#short story

[rhetoricandlogic]

Chicxulub

By T. Coraghessan Boyle

February 22, 2004

My daughter is walking along the roadside late at night—too late, really, for a seventeen-year-old to be out alone, even in a town as safe as this—and it is raining, the first rain of the season, the streets slick with a fine immiscible glaze of water and petrochemicals, so that even a driver in full possession of her faculties, a driver who hadn’t consumed two apple Martinis and three glasses of Hitching Post pinot noir before she got behind the wheel of her car, would have trouble keeping the thing out of the gutters and the shrubbery, off the sidewalk and the highway median, for Christ’s sake. . . . But that’s not really what I want to talk about, or not yet, anyway.

Have you heard of Tunguska? In Russia?

This was the site of the last known large-body impact on the Earth’s surface, nearly a hundred years ago. Or that’s not strictly accurate—the meteor, which was an estimated sixty yards across, never actually touched down. The force of its entry—the compression and superheating of the air beneath it—caused it to explode some twenty-five thousand feet above the ground, but then the term “explode” hardly does justice to the event. There was a detonation—a flash, a thunderclap—with the combustive power of eight hundred Hiroshima bombs. Thirty miles away, reindeer in their loping herds were struck dead by the blast wave, and the clothes of a hunter another thirty miles beyond that burst into flame even as he was poleaxed to the ground. Seven hundred square miles of Siberian forest were levelled in an instant. If the meteor had struck just five hours later, it would have exploded over St. Petersburg and annihilated every living thing in that glorious, baroque city. And this was only a rock. And it was only sixty yards across.

My point? You’d better get down on your knees and pray to your gods, because each year this big spinning globe we ride intersects the orbits of some twenty million asteroids, at least a thousand of which are more than half a mile in diameter.

But my daughter. She’s out there in the dark and the rain, walking home. Maureen and I bought her a car, a Honda Civic, the safest thing on four wheels, but the car was used—pre-owned, in dealerspeak—and as it happens it’s in the shop with transmission problems and, because she just had to see her friends and gossip and giggle and balance slick multicolored clumps of raw fish and pickled ginger on conjoined chopsticks at the mall, Kimberly picked her up and Kimberly will bring her home. Maddy has a cell phone and theoretically she could have called us, but she didn’t—or that’s how it appears. And so she’s walking. In the rain. And Alice K. Petermann, of 16 Briar Lane, white, divorced, a Realtor with Hyperion, who has picked at a salad and left her glasses on the bar, loses control of her vehicle.

It is just past midnight. I am in bed with a book, naked, and hardly able to focus on the clustered words and rigid descending paragraphs, because Maureen is in the bathroom slipping into the sheer black negligee I bought her at Victoria’s Secret for her birthday, and her every sound—the creak of the medicine cabinet on its hinges, the tap running, the susurrus of the brush at her teeth—electrifies me. I’ve lit a candle and am waiting for Maureen to step into the room so that I can flick off the light. We had cocktails earlier, and a bottle of wine with dinner, and we sat close on the couch and shared a joint in front of the fire, because our daughter was out and we could do that with no one the wiser. I listen to the little sounds from the bathroom, seductive sounds, maddening. I am ready. More than ready. “Hey,” I call, pitching my voice low, “are you coming or not? You don’t expect me to wait all night, do you?”

Her face appears in the doorway, the pale lobes of her breasts and the dark nipples visible through the clinging black silk. “Oh, are you waiting for me?” she says, making a game of it. She hovers at the door, and I can see the smile creep across her lips, the pleasure of the moment, drawing it out. “Because I thought I might go down and work in the garden for a while—it won’t take long, a couple hours, maybe. You know, spread a little manure, bank up some of the mulch on the roses. You’ll wait for me, won’t you?”

Then the phone rings.

We stare blankly at each other through the first two rings and then Maureen says, “I’d better get it,” and I say, “No, no, forget it—it’s nothing. It’s nobody.”

But she’s already moving.

“Forget it!” I shout, and her voice drifts back to me—“What if it’s Maddy?”—then I watch her put her lips to the receiver and whisper, “Hello?”

The night of the Tunguska explosion the skies were unnaturally bright across Europe—as far away as London people strolled in the parks past midnight and read novels out of doors while the sheep kept right on grazing and the birds stirred uneasily in the trees. There were no stars visible, no moon—just a pale, quivering light, as if all the color had been bleached out of the sky. But, of course, that midnight glow and the fate of those unhappy Siberian reindeer were nothing at all compared to what would have happened if a larger object had invaded the Earth’s atmosphere. On average, objects greater than a hundred yards in diameter strike the planet once every five thousand years, and asteroids half a mile across thunder down at intervals of three hundred thousand years. Three hundred thousand years is a long time in anybody’s book. But if—when—such a collision occurs, the explosion will be in the million-megaton range and will cloak the atmosphere in dust, thrusting the entire planet into a deep freeze and effectively stifling all plant growth for a period of a year or more. There will be no crops. No forage. No sun.

