds had hurt.

He had used his fists and his words; she had used the rocks as her weapon.

The Buried One
Charles Gramlich

Deep in the earth beneath frost and rocks, the god lies entombed in glacial soil. His heart beats once a century, bringing madness to polar bears and seals and any passing Inuit. His rare breaths tremor the land, tearing small fissures through the ice. In years past, snow would heal those fissures each winter, but the weather is changing. A warmth alien to these climes melts the new snow almost as soon as it falls, and then it seeps deep like burrowing worms to speed the god’s heartbeat, to hasten his breathing. He is waking up, and will soon rise through all the frozen earth to smash his way out under the cold, cold sky. And there will be hell.

Follow
Lee Andrew Forman

I always wondered what it would be like. But this isn’t how I pictured it. A desolate place stretching as far as eternity is what I have to look forward to, and all I’ve left is time—relentless in its nature, uncaring in its cruelty. I carry only memories on my back as I walk through the vastness of it. I suppose I still have those, but I can’t decide whether they’re a burden or the one thing I should try to hold on to. I suppose it would be easy to forget in a place like this. The further my feet carry me the less I feel like myself, the more of me seems to get left behind.

Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. Perhaps that makes it easier to face the end. The fewer earthly attachments you have, the easier it is to move on. The past no longer matters; nor does the future. There is only now, and it will be so forever.

I guess I just have to accept it. There isn’t any other choice. This place, this life after life, death after death, it pulls me, calls to me, sings a lonely song that draws me in. All I have to do is follow.

Gathered on the Beach
Richard Meldrum

After the alert was confirmed as legitimate, we ran. Not to escape, that was impossible, but to revisit the place where we first met. It was fitting to say goodbye there. We stood on the rocky shore, looking out towards the ocean. The conflagration would come from the west, behind us. Neither of us wanted to see it boiling towards us, incinerating our bodies. It was bad enough it was going to happen. We stood watching the water, while behind us we heard the explosion. With only seconds to wait, on this beach, there was only time to whisper goodbye.

Under the Surface, We All Dream
A.F. Stewart

The sea faded into the foggy far horizon, a cold salt wind blowing inshore. Sunlight reflected off the placid surface like a shimmer on opaque glass. In the sky, grey clouds hung fat and thick, and ripe with rain. No birds circled the rocky shoreline, no creatures swum beneath the waves. Time seemed motionless, hushed with the pause of expectation.

Yet we, the drowned, were aware. Lost in the swirls of fractured aspirations and currents of ocean. Eternal slumber captured us, in storm, in ruin; cradled souls in silent grief.

Where we dreamed.

Of life, of hope, of remnants beyond our reach. Hints of laughter extending out to haunt us, that teased us with what can never be. A future extinct, futile smoke born of wishes beyond your concept of reality.

It was the only thing we had left.

Until today.

Today was different. The cycle turned, and the veil thinned.

Thin enough to break.

Now we are coming home…

The Impossible Bliss
Harrison Kim

Vaclav and Geldof, the Russian astronauts, landed on Venus and stepped out of their ship. Ahead of the spacemen, rocks steamed in the acidic air, at the edge of an ocean boiling with sulfur.

“My feet feel strange. Do your feet feel odd?” asked Vaclav.

Something warm from the rock he stood on was pushing its way up through his suit and into his body. It was beautiful and loving. It felt better than even the heroin high he’d experienced once when he was a teenager. How could he resist?
Vaclav threw down his camera, ripped his spacesuit off. And stood there naked and gasping for air.

Geldor watched as liquid black covered his space companion.

“It’s the greatest feeling……” Vaclav exclaimed, trying to reach his oxygen tank. ‘I can hardly stand it!”

And in fact, the joy was so intense though the air was filled with sulfur he screamed and screamed and screamed again until the liquid cut off his voice.

Geldor felt the substance seeping in. What a feeling! He too ripped his space suit off.

“So good!” he shrieked. “So excellent!”

He sank to his knees, howling with ecstasy until his breath ran out, finally all of him lay immersed in the embrace of the black liquid.

