Fallen

October 18, 2023October 15, 2023 ~ Nina D'Arcangela ~ 4 Comments

Her wail spit the air.

“How… How could you let this happen?” she crooned as the young boy lay motionless in her arms, blood trickling from his cracked skull. “Why choose him when there are so many others?” Inconsolable, the mother stood and limped back to their home where she placed his still body on a rock bench.

The afternoon and evening spent grieving, she finally drifted off to sleep. In her dreams came the answer, but not one she expected.

“Do not shed a tear for the young one, he was meant for things unkind in this world and could not have stopped himself, Giver of Life.”

“Things, what things? Couldn’t stop himself from what?” the mother asked of the Taker of Life.

“Things I cannot explain. Things that would break you, tear him from you, make you wish you’d never given birth.”

Jerking fitfully, even her dream mind could not fathom a world in which her young son was taken before manhood, before he was old enough to claim a wife who would bear him children of his own. She spat at the Taker of Life, “Nothing could make me wish such a thing! You took him because of greed and corrupt desire – do not claim nobility as your cause. You’re evil! I should tear your effigy from the temple, you do not deserve our reverence.”

As her heart seized, the winged God sighed. “Woman, I speak the truth. He was not destined to be mundane; he would have brought about an end to all. Do you not see what resides in his soul?”

But a mother’s grief can never be sated with prophetic words, nor could she see beyond the love that tinted her sight. The Taker knew of this but did not wish the breeder to suffer. “Kind woman, hear me clear – your boy would have brought ruin to the village, he would have led riots that would have crumbled our civilization, MY civilization.” The Taker is not without compassion. “I can seed you another, kinder child.”

“No! Insuetti was my child, I do not wish to carry one of your kind. I want my boy back – damn your village.” Wracking sobs fed the small gasp heard in the waking world.

“Giver of Life, open your eye, see your boy. Do you not see that his blood runs black as the night? Do you not understand that he was the antithesis of all you are? Must I show you the atrocities he would have wrought?” The mother refused to wake and accept her child for what the Taker claimed him to be. Where there was darkness, she could see only light. Where there was malice, she could remember only his joyous grin. Where there was deceit, she could perceive only childish antics.

Left with no way to console the Giver, the Taker showed her a glimpse of what would have come to pass if the child hadn’t fallen to his death. He showed her images of greed and cruelty, of her sweet boy grown to manhood, of the acts of violence he would commit against their people. The plague he would bring upon the land. He showed her fields barren of crops; their village in ashes; men, women and children slaughtered by the droves. All because her child was brought into this world.

Once again, the Taker prompted for her to wake, to see Insuetti with clear eyes, and she did. She woke, looked upon her son with the reflection of the dream-vision playing against the back of her eyes. She could not deny that she had glimpsed the things the Taker of Life spoke of, but she could not accept them into her heart either.

Climbing upon the stone bench the child’s body rested upon, she straddled the young one, drew a sharp rock across the soft flesh of each inner thigh, and bathed her boy in the blood that gave him life with fervent hope that it would bring him breath again even as it stole the air from her own lungs.

∼ Nina D’Arcangela

Spot

October 11, 2023October 9, 2023 ~ Charles Gramlich ~ 8 Comments

Spot is my pet and I love him. My daddy brought him home last week, but already we’re inseparable. He sleeps on the floor by my bed and I feed him scraps from the table when no one is looking.

I love my daddy, too. And not just because he brought Spot home after my dog, Rover, died. Daddy knows everything. He teaches at a major university and is a doctor, though I’m always sposed to remember he’s not a “med doctor” but a doctor of Sperimental Psychology. He says med doctors are just plumbers.

I’m eight years old and one thing that worried me at first about Spot was that he was older than me. So was Rover. But when I asked Daddy if he thought Spot might die soon from old age, he said not to worry, that Rover had died from barking too much and Spot doesn’t bark.