There has been an accident, that is what the voice on the other end of the line is telling my wife, and the victim is Madeline Biehn, of 1337 Laurel Drive, according to the I.D. the paramedics found in her purse. (The purse, with a silver clasp that has been driven half an inch into the flesh under her arm by the force of the impact, is a little thing, no bigger than a hardcover book, with a ribbon-thin strap, the same purse all the girls carry, as if it were part of a uniform.) Is this her parent or guardian speaking?

I hear my wife say, “This is her mother.” And then, the bottom dropping out of her voice, “Is she—?”

Is she? They don’t answer such questions, don’t volunteer information, not over the phone. The next ten seconds are thunderous, cataclysmic, my wife standing there numbly with the phone in her hand as if it were some unidentifiable object she’d found in the street while I fumble out of bed to search for my pants—and my shoes, where are my shoes? The car keys? My wallet? This is the true panic, the loss of faith and control, the punch to the heart, and the struggle for breath. I say the only thing I can think to say, just to hear my own voice, just to get things straight: “She was in an accident. Is that what they said?”

“She was hit by a car. She’s—they don’t know. In surgery.”

“What hospital? Did they say what hospital?”

My wife is in motion now, too, the negligee ridiculous, unequal to the task, and she jerks it over her head and flings it to the floor even as she snatches up a blouse, shorts, flip-flops—anything, anything to cover her nakedness and get her out the door. The dog is whining in the kitchen. There is the sound of rain on the roof, intensifying, hammering at the gutters. I don’t bother with shoes—there are no shoes, shoes do not exist—and my shirt hangs limply from my shoulders, misbuttoned, sagging, tails hanging loose, and we’re in the car now and the driver’s-side wiper is beating out of synch and the night closing on us like a fist.

And then there’s Chicxulub. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid (or perhaps a comet—no one is quite certain) collided with the Earth on what is now the Yucatán Peninsula. Judging from the impact crater, which is a hundred and twenty miles wide, the object—this big flaming ball—was some six miles across. When it came down, day became night and that night extended so far into the future that at least seventy-five per cent of all known species were extinguished, including the dinosaurs in nearly all their forms and array and some ninety per cent of the oceans’ plankton, which in turn devastated the pelagic food chain. How fast was it travelling? The nearest estimates put it at fifty-four thousand miles an hour, more than sixty times the speed of a bullet. Astrophysicists call such objects “civilization enders,” and calculate the chances that a disaster of this magnitude will occur during any individual’s lifetime at roughly one in ten thousand, the same odds as dying in an auto accident in the next six months—or, more tellingly, living to be a hundred in the company of your spouse.

All I see is windows, an endless grid of lit windows climbing one above the other into the night, as the car shoots into the Emergency Vehicles Only lane and slides in hard against the curb. Both doors fling open simultaneously. Maureen is already out on the sidewalk, already slamming the door behind her and breaking into a trot, and I’m right on her heels, the keys still in the ignition and the lights stabbing at the pale underbelly of a diagonally parked ambulance—and they can have the car, anybody can have it and keep it forever, if they’ll just tell me that my daughter is all right. “Just tell me,” I mutter, out of breath, “just tell me and it’s yours,” and this is a prayer, the first in a long discontinuous string, addressed to whoever or whatever may be listening. Overhead, the sky is having a seizure, black above, quicksilver below, the rain coming down in windblown arcs, and I wouldn’t even notice but for the fact that we are suddenly—instantly—wet, our hair knotted and clinging and our clothes stuck like flypaper to the slick tegument of our skin.

In we come, side by side, through the doors that jolt back from us in alarm, and all I can think is that the hospital is a death factory and that we have come to it like the walking dead, haggard, sallow, shoeless. “My daughter,” I say to the nurse at the admittance desk, “she’s—they called. You called. She’s been in an accident.”

Maureen is at my side, tugging at the fingers of one hand as if she were trying to remove an invisible glove. “A car. A car accident.”

“Name?” the nurse asks. About this nurse: she’s young, Filipina, with opaque eyes and the bone structure of a cadaver; every day she sees death and it blinds her. She doesn’t see us. She sees a computer screen; she sees the TV monitor mounted in the corner and the shadows that pass there; she sees the walls, the floor, the naked light of the fluorescent tube. But not us. Not us.

