Puddles

by Megan Peterson

Milo sees worlds in the puddles.

Now this may not seem inherently special at first. Many people can see the world in the puddles. After a good bout of rain, anyone can step outside, peer into the puddles formed in the streets, and see a crystal-clear reflection of the tree branches swaying to and fro, the gray sky hanging over their head, and the curve of a dissipating rain cloud. They see their own world tipped outside down, and this is perfectly normal.

What Milo sees is not normal.

He looks into the puddles and he doesn’t see tree leaves, summer skies, or clouds overhead. No, he sees worlds with medieval castles, with round towers like tarnished soda cans and forked flags flickering in the wind. He sees worlds with rolling plains that are not green with grass but instead speckled with tiny pebbles of all kinds of colors, like the beach of a shoreline that stretches for miles. He sees worlds where plants dance like humans do—like his parents once did. He sees creatures that are not human, sporting soft orange skin like a sunset and a handful too many eyes. He sees reflections of oceans that are more Jell-O than water. He glimpses places that look like the pictures in his history books and ones that look like his favorite sci-fi movies.

He doesn’t see one world like everyone else. He sees many.

Unknown to Science

by Dannye Chase

The sea was a suggestion, shallow shadows of what had once been great depth. If the vision was real, Janice would have drowned in blood as much as water.

A Dunkleosteus terrelli, 15 feet long with a bony mask for a face, sank the points of its jagged jaw into the gills of a smaller fish—another Dunkleosteus. In the late Devonian age, the mighty armored fish had no predators except its own kind.

The smaller Dunkleosteus writhed. Janice crouched, looking from below, focused on the greasy gleam of the internal organs as they were exposed to the sea. The liver would not fossilize, nor the dark-light sweep of skin, the fins like swords. Only the face plating and fanged jaw. No one knew what the rest of the fish looked like. No one except Janice and Brooke.

As the smaller Dunky died, the vision flickered, fading in favor of Iowa fields with cornstalks broken and dead, left to hold soil over the winter. This place had not been a sea for 375 million years.

The Stairway to Firefly Heaven

by Logan Thrasher Collins

“When I die, I want to go to Firefly Heaven,” my younger sister Beatrix told me. I was ten years old at the time and she was nine.

“What kind of a place is Firefly Heaven?” I asked her.

“It’s a supercomputer in a satellite orbiting Earth. They put firefly souls in a simulation up there. Scientists built it to see if they could do the same with humans someday.” We had been playing together in a meadow near our house that evening. All around us, fireflies like glittering emerald constellations spiraled dizzyingly, dancing to what I imagined as otherworldly bug music. One landed on my hand and stayed there for just a moment. I saw it look up at me with gleaming compound eyes before it flew away.

“Why do they put it in orbit?” I asked Beatrix.

“It uses neuromorphic quantum processors that need cold and microgravity! Isn’t that amazing, Luisa?!” she replied, her green eyes sparkling with excitement.

That night, I lay in bed after I was supposed to have gone to sleep, reading about Firefly Heaven on the glowing screen of my tablet. I found an article that explained how a robot performed a precise surgery on each insect, removing half of the little brain from the head and placing it in a powerful x-ray machine to map the hemibrain with incredible detail. A special kind of printer spat out an electronic replica of the hemibrain and the surgical robot placed this replica in the firefly’s head. The process was then repeated for the other half of the firefly’s brain, creating a cybernetic insect with an entirely electronic consciousness. But this was only the beginning.

High above my family’s little townhouse, the satellite flew in geosynchronous orbit, its angelic white shell glaring brilliantly in the milky moonlight. Within that carapace, a supercomputer performed septillions of calculations every second, crunching the numbers faster than I could possibly comprehend, recreating thousands of firefly souls in a cyberspace world. But how did the firefly souls go from the electronic brains of the lobotomized bug heads to the satellite computer in the sky? I kept reading.

