Old Tom might be crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. He also knew Widduh Foster wasn’t stupid either, but she was afeared, and you can’t talk sense into someone who’s took with the fear. You can’t outrun it, and you sure as shit can’t reason with it. So he did the next best thing he could think of. He waited. He settled down into the saddle and waited for Widduh Foster to come to her senses. She wouldn’t run forever; she was too scared of the Rift. That far off, with the sun already abed, it’d take some time for it to come. Not a lot, but maybe enough.

Subscribe now

He stopped wriggling and thrashing and just sat his horse as best he could. Widduh Foster pealed into Scots’ Junction like stoats with a hawk on their scent. She rode right into the centre of town and started ringing the old churchbell they had mounted on a scaffold. It did the trick; windows slammed and shutters clattered shut all up and down the streets. Apparently satisfied she’d done her part, Widduh Foster kicked old Beulah back to a trot and made for the stables at the end of the street by the public house.

Once inside, Tom watched her minister to Beulah as best she could before she approached him. He sat, half untied, half lathered, and half convinced maybe he was in the wrong. He knew that was too many halves, but he’d been chasing the Rift too long to bother with things like figurin’. Though his heart was hammering and his mouth was dry as old bones, he sat as still as stone as Widduh Foster’s bent and callused fingers worked at the knots his thrashing had tightened. There’s time yet, he thought, listening to the night air still itself. She yammered on about this and that, how maybe they should hunker down in the barn and what a fool he’d been. Old Tom didn’t much mind the yammering; at least she’d believed him enough to come by.

He slid from the pony’s back and tossed some hay and alfalfa pellets in the trough, watching Widduh Foster out of the corner of his eye. She seemed content to busy herself flapping saddle blankets and brushing manes. We waited until she’d coiled up all the rope and hung it from the horn of her saddle, set on the wall of the bay she’d let Beulah choose, before he reached for the man door which wasn’t blocked by an enormous plank of wood like the barn doors were. It had a latch, not a knob, a little thing he was grateful for. With his back to the door, he nodded every now and then when Widduh Foster glanced over at him, and behind his back he quietly lifted the latch.

Old Tom slipped out the door somewhere between the brushing of Beulah’s belly and tail. He stumbled at first, his thighs and hips a little stiff from riding, but it didn’t take long before he was hightailing it right back out to the edge of town. He thought he heard the barn door slam somewhere behind him, and he knew he heard Widduh Foster cussing up a stream of colour that’d make a grown man weep, but to hell with that. He was going to get his girls.

Read more

Dame Donelda stood at the very edge of the sidewalk outside the clapboard and tarpaper shack Broke Sandy called home. Broke Sandy had collected scrap metal and junk for years, and had tacked most of it up on the outside walls of his shack. The dying sun glinted off of old hubcaps, rusted tin soup and soda cans which he’d split up the middle, and even oddly shaped road signs. It looked like a junk pile to Dame Donelda, but the truth of the thing was, that junk was Broke Sandy’s greatest treasure.

“Sandy!” Donelda called, more than a little nervous about walking through the weeds and detritus to the front door in case she got snake bit, or worse, tin bit. Snake venom was easy enough to treat, but the stiffjaw that came with getting tin bit was a different story. She remembered horror stories her grandmother told her about people’s backs snapping clear in half after they’d stepped on a nail or got skin plucked by barbed wire.

There was no response. Dame Donelda pursed her lips and planted fists on hips. “Alexander Gaius Clementine Pastor!” She hollered. Dame Donelda prided herself on knowing the full, Christian names of everyone in town who had one. She heard a banging sound off to her left and glanced over her shoulder to see Sloe-eyed Joe the publican wiping his filthy hands on his filthy apron on the stoop of the public house.

“You lookin’ for Broke Sandy, Dame Donelda?” He called out.

She squinted and wrinkled her nose, as if she could smell the public house from where she stood. “I surely am,” she called back. “Do you know where he’s at?”

“Well,” Sloe-eyed Joe replied, ambling down the three steps to the street and over to where she stood, “he ain’t in the house, so he might could be in there,” he said, nodding his head toward the shack.

“You are of little assistance,” Dame Donelda sniffed, casting a hard stare at the tarpaper shack.

Sloe-eyed Joe smiled, and his left eye trailed off to the side as it usually did when he relaxed a little. “Well, now, Donelda,” he said quietly, “that there is the gods’ own truth, is what it is.” His smile was always a little sad, like he didn’t really mean it but thought maybe it’s what you wanted to see on someone else’s face.