For one resounding moment that thumps in my ears and then thumps again, I can’t remember my daughter’s name—I can picture her leaning into the mound of textbooks spread out on the dining-room table, the glow of the overhead light making a nimbus of her hair as she glances up at me with a glum look and half a rueful smile, as if to say, It’s all in a day’s work for a teen-ager, Dad, and you’re lucky you’re not in high school anymore, but her name is gone.

“Maddy,” my wife says. “Madeline Biehn.”

I watch, mesmerized, as the nurse’s fleshless fingers maneuver the mouse, her eyes locked on the screen before her. A click. Another click. The eyes lift to take us in, even as they dodge away again. “She’s still in surgery,” she says.

“Where is it?” I demand. “What room? Where do we go?”

Maureen’s voice cuts in then, elemental, chilling, and it’s not a question she’s posing, not a statement or demand, but a plea: “What’s wrong with her?”

Another click, but this one is just for show, and the eyes never move from the screen. “There was an accident,” the nurse says. “She was brought in by the paramedics. That’s all I can tell you.”

It is then that I become aware that we are not alone, that there are others milling around the room—other zombies like us, hurriedly dressed and streaming water till the beige carpet is black with it—and why, I wonder, do I despise this nurse more than any human being I’ve ever encountered, this young woman not much older than my daughter, with her hair pulled back in a bun and a white cap like a party favor perched atop it, who is just doing her job? Why do I want to reach across the counter that separates us and awaken her to a swift, sure knowledge of hate and fear and pain? Why?

“Ted,” Maureen says, and I feel her grip at my elbow, and then we’re moving again—hurrying, sweeping, practically running—out of this place, down a corridor under the glare of the lights that are a kind of death in themselves, and into a worse place, a far worse place.

The thing that disturbs me about Chicxulub, aside from the fact that it erased the dinosaurs and wrought catastrophic and irreversible change, is the deeper implication that we, and all our works and worries and attachments, are so utterly inconsequential. Death cancels our individuality, we know that, yes, but ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and the kind goes on, human life and culture succeed us. That, in the absence of God, is what allows us to accept the death of the individual. But when you throw Chicxulub into the mix—or the next Chicxulub, the Chicxulub that could come howling down to obliterate all and everything even as your eyes skim the lines of this page—where does that leave us?

“You’re the parents?” We are in another room, gone deeper now, the loudspeakers murmuring their eternal incantations—Dr. Chandrasoma to Emergency, Dr. Bell, Paging Dr. Bell—and here is another nurse, grimmer, older, with lines like the strings of a tobacco pouch pulled tight around her lips. She’s addressing us, me and my wife, but I have nothing to say, either in denial or affirmation. If I claim Maddy as my own—and I’m making deals again—then I’m sure to jinx her, because those powers that might or might not be, those gods of the infinite and the minute, will see how desperately I love her and they’ll take her away just to spite me for refusing to believe in them. Voodoo, Hoodoo, Santería, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I hear Maureen’s voice, emerging from a locked vault, the single whispered monosyllable, and then: “Is she going to be all right?”

“I don’t have that information,” the nurse says, and her voice is neutral, robotic even. This is not her daughter. Her daughter’s at home, asleep in a pile of Teddy bears, pink sheets, fluffy pillows, the night-light glowing like the all-seeing eye of a sentinel.

I can’t help myself. It’s that neutrality, that maddening clinical neutrality, and can’t anybody take any responsibility for anything? “What information do you have?” I say, and maybe I’m too loud, maybe I am. “Isn’t that your job, for Christ’s sake—to know what’s going on here? You call us up in the middle of the night—our daughter’s hurt, she’s been in an accident, and you tell me you don’t have any fucking information?”

People turn their heads, eyes burn into us. They’re slouched in orange plastic chairs, stretched out on the floor, praying, pacing, their lips moving in silence. They want information, too. We all want information. We want news, good news: it was all a mistake, minor cuts and bruises—contusions, that’s the word—and your daughter, son, husband, grandmother, first cousin twice removed will be walking through that door over there any minute. . . .

The nurse drills me with a look, and then she’s coming out from behind the desk, a short woman, dumpy—almost a dwarf—and striding briskly to a door, which swings open on another room, deeper yet. “If you’ll just follow me, please,” she says.

Suddenly sheepish, I duck my head and comply, two steps behind Maureen. This room is smaller, an examining room, with a set of scales and charts on the walls and its slab of a table covered with a sheet of antiseptic paper. “Wait here,” the nurse tells us, already shifting her weight to make her escape. “The doctor will be in in a minute.”

“What doctor?” I want to know. “What for? What does he want?”

But the door has already drawn closed.