According to the article, the scientists had built a stairway to Firefly Heaven. Yet it was not really a stairway. It was a kind of email. Piece by piece, the data underlying the electronic firefly brain beamed up through the sky to reach the computer in outer space. By establishing back and forth communication between the cyborg firefly and the satellite’s software, the insect’s soul smoothly climbed into heaven, leaving the original body behind. I fell asleep soon after finishing the article, firefly ghosts dancing in my dreams.

Brendan's Bones

by Lane Zumoff

Everybody’s got a skeleton in their closet. Mine is dismembered.

I’d love to share this fact with somebody; it's not every day you get to play God. But I get it now. We humans weren’t meant for such a game. Lesson learned.

That lesson lay in my closet in pieces. A bundle of sticky severed bones inside a brown burlap bag.

These bones are Brendan’s, extracted like slow-cooked ribs pulled from a cooker. Though separated at the joints cleanly, they made my new apartment a bloody mess, a viscera canvas of gory spectacle: gizzards dangling from ceiling lamps, sinew stacked on blackened windowsills, ligaments spray-jetted across kitchen linoleum. Part of a penis stuffed in a sneaker. A testicle (I think) in the fruit bowl.

As I said. A real mess.

Under the Tents of Our Fathers

by Tanner Abernathy

Bright phosphorus spotlights scan the cheering crowd. Children hold clouds of spun sugar in one hand and the hands of their mothers in the other. Smiling peanut vendors banter with the crowd. “You, ma’am: hold these for me!”

Down on the floor, clowns hyuk-hyuk and slam their trays of confetti into each other’s tomato noses. A unicycle carves the Lord’s Prayer in sawdust around one ring.

In another ring, an elephant with a star on its forehead performs final communion on state prisoners strapped with ribbons to wired chairs. The benediction moves a third of the crowd to tears. Ash falls from the rafters on their heads.

The third ring holds an unexpected sight: a marriage between a man locked in a clear box filled with water and another man in front of an X-ray machine. A skeleton key illuminates his stomach. Timpani set the tent to a pulse. Grandfathers hold their grandchildren high, strong arms like stones.

The Dead Walk in Appalachia

by Jacob Strunk

He always looks the same, just as he did the last time she saw him. She wishes he looked like his profile picture had, smiling in the woods with a Frenchie in his lap, his eyes bright and full of life. Or as he looked on the Riverwalk, shy, reaching for her hand with a sly grin. Instead, as she stands in her underwear, frozen at one end of the hallway, she sees him as he died. One eye is grey, waxy. The other has disappeared under what’s left of his swollen face. A flap of scalp hangs down over an ear. Most of the buttons are gone from his blue chambray shirt, and it hangs limply open, torn in spots, mottled with dark blood. One of his hands is all wrong angles and black flesh. A ragged gash runs up his pale stomach to his ribs. Something inside is dangerously close to spilling out. He is silent, always, but would he need to say anything even if he could?

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and then she turns and steps back into her bedroom, latching the door behind her, leaving him in the dark.

Precious Day

by K. MacMichael

The last thing he saw were the bats, following along the cliff and sea, as they did often at the hour of vespers. The glow of the fires did not turn them. Pleni sunt cæli et terra majestátis glóriæ tuæ.

He was too far away for his cries to be heard by those of his brethren who still might live. He was too far away to hear the cries of his brethren: his everyday enemies, one day lovers and friends. He was here, alone and not alone, never alone, bats overhead, cold coming up from the earth after his bones.

He was here. Alone and not alone with two heathen marauders, laughing in temporal victory. They laughed, thinking he prayed for mercy, or for his weak God’s intervention, or for his corporeal salvation. They laughed when he did not meet them with a sword or a spirit fighting in a way they could understand.