Neither of the spacemen could move, and neither could yell any more as the liquid caked and cooked their bodies. Looking on the bright side, the impossible bliss continued….because, on the planet Venus, all humans maintain immortal souls.

The liquid rock that covered the men hardened, and in stone the two astronauts remained, their spirits covered and deep within the rock, two sulfur steaming forms forever quivering in agonizing joy at the edge of the sulfuric ocean.

The Shore
Kathleen McCluskey

From orbit, the planet appeared lifeless. A silver ocean stretched beneath a colorless sky, broken by jagged black formations along the coast. The survey detected no vegetation, no cities, no lifeforms.

I landed and began exploring. The formations resembled enormous spines, curved and tapered, rising into a line that disappeared into the mist. Each leaned slightly inland, spaced almost precisely the same distance from the next. Beneath the surface, shapes continued in a broken row.

I followed them along the shore. The water shifted around my boots, but my instruments detected no current. When I stopped, it settled. When I moved, it followed.

Farther along, one of the spines had broken. Its inside was pale and porous, threaded with tiny, black channels. I pressed my glove against it and felt a slight vibration, a slow shudder traveled through the ground.

The ocean began to recede, exposing broad, curved plates beneath the spines. They were buried beneath mineral deposits, their edges disappeared into the darkness. I watched the water drain around them, revealing a surface that was neither stone nor soil but something smooth.

My instruments registered no seismic event but the ground shifted beneath my feet.

Through the thinning mist I could barely make out the continuation of the formation, a vast, curved ridge stretching into the distance. The black spines were not scattered rocks. They rose from something buried beneath the ocean. Something so enormous that its shape could not be seen in its entirety.

Then the nearest spine moved. Others followed. One after another, traveling toward the horizon. The silver water surged back over the exposed plates and the entire coastline lifted beneath me.

I ran for the lander as the planet’s sleeping surface rolled.

Between
Miriam H. Harrison

When the water took me, I didn’t expect to see land again. Lost somewhere between unseeable shores, I gave myself over to the pull of the currents, to the cold of the deep. The last I saw of the sky, it was a twilit purple between day and night. And then the waves closed over me.

So it surprised me to find myself here, at the edge. A place between the water and land. And me, neither living nor dead. These stones caught what was left of me, fed it to the fish and birds and scavengers, until all that was left was me. These stones keep me here, captured yet free.

Above me, the sky darkens, lightens—like it did, like it will—caught as it is in the cycles of day and night. Around me, things stir and settle, rise and fade. More cycles turning, more beginnings and endings, more hopes and fears. And between it all, me. Simply me.

On the Rocks
Alyson Faye

Slip sliding, soaking wet Jem and Lou clambered across the granite grey rocks, racing against the setting sun.

“We’re too late,” Jem gasped, chest heaving, shivering with cold.

Lou grabbed her younger brother’s hand. “Just keep moving.”

Behind them fingers of mist curled across the water. The surface of the rocks rippled. A bell tolled. Just once. The children froze.

“We’ll have to hide.” Lou said.

“Where?” asked Jem. “Once the bell tolls, then He’s coming up.”

“Over there,” she pointed.

There was an overhang to their left and beneath a crawl space big enough for the two children to squeeze into. They scrambled faster, shinning knees and twisting ankles, scuttling underneath. Jem closed his eyes.

The bell tolled again. From the lost church, submerged beneath the waters.

The villagers said that on the turn of the solstice the steeple could be seen above the waters, and those who saw it died within the year. The church had been cursed, as was its reverend. A century ago the waters swallowed them both. When the bell rang out the Reverend Bellamy rose from his watery grave seeking the unwary or unlucky to drag back into the depths.

Lou and Jem huddled tighter. They heard the scrape of approaching boots, a man’s deep voice reciting ‘”For the wages of sin is death….’” Louder, nearer.

From the direction of the village handbells rang out, voices shouted, a dog barked.

“They’re coming for us,” Lou whispered, but at that a skinny hand reached in yanking her ankle, dragging her out.

The reverend, a black silhouette against the grey skies, slung Lou over his shoulder, strode across the rocks, with ease, then stepped out into the water. Down, down he sank, Jem screaming in his wake, and the villagers carrying flambeaus flocking too late to the rocks.