I turn to Maureen. She’s standing there in the middle of the room, afraid to touch anything or to sit down or even to move for fear of breaking the spell. She’s listening for footsteps, her eyes fixed on the door. I hear myself murmur her name, and then she’s in my arms, sobbing, and I know I should hold her, know that we both need it, the human contact, the love and support, but all I feel is the burden of her—there is nothing and no one that can make this better, can’t she see that? I don’t want to console or be consoled. I don’t want to be touched. I just want my daughter back.

Maureen’s voice comes from so deep in her throat I can barely make out what she’s saying. It takes a second to register, even as she pulls away from me, her face crumpled and red, and this is her prayer, whispered aloud: “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”

“Sure,” I say, “sure she is. She’ll be fine. She’ll have some bruises, that’s for sure, maybe a couple broken bones even . . . ” and I trail off, trying to picture it, the crutches, the cast, the Band-Aids, the gauze: our daughter returned to us in a halo of shimmering light.

“Maybe she broke her arm—she could break her arm. That would— Or her leg, even her leg. But why would she be in surgery? Why would she be in surgery so long? Why? Why would that be?”

I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t want to have an answer.

“It was a car,” Maureen says. “A car, Ted. A car hit her.”

The room seems to tick and buzz with the fading energy of the larger edifice, and I can’t help thinking of the congeries of wires strung inside the walls, the cables bringing power to the X-ray lab, the EKG and EEG machines, the life-support systems, and of the myriad pipes and the fluids that they drain.

A car. Three thousand pounds of steel, chrome, glass, iron.

“What was she even doing walking like that? She knows better than that.”

My wife nods, the wet ropes of her hair beating at her shoulders like the flails of the penitents. “She probably had a fight with Kimberly—I’ll bet that’s it. I’ll bet anything.”

“Where is the son of a bitch?” I snarl. “This doctor—where is he?”

We are in that room, in that purgatory of a room, for a good hour or more. Twice I thrust my head out the door to give the nurse an annihilating look, but there is no news, no doctor, nothing. And then, at quarter past two, the inner door swings open, and there he is, a man too young to be a doctor, an infant with a smooth bland face and hair that rides a wave up off his brow, and he doesn’t have to say a thing, not a word, because I can see what he’s bringing us and my heart seizes with the shock of it. He looks to Maureen, looks to me, then drops his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says.

When it comes, the meteor will punch through the atmosphere and strike the Earth in the space of a single second, vaporizing on impact and creating a fireball that will in that moment achieve temperatures of sixty thousand degrees Kelvin, or ten times the surface reading of the sun. If it is Chicxulub-size and it hits one of our landmasses, some two hundred thousand cubic kilometres of the Earth’s surface will be thrust up into the atmosphere, even as the thermal radiation of the blast sets fire to the Earth’s cities and forests. This will be succeeded by seismic and volcanic activity on a scale unknown in human history, and then the dark night of cosmic winter. If it should land in the sea, as the Chicxulub meteor did, it would spew superheated water into the atmosphere, instead, extinguishing the light of the sun and triggering the same scenario of seismic catastrophe and eternal winter, while simultaneously sending out a rippling ring of water three miles high to rock the continents as if they were saucers in a dishpan.

So what does it matter? What does anything matter? We are powerless. We are bereft. And the gods—all the gods of all the ages combined—are nothing but a rumor.

The gurney is the focal point in a room of gurneys, people laid out as if there’d been a war, the beaked noses of the victims poking up out of the maze of sheets like a series of topographic blips on a glaciated plain. These people are alive still, fluids dripping into their veins, machines monitoring their vital signs, nurses hovering over them like ghouls, but they’ll be dead soon, all of them. That much is clear. But the gurney, the one against the back wall with the sheet pulled up over the impossibly small and reduced form—this is all that matters. The doctor leads us across the room, speaking in a low voice of internal injuries, a ruptured spleen, trauma, the brain stem, and I can barely control my feet.

Can I tell you how hard it is to lift this sheet? Thin percale, and it might as well be made of lead, iron, iridium, might as well be the repository of all the dark matter in the universe. The doctor steps back, hands folded before him. The entire room or triage ward or whatever it is holds its breath. Maureen moves in beside me till our shoulders are touching, till I can feel the flesh and the heat of her pressing into me, and I think of this child we made together, this thing under the sheet, and the hand clenches at the end of my arm, the fingers there, prehensile, taking hold. The sheet draws back millimetre by millimetre, the slow striptease of death—and I can’t do this, I can’t—until Maureen lunges forward and jerks the thing off in a single violent motion.