Spot plays all the games I like, as long as I give him clear orders. I especially like to play fetch with him, and he never gets the ball all slobbery like Rover did. The only thing I don’t like is that he’s not as much fun to pet as Rover. Part of it is that he doesn’t have Rover’s soft fur, but I think a lot of it is the ugly black box attached to his head. It gets in the way a lot.

Daddy says the box is really important, though. He says it has lectrodes that control Spot, and that without it Spot would run away. I don’t want that, so I’ll just have to live with the box, I guess. I sure wouldn’t want to see Spot’s picture on a milk carton like those other lost kids.

∼ Charles Gramlich

Not My Annabella

October 4, 2023September 30, 2023 ~ TheDamned ~ 3 Comments

Annabella thinks she is the custodian of the happy ending in her narrative. She slips through gravity into a character she decides. I watch her from the wings of the theatre of our house, with a mug of tea, and try to enjoy the show.

I like Rapunzel best, and Lady Macbeth least. Ophelia and Juliet make me think.

A tourist in her own life, sightseeing here and there, a magpie picking up roles to take home.

Words remembered from some place, but she summons my attention, delivers them sincerely as if her own sweat exists in every syllable; and as I bend down and kneel at her feet with a proposal on my lips drying like spit, she hurts me with sworn untruths.

I cannot stomach the drama in an empty theatre, her performing as if I am the lights, the music, the audience, so we walk to the park where she can have her audience. I indulge this once.

We hire a rowing boat. Annabella tells me she loves me which sculpts the clouds into angels and unicorns. The sun is shining and daffodils and tulips in the park decree it is spring. She smells of lavender and her voice, singing The Owl and the Pussy Cat, tickles my ears.

Annabella wonders how the oars sound as they caress the water; if our boat leaves an echo on the river the way someone’s laughter does on a listener’s smile; if the swans make a sound when they glide and stop, glide and stop, and how the eddies sound to the fish beneath.

Her hand trails in the water like a vapour trail in the clouds. She likes to leave a mark wherever she goes—my Annabella.

And she loves me, she says. And it is spring, and we are rowing nowhere in particular, and I close my eyes, just for an instant and pretend she isn’t lying.

Raindrops land on my eyelids. April showers. As I row the boat back the way we came, I think of the umbrella stand in our hall. It is always empty because she leaves them whenever she remembers to take one. She used to joke it was a way of making it easy for family and friends to buy her a present.

I bought her one once – a duck handle, which she said she adored – for two weeks.

Am I an umbrella of hers waiting to be held, only to be forgotten? Are there enough umbrellas in the world to catch her lies like rain?

Back at home, I say I need a shower. My hurt needs to be wet. The soreness lubricated after her abrasive tongue. Standing akimbo in the shower cubicle with the tiles swimming in and out of vision, I resolve to possess a greater beauty than her: the pure truth.

It has to be done.

Annabella is cooking something aromatic for supper, but it will go to waste. Soon she will know my feelings, and I will need to shower again.

~ Louise Worthington

The Other Shoe

September 20, 2023September 5, 2023 ~ Marge Simon ~ 5 Comments

He was a big man, tall enough, and his shoulders could stand two bushels of grain. By day he worked the docks of a mighty river. He lived alone in a tin-roofed shack near the pier, avoided rum, spoke only when he had to, but that was before the last war. Now the river folk were gone and the storehouses along the river were dark and empty.

He sat on the bank, chewing a sassafras root. Once a frothy blue highway for barges and fishing boats, it was sluggish and rust colored. In fact, a perfect match for the shoe, the only thing left to remind him of her. He’d found it by the campfire, brought it to the spot where the river turned southward to the Gulf. On a whim, he’d stuck a few pathetic purple flowers in it. A token of their love? Not exactly.

Her name was Violet and she was the last woman on earth. In fact, as far as they knew, they were the last two people. All the food was gone. No surviving animals, no fish or birds. Even the vegetation was dying or poisonous. They were starving. He was a big man, a strong man, and he was very hungry.

Idly, he wondered what happened to her other shoe.

