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December 7, 2011

From “The Northernmost Poison” by Kent. B. Mystrom

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“You mutinous bastards,” the captain choked from his bunk. “You’ve poisoned me. I can feel it in my bones.”

“Try not to talk, skipper,” the bos’n said, handing a steaming cup of soup across the bed. It was the best food left on board.

The captain swatted at it, weakly but with enough force to spill the contents across his blankets and bedclothes. The men’s hungry, mournful expressions made no impression on him.

“You’ve all been against me from the start,” the captain hissed. “From first steam to 80 degrees north. You wanted the glory for yourselves, and now you’ll die out here without my guidance.”

The mates tried to calm him down, but the captain was soon frothing at the mouth in a paroxysm of rage, or perhaps of death. Eventually they were able to get a bit between his teeth, and the surgeon gave him some morphine.

By nine o’clock the next morning, he was dead. The first mate sent a party trudging over the sea ice to the rocky short to bury him. When left to themselves, the deckhands began placing small wagers about how long the rest of them would survive without the only man aboard experienced in those icy waters. The officers, for their part, apparently saw to it that the arsenic bowl from the surgeon’s kit went missing.

 

December 6, 2011

From “Saul’s Awakening” by A. Madison Burnstein

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I could only remember snatches.

Getting on the airplane in Tel Aviv…that was clear enough. Where had I been going? Grandma had been there. Perhaps I’d been to visit her and was on my way back to the States…

After that…I remember shouting, and darkness. Sharp sounds, maybe rifle or handgun shots. I’ve only ever seen either in movies. There are snatches of oaths in three languages–Hebrew, Arabic, English–and maybe others as well. I think they were saying things that Grandma would have given me a swat for.

An engine. I remember the comforting hum of an automobile engine long after the higher yawl of jet turbines had faded away. Maybe there were helicopter blades in there somewhere, or that could have just been what little I could remember of my medivac from the wilderness after my appendix burst…the only other time there were patches of black in my memory.

Precious little to go on, especially when confronted by a wall of unbroken dunes with nothing but sand, sky, and wind.

 

December 5, 2011

From “Tragedy on the Ismentro” by Alberto R. Vittorio

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The attack against the Ismentro, an insignificant tributary in the sub-Alpine highlands, came on the heels of fifteen failed attacks before it. The Austrians had long suspected their erstwhile ally of treachery, and had carefully laid in their defenses and improved them based on their German allies’ combat experience. The Italian regiments waded into slaughter, armed with Carcano bolt-action carbines against heavy machine guns.

The Sixteenth Battle of the Ismentro appeared to be more of the same; Italian officers and enlisted men had observed the Austrians constructing improved fortifications through their field glasses. Thus, when the order went out to advance, it was disobeyed by nine out of the ten formations in the line.

General Codarna was livid when he received the news, and could barely be persuaded from ordering every last surviving man on the line to be shot. He settled for decimation instead: the old Roman practice of forcing the men to draw lots in groups of ten, with the winners beating the loser to death. It had served him well, or so he thought, on the Isonzo.

Word of the events reached the Austrians, who were preparing a general offensive for later in the year. As a result, their attack in the Ismentro sector fell squarely on the decimated troops.

 

December 4, 2011

From “The Last Island” by Crystal J. Leira

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The outrigger canoes had stopped arriving with trade when he had been but a boy. Uncle’s canoe, the only one on the isle capable of making the journey, had been carefully conserved until Father felt there was no other choice but to send it. Uncle and two cousins had set out, promising to return with the necessary trade goods or an answer for the traders’ disappearance.

They had never returned.

Father had died of sickness not long after, and before long the isle was wracked by illness–caused by starvation–and the infighting that caused. Those who didn’t succumb wound up mortally wounding each other in pointless struggles.

When it was time for his manhood ritual, only a cousin and half-brother remained to stand beside him. He could not take a wife, as the only two women on the isle were his close kin. They too dwindled away, like a dying bonfire. The last islander, a cousin, had died almost ten seasons ago, leaving him alone.

The outriggers had not returned. Food was plentiful enough for him to feed himself, but without help it was impossible to do much else. It would not be long before an accident or a sickness claimed his life, and then the isle would be empty.

He spent most of his time looking out to sea in the direction of the setting sun.

 

December 3, 2011

From “Post-Chaste” by A. B. McWhorten

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“Living in a Society Post-Chaste: A Fewhite Manifesto.”

Angela looked up. “What is this?”

“They’re giving them out by the student union,” said Tom.

“Well, I like the punnery going on in ‘post-chaste,’ but how do they expect anyone to take them seriously with a name like ‘Fewhite?’ No matter how you pronounce it, it sounds like either a 19th century agrarian cult or a kind of bat droppings.”