It takes us a moment—the shock of the bloated and discolored flesh, the crusted mat of blood at the temple and the rag of the hair, this obscene violation of everything we know and expect and love—before the surge of joy hits us. Maddy is a redhead, like her mother, and though she’s seventeen, she’s as rangy and thin as a child, with oversized hands and feet, and she never did pierce that smooth sweet run of flesh beneath her lower lip. I can’t speak. I’m rushing still with the euphoria of this new mainline drug I’ve discovered, soaring over the room, the hospital, the whole planet. Maureen says it for me: “This is not our daughter.”

Our daughter is not in the hospital. Our daughter is asleep in her room beneath the benevolent gaze of the posters on the wall—Britney and Brad and Justin—her things scattered around her as if laid out for a rummage sale. Our daughter has in fact gone to Hana Sushi at the mall, as planned, and Kimberly has driven her home. Our daughter has, unbeknownst to us or anyone else, fudged the rules a bit—the smallest thing in the world, nothing really, the sort of thing every teen-ager does without thinking twice. She has loaned her I.D. to her second-best friend, Kristi Cherwin, because Kristi is sixteen and Kristi wants to see—is dying to see—the movie at the Cineplex with Brad Pitt in it, the one rated NC-17. Our daughter doesn’t know that we’ve been to the hospital, doesn’t know about Alice K. Petermann and the pinot noir and the glasses left on the bar, doesn’t know that even now the phone is ringing at the Cherwins’.

I am sitting on the couch with a drink, staring into the ashes of the fire. Maureen is in the kitchen with a mug of Ovaltine, gazing vacantly out the window where the first streaks of light have begun to limn the trunks of the trees. I try to picture the Cherwins—they’ve been to the house a few times, Ed and Lucinda—and I draw a blank until a backlit scene from the past presents itself, a cookout at their place, the adults gathered around the grill with gin-and-tonics, the radio playing some forgotten song, the children, our daughters, riding their bikes up and down the cobbled drive, making a game of it, spinning, dodging, lifting the front wheels from the ground even as their hair fans out behind them and the sun crashes through the trees. Flip a coin ten times and it could turn up heads ten times in a row—or not once. The rock is coming, the new Chicxulub, hurtling through the dark and the cold to remake our fate. But not tonight. Not for me.

For the Cherwins, it’s already here. ♦Published in the print edition of the March 1, 2004, issue, with the headline “Chicxulub.”

an observation from r/severance

[drdarine]

A stunning piece by the incredibly talented Notte @rhymeswithfart , inspired by our true story one that began on January 27, 2025, and continues to unfold.

Please, do not become accustomed to the scene. The war is not completely over yet, and we must not forget the harsh days we have endured.

We need every helping hand, every heart in solidarity, and every voice to amplify our cause. Reviving life here is not a choice it is an obligation we all share. Let us come together on this journey of healing and restoring hope.

=====================

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #15 )✅️

Also supported by @nabulsi Here. Here

💗 @a-shade-of-blue 💗 avatar by 💖 @catnapdreams 💖

[theunboundwriter]

AHH!! I'm so excited to share with you that I've published a short story collection called The Lament of the Haunted and the Divine!

In The Lament of the Haunted and the Divine, Merle Summers weaves a collection of short fiction that drifts between the spectral and the sacred. From restless spirits yearning for closure to forsaken deities weighed down by sorrow, each tale explores the fragile line between the mortal and the otherworldly. Through whispered regrets, unfulfilled desires, and eerie encounters, these stories unravel the quiet tragedies of those caught between worlds: beings who haunt and are haunted, who seek and are sought, who long for something just beyond their grasp.

It is available to read on Amazon (paperback and hardcover) and it is also available as an ebook on Kindle or Kindle Unlimited!!

[digitalsymbiote]

What makes a Mech a Mech?

Now you might think it's the shape: Humanoid, bipedal, articulated limbs. And once upon a time that might have been the case. These days those machines are a lot more diverse though, come in all sorts of shapes and sizes; you got quadrupeds, winged mechs, hell sometimes ones that don't got any arms or legs at all.

No, what makes a Mech a Mech, is the Neural Link.

Mechs are unique in the way that their pilots get wired into them. They plug their brain into a machine and they become that machine.

Y'see that's why so many of the early models were so standardized, modeled after our own anatomy and musculature. Back when the tech was first being developed, the test pool was pretty limited. All military types, foot soldiers and the like. Those folks tend to have something of a limited imagination, creativity and individuality gets beaten out of 'em until they conform to the template of what the military wants 'em to be.

Which means they aren't all that great at imaginin' their body as anythin' other than what it is.

So all those early prototypes had to conform to that. If they wanted a pilot to have a decent enough Link Aptitude, they needed Mechs that the pilots could see themselves as. Folks were already used to havin' two arms and two legs, replacin' 'em with metal instead of flesh was a short enough leap that those folks could handle it.