∼ Marge Simon

Remainder

September 13, 2023September 5, 2023 ~ Lee Andrew Forman ~ 3 Comments

Gene looked at the photograph of his family. Death isn’t pure, he thought. It’s damn filthy. It chews and spits, leaving you half-digested until you eventually dissolve.

He watched the virus take them. Minions of quietus ravaged their bodies until souls departed through fevered brows. The infection killed them quickly. But it never let go. A collective consciousness still carried their undead frames. Shuffling feet and hands scraping against the boards nailed over the kitchen doorway were all he could hear anymore.

What little strength his mind retained had been used to pretend they weren’t there—trapped together, rotting away… But nothing remained in the world to divert his attention. He hadn’t seen another living person in weeks. He considered if he might be the last. In a way he hoped it were true. Then at least humanity would be unchained from the nightmare and could finally rest.

Guilt tightened his gut, more than pains of hunger. Why had he been spared? What made him immune? Was it punishment for some forgotten sin he committed? Maybe it was just shit luck. He preferred to assume it was only his misfortune; it made the most sense.

His eyes lazily rolled to the makeshift barrier keeping a ravenous, zombified family from eating him alive. He wondered how long it would hold; but realized it didn’t matter. Sure, he’d suffer an agonizing death if they broke through, but no one would ever know of it. He sat alone in a miniscule blip of time. Human life no longer held meaning. History had been erased and would never again be recorded. In a way, he didn’t even exist.

He found that to be a comforting thought. It settled his nerves, calmed his raging heart.

Fingertips released their grip. The picture of his family rested next to a shotgun on the table.

As a calm settled within, he picked up the gun. Peering into the box of shells to see how many were left, he made his choice.

∼ Lee Andrew Forman

Crush

August 30, 2023August 20, 2023 ~ Miriam H. Harrison ~ 7 Comments

She pondered again how he might taste. It was a distracting thought, and the more she thought about it, the more loudly the subtle pulse in his throat seemed to beat. She nodded to all he said, but heard only the rhythm of his blood.

Could she still contain her hunger, or would this be the day when she sank her fangs into his throat? But that seemed too quick, too simple. Perhaps instead she could start at his chest. Peel back the skin and muscle, pop the ribs out of her way, pull his heart right from his body. She imagined how it would feel in her hand—a warm, wet weight to hold, to crush, to drink oh so deeply. Salty-sweet, perhaps. Thick and pulpy, certainly. She shuddered at the thought, the thrill, the thumping of his heart that beckoned her closer.

Even so, she sat. She sat, she nodded, she smiled. She continued as she always had. Reminding herself that however sweet he may be, her imaginings of him were sweeter still.

∼ Miriam H. Harrison

The Smell

August 16, 2023January 4, 2024 ~ Elaine Pascale ~ 6 Comments

“What’s that smell?” Ben asked.

Lydia inhaled deeply. “I don’t smell it.”

He stood and walked to her. “It’s you. It’s coming from you.” He sniffed the air around her. “Definitely you.”

“Thanks. Tell me more about how I stink.”

He lifted her arm and brought it to his nose. “It’s the shirt. The shirt stinks.”

She pulled her arm back, insulted. “I just bought this shirt.”

“Well, it smells…like you got it off a dead body.”

“I got it at the thrift shop. That one on Gulfspray.”

“Then it probably did come off a dead body.” He started to go to the kitchen but stopped in his tracks. “There isn’t a thrift store on Gulfspray. That’s a residential area.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Such a gaslighter. If there is no shop, then how did I get this shirt?”

He shrugged. “Smells kinda like you pulled it out of Satan’s ass.” He knew he was right about Gulfspray, he drove by it every day on his commute.

He looked at the shirt again. He had thought it was a red and brown tartan pattern; now it looked orange and tan. “You washed it right?”

“Of course, I washed it!”

“Well, it smells.” He whispered the next part, “And it changed colors.”

“I don’t smell it, you’re crazy.”