Dirt World

by M.W. Irving

To him, each mound of churned mole dirt is a personal attack. To the moles, however, Hazel imagines she is the Devil, dispensing horrors from above, unleashing plagues, yanking them out of their dark and cozy homes to suffer terrible deaths. This mythical Mole Devil brims with an unfathomable malice that is hard to enjoy waffles with, so Hazel makes up an excuse to leave while she fishes car keys out of her pocket. He’s a sloppy eater now. He will pick up the partially chewed food that escapes his lips and nibble it off his fingertips. Hazel loathes the nibbling.

“I’ll skin one and shove it’s bleeding pelt back into the hole as a warning to the rest.”

“I’m going to do a shop.”

Lately, he hardly notices when she makes her weak excuses to leave. She stays out longer than she means to, haunting grocery stores and coffee shops until guilt brings her back. When she returns, her father is on all fours in the grass, his face inches from a dismantled pile of dirt.

“It was twitching,” he says.

“I know, Dad.”

“I’m going to get them.”

“I know.”

Found Wanting

by Grace Daly

Despite the socks hand-knit by his mother and the worn leather work boots passed down by his brother, Bronagh’s toes throbbed in warning. His ears stung in the wind, and his nose ran freely, and his chest shuddered involuntarily. He should have been miserable in the winter air. He should’ve fled the oak savannah at the outskirts of the family farm to huddle by the woodstove. He should be inside reading an almanac or practicing cutting dovetail joints by hand or even just listening to the radio, but Bronagh’s mind barely registered the cold. His synapses were chock-full of misery already, thank you very much, misery from the urgent serrated knife twist in his miserable bowel. He had no nerve endings available for freezing.

The ever-present pain spiked, lancing up his rectum, reaching almost to his ribcage. His diaphragm and lungs spasmed in response, and he moaned quietly. He wouldn’t make it to her without a chance to relieve himself. He should go before he was in sight of her, anyways. Shitting on the snowy ground near her would be profane, somehow. He knew how ridiculous that was (it’s not like she could care), but it was how he felt all the same. He completely removed his trousers, underpants, boots, and the socks lovingly handknit by his mother to squat in the icy leaf litter, holding a palm flat against the frigid bark of an old oak so he wouldn’t collapse from the pain. Stripping from the waist down made him colder, of course, and he would’ve worried about frostbite, but he was distracted by the agonizing hot diarrhea coursing out of him. He didn’t want it to get on his clothes. He was sweating from a low-grade fever, anyways. Maybe the cold would help with that.

When the worst had passed, he cleaned himself off passably well with snow that melted against his burning skin. As he redressed with shaking fingers (shaking from the cold or from the trauma of the bowel movement, he wasn’t certain) he cursed himself and his pitiable body. It had taken almost everything he could’ve had. The farm would’ve always been passed down to his older brother Cathal, of course; that was only fair, Cathal was older, and he was tall and strong, built like an ox like their father, more than capable of sowing and reaping the corn and taking care of their aging parents. But Bronagh could’ve done well in school, maybe even gone to college like his best friend John, but he missed so many days due his gut he couldn’t graduate. Even then Bronagh, clever Bronagh, so good with his hands, had been able to convince a local carpenter to take him on as an apprentice. It would’ve been alright; he could work for himself and make a living and maybe even find a wife who wouldn’t mind his scrawny frame and stunted height.

Meg’s Thinking About Dead Babies

by J.R. Dewitt

Meg sits at the defense table trying not to think about dead babies. She’s been trying not to think about dead babies for several hours. But already halfway into trial, grainy ultrasounds are slotting into her thoughts, and she’s losing focus of the testifying suit she’s supposed to be wefting. What helps is to think about the money. It doesn’t clean out the thoughts. But it at least reminds her of the stakes. And that corks them long enough to allow Meg to concentrate on what matters this instant: wefting the bejesus out of plaintiff’s witness, the one Jackson’s tearing to shreds on cross.

“Bang up job on that witness, by the way,” Jackson says after the judge calls recess.