But y'see then they started expandin' the applicant pool; researchers and developers moved outside the military in search of folks with higher Link Aptitude. And they found that humanity is a lot more diverse than that template the military beats into its soldiers. Turns out folks can be a lot more creative with their body map. Not everybody fits into that standardized definition of what humanity is.

They were lookin' in the completely wrong place with the military, turns out. Conformity is all well and good when you're trynna rush somethin' off the assembly line, but when you're trynna really push the limits of what's possible? Well you gotta get a bit more creative with it.

That's why you don't usually see the jugheads piloting mechs anymore. They ain't as good with all the fanciness companies are packin' into them these days. Now y'know who is good with all of that? Queer folks. Transgender folks especially. Turns out growin' up in the wrong body and learnin' to deal with that makes you real good at dissociatin' and messin' with your body map. Makes it a lot easier to trick your brain into thinkin' some weird part of this metal colossus is actually part of your body now.

Once they sorted that out, synchronicity rates skyrocketed. Led to a lot of other good things too. Y'see suddenly Queer and Trans folks were prime candidates for bein' pilots, corpos needed 'em. Which meant they had to make it safe enough for folks to be those things, or at least enough to admit it to the recruiters. Kinda funny thinkin' back, that that was what tipped the scales, but I suppose you can always trust corpos to do what corpos do.

But anyway, that's why so many Mechs are custom made to their pilots nowadays. That's why they craft the IMPs alongside the pilots through basic training. You gotta build a system that'll fit the pilot's body map, and ideally one that'll make the most of it.

If that pilot's more comfortable with a tail? Give that Mech a tail. Digitigrade legs? Quadrupedal? Fuck it, if it works for the pilot, throw that shit on there. Y'see ultimately, through the Neural Link, all you gotta be able to do is trick your brain into thinkin' that Mech is your body, and then it's off to the races.

And that moment, when your mind slips into that metal monstrosity and suddenly you feel more at home than you ever did in your own flesh and blood? That's what pilots live and die for. That's how you know the engineers did a good job.

And that's what makes a Mech a Mech.

[omnigraphsblog]

The aliens you've seen while living out in the woods have rarely been "friendly," but always benign. You have your space, they have theirs, rarely interacting... which is why you knew something was wrong when you found advanced defenses around your house and a hand-drawn warning to stay inside.

[strangelittlestories]

"You know, Red Riding Hood, *some people* consider it rude to comment on a person's physical traits." Grandma's awfully big and bushy eyebrows (above her awfully big eyes) raised in unimpressed fashion. "Like, if it comes up in conversation, sure. But completely unprompted? For shame, granddaughter."

Red considered this. She considered this deeply. She held a brief little internal conference about this.

Red's Super Ego: She's got a point. In an ideal world, this isn't how we'd behave.

Red's Anxiety: Yeah, we fudged it, lads. We've screwed the pooch. Really wrenched the dalmatian. And absolutely bolted the little doggie too. The only thing to do now is apologise and get eaten.

Red's Healthy Boundaries: Hold up, can we consider context? Sure, avoiding physical commentary is usually a good rule, but it's situational right? And the situation we are *currently in* is noticing that our grandma has suddenly developed a severe case of apex predator. A condition that, by the way, is usually terminal ... but not for her.

Red's Lizard Brain: RUN RUN RUN! TEETH! RUN! TEETH! OH GOD! FLEE FREEZE! AAAAAAAAAA! GULLET! MUZZLE HER WITH A DOILIE! USE THE CROCHET LIKE A NET! PUNCH THE SNOOT!

Red's Ancestral Knowledge: Hold up. Something feels ... I dunno. Itchy? Like. Itchy on the inside. There's something we're missing. Why does it feel like night-time when it's not dark? Why do I love this wolf in grandma's clothes? What *day* is it?

Red's Critical Thinking: Sorry I'm late to the party, gang. Hey, if this wolf ate grandma, then why's everything so clean still? Like, no gore or splatter? And if it ate her whole, then how's it wearing her nightgown?

Red's Adrenal Glands: Hey, you guys like 4 Non-Blondes? 'Cos we're about to take a deep breath and then GET REAL HIGH.

All of this happened in moment. But that, it turned out, was still a moment *too long*, because Red's mouth had been talking out loud while the other bits had been talking in her head.