As Ben walked into the kitchen, he considered that he might be crazy. It wouldn’t be the first time that he had seen something, heard something, or sensed something that Lydia was oblivious to. He had never had an olfactory hallucination and he took medications for the others. Lydia preferred to live a pharmaceutical-free life and she sometimes disassociated to the point of disappearing. There were times when he would not know where she was or what she was doing and she would return, tight lipped and cementing psychic walls of privacy. He had learned to respect that, and he respected that their relationship was one of feast and famine in terms of intimacy. At the moment, he had little respect for someone calling him crazy or a gaslighter when they were seeing mirages in the form of thrift shops. “It’s in here now. The smell, it’s following me.”

“You’re crazy,” she repeated.

Crazy or not, the smell permeated the house despite the warfare enlisted. Ben tried incense, perfume, and sage. The windows and door were propped open. Nothing made an impact and Ben swore that he could taste the smell. It made it so that he had to skip dinner and that was unheard of for him.

That night, Ben dreamt of spoiled food, rotting carcasses, and noxious garbage dumps. Each hour brought an increase in the olfactory assault, and his mind conjured images in accompaniment.

When he woke, he found Lydia in front of the bathroom mirror, clad only in the shirt that now appeared to be purple and crimson. He rubbed his eyes, hoping to reset the colors, but it still appeared with different hues than the day before.

“You’re wearing that shirt again?”

“It’s my shirt.” She was standing at the bathroom sink, looking at her mouth in the mirror. She was sticking her tongue out as if a doctor were waiting with a tongue depressor.

“What’s wrong with your tongue?”

“nhuthin,” she replied, keeping the tongue on display.

Reading her body language, Ben went to make his coffee and give her some space. The sound of his ancient Keurig was overwhelmed by Lydia’s coughing. “You alright?” he called, bringing the cup of coffee close to his nose in the hopes of quelling the odor. It didn’t work and he was tempted to toss the coffee out and purchase a latte on the way to work, but those coffee pods were expensive, and he hated to waste one.

From the other room, Lydia’s coughs graduated to a throaty gag.

“Lyd? You ok?”

“Fine.” Her voice was raspy and phlegmy to the point of being difficult to listen to. In fact, it was almost the auditory version of the smell. Almost.

Once he was ready to leave for work, Ben gave Lydia a kiss on the forehead. As he pulled away, she whispered, “Spider tonsils.”

“What’s that, Lyd?”

She made eye contact, but the person behind the eyes was far away and Ben recognized this as his cue to exit. If he pressed, she would grow agitated, and her isolation would last longer than he was comfortable with.

She lowered her head and picked at the thread of a loose button. “Spider tonsils,” she repeated.

Ben wanted to ask which one of them was crazy now, but he knew that was insensitive to her very real mental health issues. Experience had taught him that she would snap out of it, and he was looking forward to putting in hours at the office as a respite from the odor.

When he returned home, there was no Lydia and no note. There was only the shirt, crumpled on the floor in the bathroom. It was damp and sticky.

The smell was as strong as ever, but the shirt was no longer the source. The shirt, now blue and green, had no odor at all.

He tracked the scent like a bloodhound. All he found for his troubles was an old candy wrapper and a large, long-legged spider weaving a fresh web in their closet. Without hesitation, he put the spider out of its misery.

Leaving the closet to start dinner, he realized that the smell had disappeared.

Ben ate alone and in peace. He made a plate for Lydia in case she returned hungry. He then showered, finding pleasure in the pleasant fragrances of his hygiene ritual. He was sure that Lydia would return home by the time he was ready for bed.

His instincts had proven wrong, and he slid beneath their scent-free sheets alone. He left one voice message and one text for Lydia but reasoned that more than that would look like he was not respecting her boundaries, and he knew that upset her. Now that his world was without noxious fumes, he could grant Lydia a great deal of grace.

The next morning, Ben pulled a shirt off the hanger in his closet. It was a shirt he had no recollection of buying. The tag was still on it, and it was from a thrift shop. Lydia must have bought it as a surprise for him. He would google the name of the store later, to find out where it was truly located.