Read more

One hand on the steering wheel and the other halfway out the window, sun blasting down and th…

Read more

There’d been a time in Green Grove, probably the same in many places, when people tried to build walls and shelters against the Rift. The rubble was still findable, if you had a big enough shovel. Sometimes the Rift threw stones and twisted metal; other times only living things went missing. Firstlanders had built the berm two miles from the town proper, a rough ring of timber, crushed stone, old tires, and, if the stories are to be believed, bones. Back then, it was taller than the hotel. Over the years, the berm settled some and the winds drove whatever they could carry up against it until it became a shifting dune with a skeleton of rusted bike frames and burnt-out vehicle chassis.

Folk went out walking the berm pretty regular for many years. When folks still kept pets, they’d tie a string on the things and walk them up there, as if their lame old dogs cared to cast their gaze out over the shifting sands. As if those pets wouldn’t have preferred to stay in the house where the wind doesn’t drive grit into the eyes and howl past the ears. But old habits die hard, they say, and it was a good long time before folk stopped keeping animals as anything other than food. It wasn’t like that; nobody in Green Grove, and nobody in the towns within a day’s travel were the sort to farm dogs and gerbils for their meat, but maybe somewhere someone did.

Read more

Dame Donelda sat in the church’s tiny choir loft, dabbing at her eyes with the hem of her sleeve. That blasted Tom Morris had caused more than enough excitement for one day. She could still hear them out beside the church, with Brewster Quail, whom everyone else in Green Grove called Fibber. For that matter, nobody in town ever called her “Missus Carolan” or just “Donnie”, like they used to when she was a girl. People got names in this place that stuck, no matter whether you liked them or not.

She ran her hands across the worn wooden bench seat and wondered idly how many bottoms had sat there over the years. Then she felt her face blush a little at the thought of all those bottoms. Then she rolled her eyes and scolded herself under her breath for being so silly. By the time she’d extricated herself from the loft and slid the window open a hair to hear what was going on, the commotion in the churchyard had fallen silent.

Standing on tiptoe, Dame Donelda could just see the far side of the yard, where Old Man Morris had been crawling when she’d left him with Brewster. Other than a few leaves and sticks on the ground near the hedgerow, there was nothing to even hint that there’d ever even been a half-dead man out there. She closed the window and walked quickly, but quietly, to the door that led from the Father’s office to the back of the churchyard. Donelda cracked the door open just a titch, but she could see nothing, only the trail of pinkish vomit she’d seen Tom Morris hack up. Wherever he’d gone, she didn’t see him anymore, so she pulled the door shut and locked it tight with the wooden bar.

Subscribe now

Read more

Read “The Rift: Part 1”

Green Grove, possibly the worst-named town in the region, second only to “Paradise” ninety clicks north where nothing grew and the wind howled day and night. It was neither green nor was it a grove, standing exposed on the red-rocked bluffs, wind-raked and dry as a popcorn fart. It had pretty near everything a soul needed, and very little of what a soul might want: Lester’s General Mercantile was across the street from the Post Office and just up the block from Petit and Sons Repair; there was a cobbler and a blacksmith, a seamstress and an inn, a butcher, a barber, a bonesetter, and a baker. Green Grove had three churches, one fire hall, one town hall where the council made decisions they claimed everyone wanted, and it had the livery and the train station, of course.

Word spread pretty fast through town that Old Man Morris was about, sicker than death and twice as ornery. It wasn’t the first time a hue and cry went up about some bum or other, but it was the first time they mentioned Tom. It didn’t take long for the bonesetter and the padre to join Fibber Quail, Widduh Foster, and Lee in their search.

“You can just never tell with these old miners, can you?” The bonesetter asked. They called her Aunt Marty, and had done ever since anyone could remember. She claimed it wasn’t her name, but she answered to it just as if it were.

Read more

Read more

Em’s mother loved Christmas, and would start taking out decorations in August. Boxes …

Read more

Compared to the main travellers’ concourse, Bay Grosbeak is virtually a ghost town. Melgar approaches the membrane and waves one of its lower hands across the eye. Nothing happens. Melgar waves one of its upper hands across the eye. Still nothing. Melgar closes its lower eyes. This being, chosen designation Melgar, has arrived at Bay Grosbeak. The eye is…nonfunctional?

After a short time, the membrane thins from the centre to the edges. Melgar crosses the threshold and gawks, all four eyes wide as plates. Gone are the soft, slightly spongy hive floors, walls, and ceiling. Gone is the low, ambient pink light the flesh of the hive emits. This place is all cold, hard polymeric alloy, the lighting bright, harsh. Beneath Melgar’s pods the floor is smooth and slippery. Melgar alters its pods to accomdate the change in terrain, tiny whorls and lines forming ridges and valleys for better grip.