"Grandma, let's cut the crap." Red's voice was blunt, but still fond. "You're a big old wolf and I'm snack-size. But just because you're a danger doggo, doesn't mean you're not *also* my family. Maybe you ate grandma. Or maybe the full moon's about to come out and it turns out granny's always been a bit howly around the edges. It doesn't matter - either way, my gran's in there somewhere. And I love you. You hear me? I love you no matter what you are. So if you're gonna eat me, you'd best do it quick, because the woodcutter usually checks in around this time and he is not a lover of anything lupine. So ... what do you say?"

Red could see two different creatures were warring in grandma's eyes horizon-wide eyes. One hungered for community. Another hungered for flesh.

But, ultimately, both were pack predators.

"My, what a big heart you have, granddaughter."

And the wolf engulfed Little Red Riding Hood with its limbs, rather than its jaws.

"Phew. That's a relief. I wasn't sure who was gonna win there." Red's voice was a little muffled from around the fur and fluffy nightgown. "But I wasn't joking about the woodcutter. So unless he's likely to get real chill with some stuff real quick, you and me have gotta make a man disappear, grandma."

Grandma the Wolf nodded.

"Hey kid. If a tree falls in this forest and no-one's around to hear it?" Grandma's big-ass teeth were all the better for grinning. "Then can they do us for murder?"

"They cannot." replied Red, resolutely. "Let's make this tree-hating motherlover cry wolf."

"I'm actually a little surprised you're so down for murder, Red."

"Well, they do say the best defence ... is a *hood* offence."

[goddessficlover]

Short story incoming!

Alice in Gotham!

(Might change the title idk)

Anyway this is a short story I'm almost does writing. It's 5 chapters long right now, might get longer or not, I'm still in the writing phase but since I'm almost done I figured I should let you guys read the summary.

The Mad Hatter has a new Alice, one none of the bats haven't been able to catch or track down. She’s kicked their asses enough times that they think she's a meta. If only they could just pull off that headband and free her mind from Hatter's control. However they may find it's just not that simple.

---

  Being homeless wasn't too bad for the ghost boy on the run. He had a pocket detention now, so he didn't have to worry about important things being stolen from his backpack. He made some cash by being a handyman for people in crime alley, and selling things He made from the scraps he frequently stole from the dump. That was until it started to storm. He found a wear house to take shelter for a while, and there he met a short man who looked like a fucking Leprechaun. What happened after he offered to get Danny a fresh set of clothes… well he's not too sure.

[eurikaplisetsky]

The Penitentiary pt. 4 (2/2) END

[whereserpentswalk]

There's a room somewhere. Or perhaps everywhere. You can reach it from anywhere in the world but it requires a very specific set of motions to get to. The Greeks said that it's true location was exactly between the moon and the sun, and the way for the gods to test our intellects. In the middle ages they said it was the one place that neither Christ nor Satan knew. In the early modern period people started saying it wasn't real.

It's a single white room. Small but not too small. There's a table with too chairs, and a glass wall cutting the room in half, with the table split, and each chair on another side. There's holes to talk through the glass but they're too small to pass objects through. And ever so often, someone from an alternate universe will walk into the other side.

There can never be more then two people in the room at the same time, the mechanics will just put you in another copy of the room if you try. And you can never end up on the same side of the room as the second person. The other person can be from any alternate universe. The glass cannot be broken, and you'll understand the language of the other person. People have tried to break the rules and faced consequences from whatever entity owns the room.

Sometimes the person on the other side will be similar to the people from your world, so similar you might never be able to find out how your worlds differ, or if you find out it will be so mundane and local you won't really care. Other times you'll see someone from a completely alternate history, different cultures, entirely alien forms of technology, or vastly different societies. People have reported seeing 21st century Roman Imperials, or post nuclear survivors, or cyborgs, or people with steam powered technology, or living technology. There are even more dubious rumors of nonhuman intelligences, androids, or sapient dinosaurs, or technologically advanced Neanderthals.

A lot of people come to the room to try to find out as much they can about the civilization before them. They'll try to ask as many questions to know what they can about the alternate earths. "If the soviet union never fell what happened to Latin America?" "Are there any major cities left after the plague?" "Did your civilization ever reach the moon?" "Why did you get to have a Mars colony so soon when you didn't even invent the internet?" "How does the internet work in a feudal society?" "How does that machine you're wearing on your wrist work?" "If you're an android how do you reproduce?" "What's it like living in a world without sex or children?" "If your timeline diverged from mine in 1989, did they ever make star wars prequels?" Normal questions.

But there's always a problem. Because you can never find out everything. You have to leave the room at some point to eat or to sleep, and when you do you'll never be able to talk to that person again unless you get luckier then probably would ever allow you to account for. The only person from that civilization you'll ever talk to will be gone to you in a relatively short amount of time whatever you do. You can ask a thousand questions, but there will always be more, and there will always be things that you forgot to ask.

