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...Nuke.
It was midnight. The audience had gone home. The three friends sat inside the caravan discussing the parlous finances of Hernandez’s Circus of Terror. ‘Our creditors are getting a bit toey,’ said Vassalli, circus strong-man and lawyer.
Klinko, the King of Klowns, sighed. ‘They’re always toey. I would suggest toey is their natural state of existence. They wouldn’t be out of place at a polydactyly convention.’
Leaning on the edge of the well, Anhelina crossed her legs meticulously. She threw her golden hair onto her shoulder despite there being no one else around to see. Meek hues of the morning sun peeked through patches of scattered fog, gently kissing her outer thigh. After a bit of time, she finally turned towards the dank well.
“Mr. Ribbit!” she cried, “Come out! Come out!”
Kettering slips on the woollen gloves and tests the door handle.
The door refuses to budge, and Kettering sighs to himself and removes the forked metal pry bar from the calico bag he is carrying. The rumours of the high levels of security in the house are overwhelmed by his need for funds. The stories of the riches kept in the house are legendary.
I shuffled forward, trying to ignore the sunburn forming on my arms. The day was cloudless but of course they hadn’t given us sun umbrellas. We were just forager bees, after all.
The house bees in line next to us weren’t faring any better, though. They were wiping away sweat just as often as we were.
The Earth whips by through lone porthole,
A bluish beachball, nothing more.
To crash this station is my goal.
Like — I’m in my bedroom upstairs. Alone right. Lights off. Like it’s really late — around midnight.
Like I’m on my bed trying to get to sleep. Like it doesn’t happen, but something else does. There’s like a bright searchlight shining through the curtains at my window. And I’m like, this is all I need. Me — I’ve a job interview like tomorrow morning.
Standing alone on the front porch, staring at a face in the sky? This really wasn’t how I expected the world to end.
And that’s saying something: I toured from Stanford to Cambridge to lecture on how universes should end. I covered heat death, big freeze, big snap, all the standard methods. When someone inevitably raised their hand to ask my prediction for humanity’s end, I always offered my honest belief, that we would wind up killing ourselves off. Of course, there was always a follow up question about meteors. “No,” I would tell them, “Jupiter mostly guarantees we’re okay.”
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
(Isaac Asimov)
No one noticed at first because the initial changes had nothing to do with money.
Annora’s mother began to bring home vegetables that were not frozen or from a can. She also gifted her daughter with name-brand donuts, coffee cakes, and muffins. The overflowing shelves of the food pantries were a marvel, but only to those, like Annora, who depended on them. Food was no longer being thrown away as it once had been, and it made a difference. Annora no longer had to hunch over her lunch in the cafeteria, hiding it behind her elbows as if she were preventing a cheater from reading her test answers.
When the last alien died, we all cried. We put his poor tiny body in a shoe box and buried it in the field behind the tree house with the others. At one time there were five of them. We found them in the ruins of their ship in that very field. I remember how we were roused from our summer torpor at the sound of the crash. The smoke and fire brought us running.
Billy Jordan was the first to spot the wreckage and the scattered crew. By the time we saw it, it looked like so much rubble; like one of those crushed cars down at the junkyard and just about the same size. One by one we found the bodies of the ship’s crew. They were not much bigger than my sister’s rag doll except their skin colour was grey-blue and their heads were overly large for their small bodies. We gathered them together and knelt over them with wonder and apprehension. I remember we were squeamish about handling them.
Candles flickered, throwing shadows over wooden beams. A deep voice rumbled, "Where shall we three meet again? In thunder —"
"Do we really need the dramatics, Ida?" another voice muttered.
"Where's your sense of occasion, Brenda? We're witches, not housewives," Ida replied, ruffling her grey curls.
“You must be from Ireland,” I say. The train is crowded as all Melbourne trains are at rush-hour.
“No, Scotland.”
“Oh, I do apologise,” with a laugh. My work-bag is locked between my feet: laptop, files, all closely guarded.
Coming In Issue 288
Blue Moon
By Harris Tobias
Fido, the Cat, and the Capsule
By KJ Hannah Greenberg
Three Eight Two (part one)
By Andrew Dunn
Yoni's Potential
By Greg Foyster
Maurice
By Salvatore Difalco
Daddy's Always Right
By Chuck McKenzie
An Irregular Ode to the Loch Ness Monster
By Michael Leach
Tantalise
By Jared Bernard
The Hideous Deed
By Fulvio Gatti
Review - Not Death VR (Version 3.1.007)
By Rodney Sykes
Scifaiku
By PS Cottier
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Speculative Fiction
Downside-Up
ISSN 1442-0686
Online Since Feb 1998
Nothing is always absolutely so
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