The world is flat
“The world is flat. God made it that way.” Granddad says this all the time, so we buy tickets to space.
Read MoreSome kind of trout
The fish was minding her own business when a fissure opened in the ice above her, and she was sucked unceremoniously upward.
She wasn’t really a fish, of course. But she had fins, she had gills, her shape was ideal for slicing through Europa’s subsurface oceans. The obvious difference, biochemistry aside, was her lack of eyes, and some deep-water Earth fish don’t have those anyway.
Read MoreNorth Richmond Street
North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when, after a daily seven-hour stretch of tedium, they finally let us loose. For the last hour us kids minded more the clock than the chalkboard. The yellow light of the sinking sun would warm our yawning faces, a signal to our brains to shut down; one old Mr Malone, droning on at the head of the class, was somehow insensate to.
Read MoreCappuccino
“Medium cappuccino.”
The grinder released a small pile of grounds into the handle. Dan tamped the pile smooth, then jammed the handle into its socket. As the coffee trickled through he steamed the milk, tiny bubbles rising to froth. He poured a stream into the cup with the coffee and affixed a lid.
“Medium cappuccino!”
Skink
The lizard scrambled up the wall, toes seeking tiny ledges in the sandstone brick. At the top she basked briefly in warmth, bubbling up from the brick and beaming down from above. Her forked tongue flicked out. A pungent odor. Human. A shadow fell across her and she dove for cover in the greens beyond.
Read MoreOcean Ghosts
A cloud of fragile spectres drifts through the darkness.
A slow, clumsy whirlwind moves through them, carving a path through the helpless motes.
They are left battered and torn in the giants' wake, forthwith replaced.