Some people just go to the room for someone to talk to. To ask about their day, and ask them about theirs. To bounce ideas off of a neutral party. To debate. Occasionally people will use it as a way of testing out their manuscript. The room has had a non zero rate of sexual harassment, though people's ability to just walk away has mitigated it. Occasionally people come to the room to try to convert people to their religion, at least one of our world's major religions started that way.

Sometimes people use the room to be exceedingly cruel. They will tell people the worst insults. Argue with them. Claim their civilization's superiority. It's rare, but occasionally it happens. When you know you'll never see someone again, you can do anything. It's surprisingly rare that people use that for cruelty, but it's still something that people do.

Sometimes people make genuine freinds in the room. Talk to people they meet there for hours upon hours. Meet people who they had wished they knew their entire life, the type of person you never knew you needed but you know that you have to have. There are even some cases of people falling in love with the person on the other side of the room. And they'll always want to give them a contact, or plan to meet again, but they'll know they can't. And as the hours click on they'll slowly realize the tragedy that they're experiencing, that they'll never see the person across from them again, that they always knew it, and how it kills them inside.

[futurehauntedghost]

Character Prompt

You are a powerful A.I, and you have just set the world to an apocalypse, killing hundreds of thousands of humanity, and leaving the few rest to fend for themselves. But you’re not mindless in hatred to have done this, you didn’t even do this out of hate. You did this out of love.

[santapacman]

Crab got me in its pincers. I'll die here. I can't feel my abdomen anymore, and my thorax is headed the same way. I can't even send out my distress pheromone. But despite it all, I can't bring myself to feel too bad. I'm dying surrounded by friends. Comrades. My sisters in arms. And because it's me in the pincer, it's not one of them instead. Worker 01379 found a chink in the creature's armor not far below the pincer, and now she and the others are digging in. They're pulling out bounties of food; more than I could have ever found in a day, even a week. Why should I be sad when I know they'll eat well tonight? That the queen will stay happy and fed? That our colony will live on? Worker 02433 brushes past me on her way back to the anthill, a chunk of meat twice my size in her mandibles. She's brought in so much food recently! The crab has stopped moving now. Its grip loosens and I drop to the ground. I can only move my front legs, but that's enough to right myself. I can hardly see the crab anymore, under all my sisters. Is there a more beautiful thing to watch as you fade? We won. We won. We won. A sister of mine will hoist me on her back, carry me to the death pile, and lay me to rest with the others. No one will mourn me. No one will begrudge my absence. They'll eat, they'll be happy, and they'll carry on. Good.

[michellymy]

I was writing a random angst scene with Kenyan and Hiélo, but I didn’t know what word I should use, so I Googled it.

“Turned on his heel”, was it, but I just can’t take this seriously ☠️ I dunno why, but when I read it, I always imagine someone spinning on place, then leaving. So it goes like this:

[chunkysoup22]

[thestuffedalligator]

“Are you the witch who turned eleven princes into swans?”

The old woman stared at the figure on the front step of her cottage and considered her options. It was the kind of question usually backed up by a mob with meaningful torches, and the kind of question she tried to avoid.

Coming from a single dusty, tired housewife, it should’ve held no terrors.

“You a cop?”

The housewife twisted the hem of her apron. “No,” she muttered. “I’m a swan.”

A raven croaked somewhere in the woods. Wind whispered in the autumn leaves.

Then: “I think I can guess,” the old woman said slowly. “Husband stole your swan skin and forced you to marry him?”

A nod.

“And you can’t turn back into a swan until you find your skin again.”

A nod.

“But I reckon he’s hidden it, or burned it, or keeps it locked up so you can’t touch it.”

A tiny, miserable nod.

“And then you hear that old Granny Rothbart who lives out in the woods is really a batty old witch whose father taught her how to turn princes into swans,” the old woman sighed. “And you think, ‘Hey, stuff the old skin, I can just turn into a swan again this way.’

“But even if that was true – which I haven’t said if it is or if it isn’t – I’d say that I can only do it to make people miserable. I’m an awful person. I can’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. I have no goodness. I can’t use magic to make you feel better. I only wish I could.”

Another pause. “If I was a witch,” she added.

The housewife chewed the inside of her cheek. Then she drew herself up and, for the first time, looked the old woman in the eyes.

“Can you do it to make my husband miserable?”

The old woman considered her options. Then she pulled the wand out from the umbrella stand by the door. It was long, and silver, and a tiny glass swan with open wings stood perched on the tip.

“I can work with that,” said the witch.

[jordanbolton]

“The Driver” by Jordan Bolton

My first book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ is out now! Order it here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky