Plugs

Alex Dally MacFarlane’s story “The Devonshire Arms” is available online at Clarkesworld.

Susannah Mandel’s short story “The Monkey and the Butterfly” is in Shimmer #11. She also has poems in the current issues of Sybil’s Garage, Goblin Fruit, and Peter Parasol.

Read Rudi’s story “Detail from a Painting by Hieronymus Bosch” at Behind the Wainscot.

David Kopaska-Merkel’s book of humorous noir fiction based on nursery rhymes, Nursery Rhyme Noir 978-09821068-3-9, is sold at the Genre Mall. Other new books include The zSimian Transcript (Cyberwizard Productions) and Brushfires (Sams Dot Publishing).

Bird

by David

Imagine your brain has been transplanted into the body of a genetically engineered bird. Imagine that your family (Sean, Merope, little lame Emilie) have been archived digitally. Imagine further that you have been told, if you complete this mission, they will be allowed to join you. Let’s be honest. You know where this is going, you watched “Dune” and 1000 other vids with the same plot device. So when you fly over the cluster of thatched huts nestled under the trees, you don’t drop that which you carry. Your family is lost to you, always was (surely), but you will not destroy the rebel village. You are free, free to develop your own new life. Free to soar on the wind, a solitary aerial monarch. One who has escaped the tyrants.

One who has no idea of how to survive, alone and avian. Maybe the villagers will accept you, feed you, shelter you. You spiral down towards the trees that shelter your possible new home.

Imagine you are a genetically engineered bird who, for a time, dreamed she was something else.

end

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