Read more

Melgar sits at a small table in the centre of the food court, watching beings come and go. Some carry possession cubes, but most simply move to and fro unencumbered. This hive, relatively newly established, is just starting to attract more traffic. It’s only been a few goreks since Geomagnetics stabilised the wormhole, but there’s never a shortage of demand for intergalactic travel, especially at this season. Within the first few spans, consumer use of this wormhole had grown exponentially. As with any of the newer installations, especially since the incident at the Corellian Galaxy, security measures have become top priority. Thankfully in this sector there have been no external threats; Bawn moderators are often delegated two, sometimes more, hive assignments.

Meglar glances up at the entertainment projection and grimaces. Reality programming truly is the lowest form of entertainment. This particular programme has been (in Melgar’s opinion, baselessly) popular for several seasons. It’s a format that’s been popular in other regions of the Blue Planet’s surface: camera drones capture footage of the antics of surface flora and fauna, and predictive/generative algorithms provide voice-over narration. And, of course, if viewership numbers aren’t high enough, the producers manufacture drama. In the early days, the programmes had been riveting: actors (and sometimes the producers themselves), dressed in increasingly elaborate environment equipment (mostly for show; Melgar always suspected there wasn’t as much ‘potentially dangerous quantum interference’ as they claimed) would interact with surface fauna. Most of the indigenous wildlife reacted in predictable ways (although some of the feline species have a penchant for sitting on the actors).

Read more

Following Melgar’s bombshell announcement, Liglet, Teermin, and Wuxla leave their work stations and come over to the area where Aggla and Lorval sit staring at Melgar. Three more seats rise up out of the floor, forming from the skin of the hive right under them. 4-2-5-1-x remains at work, which doesn’t surprise any of the other Terrazoologists. 4-2-5-1-x is well known for having an …enthusiastic work ethic.

Several of them speak simultaneously: “When did this happen?” “What were they like?” “Where did the close encounter occur?” “Is Control aware?” and, from Lorval, “Was the smell overwhelming?”

Read more

Following its meeting with Control, Melgar goes about its work with a different aspect, a lightness, a bounciness which other beings observe and mention in passing. Melgar spares no time mentioning the opportunity it has been afforded, an opportunity many other beings do not seem as excited about. They do, however, note Melgar’s excitement and offer congratulations on what it must consider its own success.

The Terrazoology team is a smaller contingent of beings. Melgar knows research into Terran fauna is generally considered to be a bit of a pseudoscience - not that there aren’t legitimate reasons to study the creatures that inhabit the planet’s surface; it’s generally accepted there’s no intelligent life left on the planet. That being said, there are plenty of beings in the hive who believe some species are capable of achieving consciousness. The majority of hive resources are dedicated to data collection and resource development.

Read more

Melgar stares at the projection, turquoise glow flickering in the dark room. A soft ticking sounds in synchronisation with the light. Melgar sighs. Cycle in, cycle out, the same screen, the same frequencies, the same -

*PING*

Melgar blinks. Did that just happen? It sweeps its fingers about four inches in front of the projection. There. Not a spike, but definitely something -

*PING*

Melgar jumps back in its seat a little, eyes wide. Shit. It sits forward, watching intently.

*PING…PING…PING*

“Shit! Shit, shit shit shit shit.” With one hand making intricate sweeping and circular motions in front of the projection, centre hands making similar gestures just above the surface of the station, Melgar slaps at the transmission control at its throat. “Uh,” Melgar starts, then winces. Professional. Reeeal professional. “I mean, 8-9-4-4-x reporting. We are recording an anomaly in sector Abacus.”

Read more

Going forward, I will be putting much of my work behind a pa…

Read more

Chloe lay back, the chilly porcelain above the water line between her shoulder blades making …

Read more

“Now, now, gentlemen, there’s no need to shove. There’s plenty to go around.” The man in the stovepipe hat b…

Read more

The glass in my hand was sweating, and so was I. There must be a mill…

Read more

Marilyn hunched over and drew her jacket closed with one hand while clinging to the handle of her umbrella with …

Read more

“This is Inspector Cruz, interviewing witness…uhhh…Suhr-uhs….uh…” Cruz glances up at the witness sitting opposite, one eyebrow raised.

“Srus’ziaqad”

“Riight. Okay, so …

Read more

Carson pulled the dusty rose-shaped box out from between the floor joist…

Read more