 

December 1, 2011

From “Faded Flower of Venetia” by Luigi Z. Moderno

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“Right, right. Ennelle Luca, queen of the Italian screen. I used to have a poster of her on my wall.”

“You were quite the cineaste as a child.”

“Who said anything about being a child? This was in grad school. I took a course in Italian film, and the prof was a devotee of Antonio Tenaglia. He was always tearing down Fellini and building up Tenaglia and we impressionable students lapped it all up.”

“So here we have the address of Ennelle Luca, nee Maria Zoccarato, star of the last six films her lover Tenaglia made before he died, and a virtual recluse ever since. What are we going to do with it?”

 

November 30, 2011

From “The Muse and the Completed First Draft” by Altos Wexan

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“Well, that’s it,” I said. “I’m done. Or at least as done as I’m going to be.”

My muse, seated in the tattered desk chair behind me, cracked open a fresh beer, not even bothering to mop up the droplets that splattered on their beat-up t-shirt. “Well, was it everything you thought it would be?”

“Sort of,” I said. “I mean, it’s always a thousand times better in my head.”

“It always is,” said my muse in between slugs of Pabst. “But was it worth it?”

“It was a real slog sometimes, especially with the deadlines,” I said. That wasn’t the half of it. Late nights in coffee shops on the weekends, struggling to craft a sentence or two between shifts at work…Sometimes the words would flow out so fast I was afraid I’d type my fingers into raw and bloody nubs. More often I’d sit there sweating bullets at the sight of a blank page, that most pale and personal of horrors. For every piece of prose that soared, there were two more that sank in the morass.

“That’s not what I asked.” My muse tore open a bag of greasy potato chip and began to eat. “Was it worth it?”

I looked at the words on my screen, the pages upon pages that, bad as they were, hadn’t been there before. I glanced at my story notes, breathing some tiny spark of life into people that would never exist, no matter how cardboard or inconsistent they might be.

“Yes,” I said. “It was worth it.”

 

November 29, 2011

From “The Liberation of Winslow Farms” by Peggie Sharron Jarvis

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Melody Greer preferred to be known as Subcommander MG, at least when planning sabotage operations with her Humans for Ethical Animal Treatment group (or “cell” as she preferred to call it). A consensus had rapidly developed among the HEAT members in Cascadia regarding Melody, one that had withstood membership changes and trips to the cooler:

-She was a gifted leader and passionate organizer for the local HEAT.

-She was completely batshit crazy.

This time, she appeared before the seven local members wearing an East German surplus field sweater and a drawn balaclava. “Greetings. Our target this time will be the C. I. Winslow Farms. We will liberate their entire stock of hogs and cattle, and sabotage production systems.”

A hand went up in the back. “Isn’t that a family farm? I think I went to school with the Winslows.”

 

November 28, 2011

From “Thermos Rafting” by Joanie O’Neal Emerson

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“Love to, but can’t,” Sheila said. She took another generous sip from her thermos. “Dead.”

“Dead?” Ruckell said. “I think I’d have heard about that.”

Sheila shrugged. “Obituary’ll be in Monday’s paper. We got the news too late to make Friday’s.”

“What happened?”

Another long, deliberate sip. “Not sure it’s any of your business.”

Ruckell sighed. “Do I really have to stick my badge in your face again, ma’am?”

“Do you?” Sheila raised the thermos again.

Ruckell swatted it away. It clattered to the ground–there was nothing in it. She’d been sucking on an empty thermos just to spite him. He held his badge inches from Sheila’s face. “How…did…he…die?”

“Whitewater rafting,” Sheila hissed. “Boat overturned. They found everyone downstream, drowned.”

 

November 27, 2011

From “The Datane Trojan” by Connor Haehnel

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serialCabal: I’ve got a bit more information for you. Scuzzy was attempting to make a local copy of something from Datane Systems, LLC.

existentialCrisis: Datane? They’re a low-level server farm from what I can see. They rent their servers and processors to other companies at peak times when their cloud computing can’t handle the strain.

serialCabal: Not exactly a major player in the world market. Why’d Scuzzy attempt something so risky with such a dinky target? Making a local copy off some two-bit server farm…it just doesn’t add up. Unless he was trying to get something that went through Datane.

existentialCrisis: Hold on. I put in a query to Dongelle and she just sent over a list of clients that have been using Datane. Says CeeAreTee got it off an illegal drive that someone hawked–tax documents and internal stuff.

serialCabal: And? who have they been selling to?

existentialCrisis: Nobody. Datane has been in business for ten years and they’ve never sold a single bit of server space or processor time.

 

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