The Courier’s Tale

by Rudi Dornemann

It’s still early when Eyve Aerial enters the abandoned district. The sun is bright and low, so that the spidery petals of snowflake roses cast shadows like clutching hands on the edge of the road.

An invocation, chalked on the bowed metal of a cellar door in careful phonetics, is a line of bubble-round glyphs that might be cartoons. Eyve forces herself not to read, lest she sound them out in her head and activate something.

An emperor centipede blurs across the pavement, a quick zig just when it would have scurried over the toe of her boot, and it’s away into the safety of the rose-thicket shadows. From the clacking clatter of its segments, the mineralizing’s irreversible — it’ll be dead in a week, a statue, a monument to its final moment. Eyve shivers; Medusa syndrome! And it almost touched her.

She’s carrying a jar full of oracular candies, imported and expensive: fruity fizzing omen-jellies, licorice-centered maybes, sugar-powdered harbingers. As bad for your teeth as your soul — that’s what the Central Square Sorceress said when she paid Eyve the first half of the courier fee. She sounded stern and all-knowing, like she always sounded.

Eyve’s been resisting the temptation to taste one all the blocks and blocks she’s been walking. With all the miles she has to go, she won’t be able to hold out. The Blue Magus of the Western Suburbs will never know if she has one. Just one. This is the only part of her route where there won’t be anyone around to see her.

Eyve reaches without looking, pops a minty-sour something into her mouth. The taste is acid and too-sweet. She spits it out on the asphalt, but flavor is still unfolding on her tongue, rich and disgusting. She sees herself, not much older, hobbling and rust-furred, clanking into her final pose. The jar slips from her hands, shatters. Candy blobs and glass splinters cover the road.

After a frozen moment, she picks up a squashed harbinger, and licks it, hoping for a glimpse of a different, less terminal, future. Just a lick shouldn’t be too bad for her, and if it’s promising, she can eat the whole thing. It tastes like yesterday’s stewed cabbage, and shows her the whole city turned to a charred crater.

She sets the harbinger aside and reaches for a pink-frosted portent nougat. Maybe this one will be better.

Bullet Ride

by JeremyT

Our reentry pods skip across the over Africa to South America in a handful of seconds and Jessie is screaming like she did when we snuck off to ride the Dubai coasters while my parents negotiated treaties with her parents in Geneva. The Mission Control people are chuckling over the comm, so I guess it’s not uncommon for return trippers to treat the whole thing like just another amusement park ride.

I hated the coasters. The only reason I ever rode them was because Jessie would let me feel her up afterwards. I hate this just as much, and I am pretty sure I just wet myself or worse. My heart is bouncing off my rib cages like a raver on E-plus.

“The problem with you,” Jessie said to me below the coaster while I puked my lunch onto the sizzling-hot pavement, “is that you just can’t let go. You need to conquer your fear of death and make it work for you.”
Hence our trip back from the L5 station as bullets fired at the Earth’s atmosphere inside goo-filled pods.

She’s going to fuck me when we land.

So it’s probably worth it.

“Parachutes to deploy in t-minus eight,” a woman’s voice says through my comm. “There will be a slight bump.”

I feel the bump, only it’s more like a maglev train crashing into a brick wall. Jessie stops screaming. The silence scares me more than the screaming.

I’m surrounded by impact, g-resistant gel, so I can barely move my fingers to text: Jessie?

No answer. I hit my panic button.

“Remain calm,” says the woman’s voice. “Your reentry pod is functioning normally.” I can hear frantic argument behind her, but I can’t make out the words.

What about Jessie? I text as fast as I can. The pressure is letting up. I can feel gravity’s pull at my feet again, and the pod is swaying gently.

No answer.

I’m not dumb. I know what’s happened. Jessie was my best friend, maybe my only friend. But all I can think is, Shit. Now I’m never going to lose my virginity.