Happy New Year, Said the Rooster

by Luc Reid

The rooster took it philosophically. “I’ve always thought I had a spiritual calling,” he joked to the ducks.

The mallard drake, a half-wild resident of the dome wall wetland, didn’t think this was funny. “Why do you choose death when there is swimming and flying? Run away!”

The rooster cleared his throat with a delicate “ur-uhrt!” and the mallard was embarrassed to recollect that the rooster could neither swim nor fly. “Anyway,” said the duck, “they won’t kill you when they realize you’re a Speaking Animal.”

The rooster jerked his head back in that way chickens have when they want to be contrary. “If chopping off the head of a dumb rooster will bring luck to the farm, then chopping off the head of a Speaking Rooster should be much more luck. So I won’t tell them.”

The farm had been running a little short of luck. It was a serene and verdant little farm, five square kilometers under a bubble on an asteroid that drifted through the Jupiter Rim Mining Territories. Lately the miners had been doing badly, and the farm had been doing worse. No one had been able to afford eggs in almost four months. The bubble had grown a crack that crept further every week, and if they didn’t get the funds to fly in engineers soon, it might break open entirely, leaving Farmer Hwang-Bernstein and his family to cower in their survival shelter and hope for an evacuation mission while the livestock drifted away into space, bug-eyed and frozen.

So the rooster said nothing when 8-year-old Verita Hwang-Bernstein strode out and grabbed him by his taloned feet.

“You’re making a mistake!” the mallard quacked as she walked away, but Verita never talked to ducks, and the rooster didn’t know whether the mallard meant him or the girl.

Dangling upside down, the stars wheeling above him, the rooster began to feel unsure, and his marble-sized heart beat double time. When Verita laid him out on the old stump and the rooster glimpsed the farmer striding out with the axe, he began crowing and screeching and jerking around for all he was worth.

There was a kind of thwack. All his fears, suddenly, left him.

When his feet touched the ground he ran, heedless, unthinking, unburdened. He couldn’t see, nor hear, and he wasn’t even sure the ground was beneath his feet. “Ah,” the rooster thought. “So this is freedom.”

He might, he thought, be running in circles on the stars themselves.

The Corporeal Assistant

by Edd

Every eight year old in the world knows what they want to be when they grow up. Ysabel Moreno was no exception.

Ysabel was allergic to ghosts. She found this out when the specters of three dead pirates set to guard a treasure long since discovered made her sneeze and her eyes water. They spoke to her of a man on the beach who carried an odd walking stick that beeped and buzzed, of his excitement when it beeped most loudly, of his digging up the chest they had been killed to guard.

Ysabel was a clever child. She told the ghosts to follow her when she left the beach, only to follow at a distance so that she could breathe easier. When she and her parents were finished playing and lazing on the beach, they went home, and the next day she asked to be taken to the National Museum. The ghosts followed, sitting at the far end of the bus, where an old lady complained of the cold.

Ysabel led the way up the stairs of the museum. Only she heard the jingle of their cutlasses striking the steps. Her parents followed, trying to slow her down so they could read to her the labels on things, but she would have none of their dawdling. She ran from one hall to another, finally stopping at one labeled “Treasures of the Deep”. There, in a place of honor, stood the chest, perhaps a bit less heavy with gold and silver, yet it pleased the pirates to see it. They thanked Ysabel most graciously, then stood over the treasure to guard it as was their duty for the rest of time.

Ysabel’s mother remarked as they left the museum that her ailment appeared to be improving, and her father took them to an ice cream parlor to celebrate. She was almost done with her fudge ripple when a fit of sneezing quite overcame her, and she looked around the room to see a sad woman with a parasol. Oddly, she was seated in the same chair as a young firefighter, who spoke of the uncommon coldness in that part of the room. The ghost saw Ysabel watching, and beckoned to her.

“Oh dear,” said Ysabel’s mother. “Just when you were doing so well.”