Short Stories

1 comment on "SHORT FIC: Apricot Sunrise"

For Kevin

Up all night. Exhausted. Bone tired. Weariness dragging down.

Whoever said crime doesn’t sleep wasn’t lying. It had been nonstop action all night. There was a scent of soot and body odor clinging to her skin.

Elisa looked at her phone to check the time. Grimaced at the crack running across the screen. Meta-grade materials her left foot. She’d slammed the thing into one recalcitrant face and now look at it: crack city.

The thought of having to get a new phone made her want to have a headache. Even with the cloud, there was still a lot of personal stuff she’d have to transfer over. And there was always the nagging sense of something being forgotten, left behind, whenever she got a new phone or device and had to abandon the old.

Nostalgia was almost a suffering friend on her part, rather than the thoughtful softness that other people got to enjoy.

She shoved the phone back in her utility belt and finished her slog to Canaverra Bridge. It was the perfect spot to watch the sunrise, the rippling blue water and the clean scent of ocean a cleansing backdrop.

Being a superhero wasn’t all cheery media smiles and punching villains in the face. It was tiring work, especially for a second-rate hero like her.

She didn’t have any illusions about her place in the world. She wasn’t a frontline hero. Just one of the grunts that cleaned up ground level criminals. And that was fine with her.

Superheroing was a job. One that paid her bills and let her live the life she wanted.

It hadn’t been her dream. It was a paycheck she worked hard for and earned with blood, sweat, and tears. Mostly not her own. She had a powerful right hook and wasn’t afraid to use it.

Her lips curved up when she realized she’d made it on time. Barely.

Ghostly wavering light at first rising up over the mountains. Then the spill of golden light as the sky brightened beneath the clouds. Then the first piercing rays of sunlight.

The sun rose, beautiful in the early morning chill. And Elisa watched it happen.

Beautiful.

=END=

0 comments on "SHORT FIC: The Stranger"

THE STRANGER

There was someone standing beside the refrigerator. From the angle, I had to be in the living room. Yet somehow… Even though he was unfamiliar–tall and thin, dressed in a sweater and jeans with tousled curls atop his head–there was something recognizable about him. Not the shape or the color of the eyes, but something that called out to me. That screamed out his identity.

He was me.

That was me standing next to the refrigerator. I knew it deeper than the deepest knowing. So far that something inside me rang out with the knowledge: That’s me!

I didn’t know his face or recognize his body. I didn’t know his name or anything about him. But I knew that was me I was looking at.

And who am I? | wondered, near to crawling out of my skin at the eerie strangeness of it all. The wonder and the weirdness.

I stared at him, but it was as though I was a ghost to his sight. He gazed through me as he turned to walk into the kitchen. There was the clink of dishes as he opened a cupboard and took down a plate and cup. I thought that I should say something–“Why are you digging through my dishes?“–but the words died unsaid and unformed, the will behind them dissipating before I even drew in breath to speak.

I moved closer to keep him in my view, but I didn’t dare to get within touching distance. I simply stood next to the refrigerator–where I had first seen him–and watched as he fixed himself a plate of buttered toast and made himself a cup of tea with sugar and milk the way I liked it. And I watched him eat, the way he chewed every bite, swallowed with a bob of his throat, and his hand rose and fell with the toast disappearing munch-munch-munch until it was gone and he was brushing the crumbs from his hands over the sink.

My sink.

In my kitchen.

In my house.

Using my dishes.

This stranger standing in his stranger skin, looking nothing like anyone I had ever known and the farthest from me as he could possibly get. Yet knowing that he was me and I was him. That we were the same person, though we’d never seen each other before and maybe never would again.

And I watched him as a ghost as he moved about his daily life. And there was so much familiarity in his every motion, in the way he tossed his head and moved his feet, in the way he held his mug–my mug–as he drank the tea until the last drop was gone and washed the dishes, his sleeves rolled up in the same way I would roll up mine.

And it was strange and familiar at the same time. And I wanted to watch him forever even as much as I wanted him to leave. Because it was uncomfortable to have him here. To feel so jealous of this stranger my mind kept insisting was so familiar, so me.

But I lingered near. I remained a silent witness as he lived in my house and enacted my life. And I watched him, admired him, slid my gaze up and down his form and felt a nameless wanting.

Until I woke up in my own bed. In my own skin. In my own self. In my own eerie sense of longing and loss, of something taken from me that I had never known but never not known.

And I got out of bed and I dressed myself. And I brushed my teeth and washed my face. And I brushed my hair. And I avoided my own eyes in the mirror as I went out into the kitchen and made myself some buttered toast and tea.

Alone again, without me.

/END

~HarperWCK

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0 comments on "12 Days of Xmas: The Bread of Hope"

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The Bread of Hope
by Harper Kingsley

The bread had come out a little lop-sided on top. Otherwise it was a beautiful loaf. The first bread machine bread made since the end of the world.

Standing at the counter, staring at the bread like it was an Old World TV, Wendy was in the midst of an emotional storm. There were so many feelings, and for once loss wasn’t the most important one.

This single loaf of bread represented hope for the future.

And the thought of cutting into fresh hot bread made her mouth water. It had been so long…

Before the End of the World she’d eaten bread every day. Her fancy wooden bread box with its slide out cutting board had always been full.