Ben felt guilty that he had not given her the chance to give him the shirt; he had been so focused on obsessing over the invasive smell. When she returned, he would be sure to apologize.

This shirt did not smell. And it fit perfectly. He decided to work from home so that he could be there when Lydia returned. She was not answering her cell and it was unlike her to be out of contact for so long. Ben didn’t want to alarm her family, but he resolved to contact them if he hadn’t heard from her by lunch.

The thought of lunch made his stomach rumble, even though he had just eaten breakfast. He tried placating his appetite with a strong cup of coffee, but as he brought the mug to his lips, his stomach recoiled.

He dropped the mug, gagging as the fumes from the spilled coffee entered the small space.

As he cleaned up the mess he had made, he was overcome with a coughing fit. He coughed until his throat felt ragged. Then he gagged. It wasn’t nausea causing him to gag; there was something lodged in his throat.

Moving to the bathroom mirror, he opened his mouth and peered at his throat. Directly behind the uvula, there was a dark shadow. Ben made a low growl in his throat, seeing if the shadow would move. As he watched, a long, spindly spider leg crawled onto the back of his tongue.

He now knew what “spider tonsils” meant and he knew what had happened to Lydia.

∼ Elaine Pascale

Unlucky Moon

August 9, 2023July 26, 2023 ~ TheDamned ~ 5 Comments

“How am I always unlucky?”

The question was rhetorical. Topi was the one who wandered too far away. She hadn’t kept an eye on the sun. Now she better find shelter fast before the bacteria began to drift in the fertile dark.

Frank Sinatra’s voice crooned about flying to the moon from a deserted shop front. No one knew what powered the music behind the boards, but it had played the same tunes since as long as she had been here. She stopped and looked up at the night sky. A full moon would help a little but it had not yet risen.

Frank was out of touch. His song didn’t age well, she thought. No one would want to fly to a landfill. She scratched her forehead and one of her sensors snagged under a nail and came off.

She studied it in the dim light. A ruby red gem winked in the electric glow, like a drop of clear blood on her fingertip. She flicked it into the shop front. Frank could fly to the moon on that.

The sensor landed on the curb near a flower wrapped in lace and tissue paper. It was tied with a thin silver ribbon that would make a nice gift for her baby sister. Topi had never seen a rose except for illos on old signs. Roses were for the second-tier rich—too poor for Mars evac, but rich enough for the greenhouses. They never came out to risk the pollutions, let alone drop their roses. Yet here was a rose.

I should back off, run away… this is danger.

Topi thought of her baby sister carefully unfolding the fancy paper to find an even fancier ribbon. It would be the loveliest thing any of them had ever owned. Carefully, she moved toward the deserted flower. A sweetness in the air overcame the scent of asphalt and sick. It was like magic. Topi crouched, fingers inches away, undecided.

It was too suspicious to find a rose in the Squallys. Frank’s voice crooned through the shadows. “…in other words, please be true. In other words, I love you.” She could be lucky for once. She could believe in a miracle. Topi picked the rose up and held the silky petals to her skin, inhaling.

“I’m sorry…” The whisper came from a bundle of trash piled up against a broken guardrail. There was a woman sitting there, near buried in the refuse. She was hiding, but Topi could see her fancy gown shimmering white through the pile of greyed, collapsing cardboard.

“You’re rich—how are you here?” Topi clenched her fist around the flower. “This is your rose.” The petals were soft against her lips and she imagined how it must be in the greenhouses. She didn’t want to give it back.

“The filters failed,” said the woman. “We could smell the stink coming in. I panicked.” Her skin was dotted with pearl gems, each a glass drop of milk, defying gravity.

Topi stepped back in shock. “You’re sick! Your gems are white!” She threw the perfect rose at the woman in disgust and wiped her hands on the street. Grime was better than what this woman had. “Go back to your glass city!”

