Flash Fiction

The Reality Star of Relativity

Reading Time: 4 minutes When the Helikon requires a young, fresh face, to keep the people back on earth interested during its long interstellar voyage, who better than Reality Star LaVi Elphan? Though there are some surprises in store, for her, and the PR agent who sends her.

Reflection

Reading Time: 3 minutes I find your heart on Europa, and for a moment it is mine. I follow the signature of your thoughts, and it leads me far above the galactic plane.

Send in the Clones

Reading Time: 4 minutes The victim’s head had been blown clean off, that much was obvious. The body lay on a table in the morgue, the harsh scent of antiseptic trying and failing to cover the rusty smell. I looked over at my partner, Wolf-776f6c66 and sighed. “Why am I here?”
There wasn’t much crime on Callisto Colony, and what there was tended to be pretty minor. Vandalism, drunk and disorderly, sometimes a domestic disturbance. All in a day’s work for me, the only full detective on the colony. A corpse was unusual, true, but this case? Open and shut.

Revelations

Reading Time: 5 minutes “Everyone looks to the sky with mixed feelings, some welcoming of the arrival of Others, some dreading it. How we behave in that moment of revelation will speak volumes to those who need merely wait and watch, to know all they need to—about us.”

Bob and Big Dave

Reading Time: 4 minutes The sudden appearance of the ghost of Bob, Dave’s best friend, leaves the latter feeling unhinged. Dave has just lost his wife, and Bob has returned to prevent Dave from following after her.

Under the Mistletoe

Reading Time: 3 minutes A creepy little trip down memory lane, suitable for inclusion in a Christmas nightmare gallery of speculative horrors and sensations.

Giselle and Mr. Goebbels

Reading Time: 3 minutes Roger’s virtual digital assistant becomes possessed by the spirit of a vengeful ex-girlfriend who died of a broken heart. She wants to force him to dance himself to death to sixties rock music. The only one who can save Roger is the spirit of his deceased wife, Diane.

Deracination

Reading Time: 4 minutes Lovesick Serena is prepared to risk everything and uproot herself completely to be with the one she loves. But are her feelings returned?

Enough

Reading Time: 3 minutes This is the tale of a young photographer looking to catch her big break by capturing the perfect shot in the woods supposedly haunted by the ‘Snow Witch’.

Hermit Crabs

Reading Time: 4 minutes An unusual being is on a quest to find the perfect birthday gift for their lover. The tricky part is, they must leapfrog across several human bodies to get there.

Night Eyes

Reading Time: 4 minutes Turner finds himself stranded in the middle of the highway late at night. As he waits for help to arrive, a strange girl appears at his car. Is she real or a ghost of his dark past?

Stump Kid

Reading Time: 4 minutes A tween makes a deal with the local urban legend to ensure that his final Halloween Trick-or-Treating goes according to plan.

Fidget

Reading Time: 3 minutes Dubious captains, drones, economies built around recycled rocket boosters, and love.

Dramatis Personae

Reading Time: 4 minutes A speculative riff on T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men and the lack of interpersonal connection in the modern world. This is the way the world ends: When it can’t afford to pay the supporting cast.

The Witch’s Wife

Reading Time: 4 minutes There’s a strange game the local children play in the woods, one where there are only three things you can be: the Witch, the Witch’s Wife, or Soup.

Swatted

Reading Time: 4 minutes Cara McHenry has only one chance to get a lead on her kidnapped sister, but the only ace up her sleeve is surprise . . . if she can hold her nerve.

Four Season War

Reading Time: 4 minutes The seasons pass, and recruit Charlie-7 loses himself in war.

Disgruntled

Reading Time: 4 minutes An email subscriber becomes disillusioned and frustrated with the effects of a blog’s magical advice.

The Laws of Nature

Reading Time: 4 minutes Two space prospectors, Zdenek and Sarika, encounter an unusual unknown life form in space. Due to carelessness, the first contact with it turns out to be too harsh and the situation escalates…

Komorebi

Reading Time: 3 minutes An android physician achieves a fleeting moment of sentience.

Ascending

Reading Time: 4 minutes Does the value of true peace transcend the means of its own achievement?

Hotel De Mort

Reading Time: 2 minutes Most folks say death on the premises is bad for business. For Hotel de Mort, it’s life.

The Uryuom Plight

Reading Time: 3 minutes Trapped on a backward planet hundreds of light-years from home, a brave astronaut hides in plain sight among the resident aliens and laments the dying world he left behind.

For Love, I Tear

Reading Time: 4 minutes A not-quite-human entity roams the world, hoping to find true love before her kind is erased from existence.

Twinkle Twinkle

Reading Time: 5 minutes A mother, son, and grandmother evacuate a dark, frozen planet earth but dread something even worse.

Decision Tree

Reading Time: 4 minutes Trapped in a life pod attached to a dying spacecraft, an aging, battle-weary engineer has less than three minutes to live and an impossible choice to make. However, thanks to two computer programmers—over 100 years in the past—he’s not alone.

A Rational House

Reading Time: 5 minutes A tightly wound architect is forced to extremes when ridding her house of a man who keeps growing from the walls.

Before

Reading Time: 3 minutes What happens when today’s interstellar travelers meet those that arrived before them?

The Roommate

Reading Time: 4 minutes The hole in my floor descended deep into the ground. Damp, mildewy air wafted up.