“Last Waltz on Titan” by Michael S. Diamond
The hexagonal plate, the needle and the rosette. Shades of yellow varying from near colorless to a turbid brown. They might be beautiful if they weren’t so damn painful when they struck.
Category: Fri-SciFi
Fri-SciFi: Original Speculative Fiction
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon is a rare literary science fiction novel set in a future universe so gorgeously described and perfectly self-contained—and yet so harrowing and cruel—that its only parallel universe is our own.
Solomon’s novel inspired us to create Fri-SciFi—our new flash fiction series.
We’ve been through the past, and we haven’t really learned from it. The present? We’re too busy attempting to survive it. So we’re asking you to provide us a glimpse of what comes next. Illustrate the essential choices we must make in the present that will lead us to your brilliant utopian future. Or, if you cannot anticipate utopia, provide us instead with your cautionary tale. Show us where we will fall if we—when we—fail to alter our course.
Fri-SciFi stories are published on Fridays because we expect we’ll need the weekend to contemplate your vision.
“The Mind Bar” by Tasha Cotter
At the Mind Bar, they each took a chair with a Mind Specialist, overhead lights beating down on each of them at their individual station.
“Nameless” by Łukasz Drobnik
It can see us from above as we try to hide among brambles, hoping it will mistake our human shapes and movements for those of boar or deer or badgers.
“Stinkbug Apocalypse” by Jean Wolfersteig
Rosalie took one look at the tarot cards this morning and gazed up at me. “Molly,” she said, “I need to get away from you.” Then she bolted down Psychic Alley.
“Bones” by Elliot Harper
That gesture, that tightening of the hand, such a simple thing, simple but it reassures me.
“The Only Living Teacher in New York” by Mckenzie Cassidy
Retirement day. Those words had resonated over my career, if you could even call it that . . .
“Homecoming” by Jessica Hertz
The soil smells sweet—rich and earthy with a faint whiff of sulfur from a geyser somewhere in the vicinity.
“Walls” by Rhian Waller
The walls divide more than inside and out: they run a sharp line between needs and wants.