The woman vanished back into the pile of refuse, pulling a sheet of newsprint over her head. “We can’t. The filters failed…. trapped.” She said no more, only closed her eyes. Ttears shimmered silver in the dim light..

Topi turned and ran, rubbing her hands raw against the brick and concrete she passed. She stopped at every puddle and plunged her hands in, wiping her face. Then she realized… She couldn’t go home. Not to the children, not to her mother. Not until she knew if she had caught it.

She examined her wet and bleeding hands under a blinking street lamp. Most of the sensors had been scraped off during her panicked flight, but the few left winked up at her in reassuring hues of sapphire, ruby and jade.

She sighed in relief. She could stay away until dawn. The sun would burn away any bacteria drift she carried. If her gems stayed bright she could return home. She would never do anything so stupid again.

Then, against her knuckle, a pearlescent drop of glass and photoelectrics. It was milky and pale, colorless. Her hand shook. Her life was draining from her, each of her jewels would now wink out until she followed. “Please just be the moon’s reflection…”

She sat where she was, back against the wall and gazed upwards to the sky. There was no moon to be seen. “How am I always unlucky?…” Topi put her hands over her face, pushing her fingers into her eyes to stop the tears. There was no sense mourning the facts.

“I should have known better,” Topi felt calmer. “It was too lovely to be safe.” She inhaled as much air as her lungs could hold, leaned her head back and closed her eyes. A delicate wind brushed her skin, carrying remnants of Frank Sinatra with it, still crooning. Topi let her breath out and re-imagined the heady scent of rose. She wanted to carry it with her into the next world while her last breath escaped into this one. The rose may have even been worth this.

Overhead and unseen by the girl dying below, the moon finally rose.

∼ Angela Yuriko Smith

Bone Appetit

August 2, 2023July 21, 2023 ~ Ian Sputnik ~ 4 Comments

Jerone cut through another thick clump of vines with his machete. The going was slow and hard with the group of botanists only managing to move no more than ten miles a day. Their goal was to discover new species of plants, document them and collect samples. The area of the Amazon that they had selected was one of the least explored parts of the country.

His thoughts wandered off to the day before he had left home. He had boasted to his wife, Tanya, that by the end of the trip, there could well be a plant named after him. “Fame at last,” he declared. His wife just rolled her eyes and continued packing the last of his clothes. If she left it up to him, he’d arrive in Africa with a rucksack full of nothing more than odd socks and ski apparel.

The humidity was really starting to get to him. He stopped at the edge of a small stream and cupped a handful of cool water into his mouth. The local guides that they had hired went into an immediate panic. One gave him a hard slap on the back causing him to spit out the fluid. Another opened his canteen and made Jerone rinse his mouth out before he was ordered to spit that out as well. They stared uneasily at each other, muttered something in their local tongue and slowly continued their journey.

He awoke in the middle of the night and sat bolt-upright in his tent. The fizzing sensation in his mouth was akin to him having eaten an entire box of Alka-Seltzer. He put a finger in quickly to try and ascertain where the discomfort from coming from and pulled it back out twice as fast. The agony that he felt as he touched his teeth was mind-numbing.

Over the course of the next few days, the pain intensified. He woke up one morning choking. He leant forward and gagged. Three teeth shot from his mouth onto his sleeping bag. He picked one up and looked at it in shock. He couldn’t believe that it was one of his own, it was in such a bad state of decay, chipped and rough all over.

The following day the rest of the team arranged to have Jerone flown home. Whatever was ailing him needed proper medical attention, and fast. An infection caught in that part of the world would only worsen quickly due to the moist, hot environment.

Tanya sat in the consultation room as three doctors tried to explain the situation. Jerone had been placed in isolation for the three days since he had returned to the States. They took blood, bone, and tissue samples, circulated them to the top labs in the country and were now waiting for the results. Before leaving the hospital, she approached Jerone’s bed and, through the plastic curtain looked down lovingly at her husband. His face looked sunken as if it was a balloon slowly losing air. His eyes bulged from his sockets. She cried as she turned to leave.

