The short story is the perfect form for sci-fi. It allows a writer to explore a big idea in a very small space. Each of the stories listed here imagines a world that’s different from our own in some brilliant or terrible way – with few aliens or spaceships in sight…
Tag: Flash Fiction
Cascading Failures of the Heart
They will never know they are perfect for each other. Theoretically. Algorithmically. A solved equation of two strangers. Objectively a cosmic match. As objects moving through the universe are drawn toward each other by their natures. They’ll never know they should have found each other and been as beautiful and strange and full of fire…
Petrichor
That summer they added fluoride to the water. Our parents did not question that the commies who ran New York City wanted us to glow green in the dark. A decade earlier, our fathers had stopped the stain of evil spreading over the Pacific and Europe. They had no patience for the distinction between fluoride…
Daytime Television
First Program Spiders The talk show host invites the Naturalist onto his stage. The Naturalist looks as all Naturalists do: he is dressed in khaki shorts, a button-up white shirt, a pith helmet, brown leather boots. The exposed bits of his arms and legs are coated in a thick layer of hair, a little too…
Signals of Fear and Uncertainty
There is a fist-sized hole in the concrete floor and another in the ceiling. The hole in the floor is bearded with sunblack shit, and at night the beetles climb out of it and crawl across my toes. The smell is worse in the daytime. Sometimes I stand under the hole in the ceiling and…
The November We Are Fifteen
Previously published in Crack The Spine. The November we are fifteen we run away and the boys around the block put us up in a motel room on the turnpike that has a hole in the door so we can see everyone’s sneakers shuffling past. We write poetry and eat potato chips all week and…
The Train Journey
The journey was peaceful. I closed my eyes most of the way, sat back and thought of all the wonderful things I had done that day. When I opened my eyes the frost was settling on the fields and trees, and the other passengers were either asleep, reading, or eating. When I got to the…
After the Parade
Glass crunched under my mum’s car tyres as her Corsa crawled up the road, which had been clean when we drove down it a few hours earlier, before the parades passed through. As the wheels rotated I felt each chip of glass dig into the hard rubber, tearing at the air inside. The tyres fought…
Theme Park Love Story
The new boy, Tom, was leaving. This came as a surprise to Rose and Jake. He’d only been there a season. Tom worked with Rose and Jake as pirates. The first thing he’d said to them was that Jake was “a very apt name”. The second thing he said was “Shiver me timbers shipmates, that…
How Alice Might Have Felt
I.In the lush yellow light before the storm,I ask you for your autograph. I’m jittery,a half-tame wolf bitch poised to boltacross the emptying bar. We talk–you over beer, me over whiskey, glassrocks-cold and skinned in water–until thunder heaves the pregnant air.You grasp the hem of my skirt, runyour fingers between skin and fabriclike a bee…