They’re outside the courthouse now, strutting through the Denver rain back to the firm. Meg's trying to keep up in the skirt and blazer number the paralegal stuffed her into this morning (her “courtroom camouflage”), but it’s been a hot minute since she’s worn heels. Doesn’t help that she’s still trying to keep a professional composure.

“What I like about you, Meg, is that you’re an artist,” Jackson says. “You keep it subtle. A forgotten detail here. A mispronounced word there. All natural like. Like he just got frayed nerves on the stand. It’s art.”

At the Chasm of the Split Gene

by Brian D. Hinson

The cargo elevator doors slid open, revealing cages crammed back-to-back and side-to-side. The first shipment of 50 hybrids had arrived. The musky, animal scent reminded me of a farm, of goat manure. They resembled bald children, but not so much at close inspection. Their skin tones covered humanity’s spectrum, but all had a number of large, irregular black splotches. A very short and sparse overlay of hair covered their backs and legs. Raspy hoots and moans rankled me and the other techs as some of the hybrids gripped the bars of their imprisoning crates. A few curled up silent on their cage floor, shivering with anxiety, eyes wide. Still others swung from the top spars and howled.

I covered my mouth and nose with a shop towel. These stank worse than other lab animals. Liam, the stocky representative from the genetic engineering firm Meskhenet stood beside me, smirking. “Zarina, right?”

I nodded and watched as an autodolly grasped the first cage with its manipulator arms and rolled it to a position against the far wall. Keeping my face shielded from the odor, I walked over for a close inspection. A child, essentially a strange naked boy with about 10 standard years of growth, stared back at me with its round, brown eyes. I stuffed down my uncanny-valley nausea as I looked it over. The hair, skin, flat ears lacking a helix, and those small eyes were the significant physical departures from a fully genetic homo sapiens.

Xaman-Ek, my employer, was the medical engineering firm designing and building the hibernation pod system destined for the Adria system, a 200-year trip. So how do you thoroughly test a system that will maintain human lives for that long? Well, that’s the billion-dollar question.

Meskhenet had developed the hybrids: a clever blend of human and pig genes resulting in a body quite human, the brain mostly sus domesticus. Legally, a lab animal. Gened with twice the normal growth rate, five years had elapsed before we received these human simulations of 10-year-olds. Beginning tomorrow, they would undergo the hibernation procedure and sleep away a decade.

I inspected this caged hybrid as it inspected me. I had to act unrattled. I asked the rep, “What happened to it?”

“What do you mean?”

Was he trying to pass inferior specimens?

The House Always Wins

by Lisa Finch

Since Greg got laid off, he spends hours trying to win points for health care, for groceries and the thing he lives for: random prizes. He almost never earns enough points because he gets sucked into the “double down” option. Like my grandfather’s stories of Las Vegas, the house always wins.

When Greg’s not gaming, he’s watching the only other station: State News. Logging so many hours also earns points, but it soon became way too slow for Greg.

“Do you know what’s wrong with this thing?” He turns with the remote in his hand.

Once, he was the man who held my hand through a painful miscarriage. Now he’s a lost child.

“Hey.” I gently take it from him and place it on the table. “Let me get you some coffee. We’ll come back to that.”

“Okay, but just for a minute.” He laughs and runs his hands through his hair. “Must be a glitch or something.”

Dragonslayer

by Paige Fitzpatrick (STUDENT)

I slide into my usual seat across from them both. “I missed you guys too. But don’t worry, I’ll be set for a while after this job.”

“Does this mean you can take your cat back?” Evan asks. “I have cat hair on everything I own. How do you live with it?”

“Evan loves Felipe,” Asher says with a wave of his hand. “He’s just being a grump.”

“I do not love Felipe. You love Felipe and I love you. Against my better judgment.”

“Aw, you’re so sweet.” Asher leans over and presses a kiss to Evan’s cheek, who squawks in protest and shoves him away. I roll my eyes fondly.

“Don’t worry, I’m taking Felipe back. From now on, it’s just me, my cat, my apartment, and absolutely no—”

“Dragon!”