Tanya visited every day for the next week witnessing his quick deterioration in real-time. Each hour he looked visibly worse.

One morning, at about 3am she was awoken by the ringing of the telephone. She knew who would be on the other end of the line before even picking it up.

She arrived at the hospital by cab and made her way to the isolation ward. Once there, she was met by a large group of medical staff. It appeared that his body, more specifically his bones were being eaten away from within, she was told. They tried to dissuade her from seeing her husband but she was determined to be with him at the end so she could say goodbye.

Looking at what remained of Jerone, Tanya collapsed in shock. What remained of her husband was nothing more than an empty sack of a human. With his bones almost entirely gone he was more akin to a puddle of blancmange than a person. It was as if with a zipper added, one might be able to wear him as a flesh suit.

The doctors explained that it seemed the ribs had been the last to be affected. When they finally were gone the weight of his flesh, muscle and skin would push down on his lungs and heart which would cause death. Unfortunately for Jerone, he was awake and aware of what was happening. The drugs that they had been using to put him into a chemically induced coma no longer seemed to work. His eyes darted about as he looked around the hospital room through the loose slits of skin which were once his eyelids. His face was very thin and contorted. Apart from his rib cage, he was almost flat, as if he’d been run over by a steamroller. He made gurgling sounds as he fought for breath as his mouth and throat collapsed in upon itself. The shape and contours of his brain were clearly visible beneath the skin of his head as there was no longer a skull to hide its form.

Within the next few hours, Jerone fought for every precious breath but inevitably died.

About three weeks after the funeral Tanya sat at the kitchen table drinking her coffee and read the morning paper. The service had been beautiful and was attended by so many friends, family, colleagues, and those who were just curious about the strange manner surrounding Jerone’s death. He had to be cremated due to medical concerns for the local area. The thought of that made her even sadder. They had promised that they would be buried alongside each other when their time came.

As she continued reading, she was drawn to a piece about a viral outbreak near their local airport. The symptoms were identical to that of her husband’s, and she knew it was the same affliction as they mentioned the small waterborne, wormlike creature responsible. She had already been advised that Jerone had succumbed to a calcium-eating organism that he had come into contact with in the Amazon, but now they had given it a name. She read it aloud ‘Jeronius Parasiticus’. She wondered whether her husband would have been proud of his new fame even though it wasn’t for having an exotic plant named after him.

∼ Ian Sputnik

When the Earth Broke

July 26, 2023July 19, 2023 ~ Nina D'Arcangela ~ 5 Comments

When the meteor hit, panic ensued. Coastal regions were swallowed by the seas, volcanoes erupted, the deserts cracked. The constant grainy mist that filled the air made breathing difficult for those unlucky enough to survive. Life wasn’t life anymore, it had become something else, something different. Once the pyroclastic dust settled and the oceans learned their new tides, civilization began anew. The world was no longer a blue marble with green pastures and white clouds; our new spectrum consisted of dingier, more sedate hues. The air took on an amber haze, the sky never as bright as it once was again. All water was now a sickly green, and crops, the few that remained, ripened to a less than appealing umber. People learned to live in trees with dense foliage. They built cities of wood that spanned the rainforests that overtook the planet with a fierce vengeance. Horses, cattle, pigs; most livestock faded from memory, seen now only in books. But humanity has a way.

Soon, we began to co-exist with and utilize what nature allowed. We befriended spiders that spun webs of safety below where we slept in exchange for small offerings – mostly females that couldn’t bear children, or men too weak to carry. We employed ants the size of creatures once known as bulls to till the meager fields and carry the food that still grew. Perhaps our greatest achievement, taming the flies that once annoyed. We saddled them, rode them to and fro. And for those fortunate enough to bond with a dragon, the ride that much sweeter. Their carnivorous nature allowed for a small portion of protein when one of their legion fell. The dragons, you see, were kind and giving, as long as man did not try to take.

∼ Nina D’Arcangela