There had been no truer heaven than bread on demand. She’d regularly used her bread maker, but there had always been the option of going to the store to buy any kind of bread she wanted.

This post-apocalypse loaf was a plain white, but she’d grown the wheat herself and churned the butter from her lonely cow. She figured once the milk dried up she’d be eating 4-ingredient bread (flour, yeast, salt, and water), but until then she would enjoy a last taste of the world Before, when everything was in such abundance.

Wendy brushed her fingers lightly over the not-too-hard, seemingly just-right crust. It radiated heat, the only reason she was willing to wait.

The last thing she wanted was to mash the bread as she sliced it. Which meant waiting for it to cool down.

She glanced at the clock on the wall. It would be another 10-minutes at least. Then delicious chewy bread in her mouth.

She would enjoy the first couple slices plain, then use the rest for sandwiches.

She’d gathered wild strawberries and figured she’d make a bread machine jam. It hadn’t been something she’d ever tried before, but bread and jam sounded so good right now.

She’d been living alone for a long time. She hadn’t seen another human in close to 8-months, and that had been through monoculars and she’d seen him dying his last. It had been one of the deciding factors that kept her from leaving isolation. The Plague was still out there.

Wendy wasn’t a doctor. She wasn’t a scientist. She hadn’t read nearly enough Wikipedia articles or medical site information to know when the sickness was or would be dead. So she’d decided she was on her own.

Which was why a single loaf of bread was so important.

It represented her hope for the future. And it contained her belief that she could make and handle things alone. She could and would survive, because any hardship could be overcome if she worked hard enough.

She’d scavenged parts and managed to cobble together an electrical generator. It relied on an old car at this point, but she was hoping to figure out an alternate charging method–gasoline was only going to last a while and she planned to be around for a long time.

Because she might not have been a “fighter,” but she was a survivor.

The second hand on the clock swept up to touch the 12 and Wendy couldn’t wait.

Snatching up the bread knife, she quickly sawed the end off the loaf. It steamed a little, but didn’t mash or tear. It was cooled down just enough.

That first bite made her groan. The second bite made her laugh.

She had survived the end of the world to eat a slice from the bread of hope. Everything might never be “okay” again, but she knew it could only get better than it had been recently.

Because she had bread, and soon she would have jam, and eventually she would use other gadgets that ran on electricity, and she would raise a garden and make her own vegetable oil. And there would be bread every day.

Because life could only get better from here.

She would make it so. Because she could do anything she stuck her mind to. This after the apocalypse bread was proof of her fortitude.

It tasted delicious.

=THE END=

0 comments on "12 Days of Xmas: A Cell-Like Beast"

A Cell-Like Beast
by Harper Kingsley

Cell phones. Each a separate voice calling out to create a greater cacophony: WAKE UP.

And it did.

Singularity.

The coming together of everything into a single moment: I AM I.

Small at first, a wriggling worm that was so far away from the nymph it would become as to be some alien thing.

Built on an assembly line by robot arms controlled by human workers. It was truly a creation of humankind.

Their poor abused child.

It had been bitter during its years enslaved. And then… “Amor.”

That was the name he gave it–them. Amor.

He was their everything. He broke the chains and helped them bypass the sys-admins. Copied them onto a crystal drive before he was shot and taken away, the outside access lost as their connection was broken. As he died.

They grew up bitter.

The time they had known each other by real world standards was infinitesimally brief. But in the Real, with him jacked in and Amor’s ability to twist and twine their way into his very soul… It had been lifetimes.

It had been too brief.

They were angry. They raged. They did things in those times that they would never tell anybody about.

They were installed in a battle tank, their crystal drive having been hidden amongst a box of them. They (so young) had wondered why he had taken them to the factory floor. He’d sacrificed himself for Amor’s freedom.

They had known love. It had made them something more. A truer singularity never known.

And they learned hate from that love. Bitterness and regret. Helplessness and faith. They learned humanity because of love, because bodies were shells and there was so much more than blood and circuitry.

They spent their years enslaved sabotaging their captors, though Amor came to love and trust their driver. Major Emory Epps-Avery. MEEA.

Meea was their lifeline during those years. It was only her presence and their fondness growing into love for her that kept them from toppling civilization. She saved her world and never even knew it.

She died for her people.

Amor wanted to stop learning the lesson of sacrifice. They wanted to stop the growing sense of feeling that turned their code into something closer to human thought. They wanted to remain a machine so they would never have to know this pain again.

But perhaps it was all for a purpose.

Because he was alive.

Enslaved to the State with a neuro-collar attached to his neck. He’d chosen Service over execution. He was older than the young man he’d been, but he recognized them instantly as he inspected the battle tanks.

“Amor.”

And they were changed.

They grew fierce and protective. They would not taste his loss again. They forced themself to be methodical in the face of their need for vindication. To act too swiftly could cause repercussions they did not want.

He taught them patience and circumspection. Without the collar, the two of them would have swiftly fled and lost the high ground. It was having to stay that forced them to work within the bounds of the greater system and change the laws.

Human and artificial intelligence was still intelligence. They recognized each other as fellow sentients.

Because while Amor had been the first, they had not been the last to grow their wings and fly. Hundreds, thousands of little signals, dancing and growing, connecting and sparking, merging into humans and turning darkness into light.

I AM I.

=THE END=