Skip to content

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Posts

Chapter 2

by Zin

The night settled gently around Tella, wrapping her in its velvety embrace, as the quietude knocked softly against her windowpanes like a timid guest. Yet, before she opened her eyes, her spirit was already racing, tangled in the web of a haunting memory. Her breath quickened, each inhale sharp as a shard of glass, her heartbeat a frantic rhythm drumming against her chest.

With a hesitant flutter, she opened her eyes, raising a trembling hand before her as if to question its quaking. An alarm blared from the nearby robot health monitor, its robotic voice slicing through the gloom of her room. “My lady, your heart rate is dangerously high. You need your injection, or you risk collapsing.”

The Ring on the Windowsill

by CJ

Sasha couldn’t remember how her wedding ring had ended up on the kitchen windowsill, all she knew was that at some point it became part of the clutter.

Discarded between bottles of medicine and a neglected pot plant, it should have been invisible, but she knew it was there – a golden flicker out the corner of her eye as she ate breakfast each morning.

In a way, it had become a universal constant – the sun rose in the east through the kitchen window, and, every morning, it caught the metal and winked at her. Even on the cloudy days, or at the height of winter.

Emyr Travels

The five sets of melodies, harmonies and rhythms rode in on the tide. They curled up and off the incoming waters, peeling away from the white crests to be caught by the breeze and reverberate around the rocky walls. In the cold Welsh air, the five songs found each other and finally embraced.  The cliffs and the land welcomed them, embraced them and made them felt safe so that, slowly, they could become one song. At first Carol and the other sirens in the cove simply stood and listened. Marvelling at the new song with its intricate form, watching it grow in confidence, letting it fill with vibrancy, colour and light. As the new song started to shimmer in the night air the sirens stood along the darkened shore and braced themselves.

One by one, feeling the strength of their sisters’ shared music, they started to pick up the notes and phrases and repeat them. Singing them back to the cliffs and the water and the sand, adding to the melody with their own, weaving a strong song for Emyr. The music grew and when it was ready the sirens held onto the song like it was a lifeline. The sirens spun the song round the cove, looping it through the air high above their heads. It thickened the air around it, and when the sirens had given it enough momentum, they cast their song through the portal in the cliff face, up into the inky night sky and out into the universe, towards the Circle.

Sale or Return

Cassy looked at the pictures filling the screen, the latest celebrity couple smiling broadly, their white teeth gleaming as they presented their stunningly beautiful new baby to the World. They’d used a surrogate, of course, why ruin your figure when somebody else would take one for the team, at a price.

George Bernard Shaw and Isadora Duncan came into her mind. Duncan had apparently suggested to him that if they had a child together, it would have the perfect combination of her beauty and his brains. He had countered this, however,  by saying that the opposite was also just as likely to happen, which would be far from ideal. There would have been no such chances taken with this baby, though, Cassy thought.

How to murder Aliens

1

First: identify the right time. The purple hiota plants come into flower, just before the Cull, which was a good time, because the Akkers -sorry, that’s what we call them on account of the noise they make eating, Akk, Akk, Akk – lick the nectar and it makes them high. All the guards do it, although forbidden, because more prisoners escaped then than any other time of the solar. Some guards take so much they wander off into the jungle and die there, probably as happy as lice in a dormitory.  

Two: pick your alien wisely and cautiously. The most obvious targets were the guards of course, but that had been tried many times, and the escapees were quickly recaptured. Of course they were. Guards were missed almost immediately, no matter how dopey some of them were – unless they were hiota high. And once recaptured, the prisoners were made an example of.

The night Uncle Johnny died

Laurence was just fourteen years old. Though tall enough for his dark, bushy curls to brush against the lintel across the worn, wooden swing doors of the Bird in Hand public house on Bromsgrove Street, and broad shouldered enough to pass for a man in the right company, he was not going to fool anyone in the Bird, not on a Friday night.

He felt a tightness in his chest he couldn’t quite name: neither fear nor shame, but a heavy awareness he didn’t belong here, not yet, and perhaps never would. He acted as a silent postboy, carrying messages between adults, yet no one ever asked how he felt about their contents.

School Exchange to Mars

By Janet

Mars – Day 1

Hi Mum.

Greetings from Mars!

Yes, we’ve finally arrived and thank God for that. I don’t think I could’ve spent another minute on that shuttle, if you paid me. Two months with six of us cooped up in a space the size of our back bedroom and you can imagine that tempers frayed, not to mention the smell. No wonder they made us strip off and walk through a disinfection chamber on landing. Honestly, I don’t blame them as we stank to high heaven. It was quite embarrassing though but I don’t think Martians are as self-conscious as Humans. It’s interesting how much you learn about people when you can’t escape them. For example, Ginny talks in her sleep and Ryan snores like a warthog, two things I would rather have not known. They of course swore they didn’t, but a little secret recording settled that dispute. Food wasn’t too bad until a couple of weeks before we landed and there was no fresh food left. Dehydrated spag bol sounds OK but, trust me, it isn’t. Think very soft slimy tinned spaghetti strands interspersed with grit, and you get the picture.  The flight was so boring too. The trouble with space is that the view out of the window is quite samey, day after day, not like the journey from Swansea to Cardiff. Imagine month after month of mainly darkness. We managed to keep ourselves busy though. Joe ran a daily morning fitness class of squats, lunges, press ups, sit ups and the plank and Cary ended the day with a yoga class. As you know, I’m no fitness fanatic but I think it’s done me good. That, along with reading, puzzles, listening to music and the occasional makeshift karaoke, initiated by Rob, helped pass the time. I bet you didn’t know that Rob’s DJ’ed at Clwb Ifor Bach. Admit it, you don’t know where that is, but it’s a club in Cardiff so that’s really cool.

Anyway, enough for now. I’ve arrived safe and sound and I’ll message again when I’ve met my exchange family. Say hi to Dad and Jen for me and give Luna a big tummy tickle.

Cariad mawr,

Fi

xxxx


Death of the Emissary

By Jason

You realise darling, I am older than I ever thought I would be. This is a fact that amazes me even now. I have outlived the Five Mothers, the Bahamut who ventured out onto the Celestial Ocean to contact you, forging this universe as they travelled.

I doubt they would recognise me now.

If they saw me now, what would they think?

I am not one of them. Not now. I have changed. Some would say I have evolved; others would be less kind. I think they would be afraid of me. I am so different now. Old, decrepit, deformed. An alien to their eyes. Maybe even an abomination… Before I touched your Artefact, as I watched the pod mothers swim in circles around it, I knew what exactly would happen. I sensed the possibility with every atom in my being. The greater part of me wanted it, ached for it. It pushed me toward change, recognising the importance of the process. I am still surprised by exactly how much I wanted this though. Surprised at how important it was to me back then and how stupid I must have seemed to my pod sisters. Not stupid in wanting to grow and see and develop. But, stupid in that ultimately it won’t have made any difference.

You are dying.

I have seen your end. I feel it. I know it and I hate it.

I still think you beautiful.

Wise.

Even now you seek to comfort me. Trying to prepare me for the time when…

Seeds of Death V1.1

by Martyn

The tall, black-clad figure of Zinnai Savita Ké coalesced into corporeality with a sigh of expanding vapour and a shower of portal radiation overspill. The air, carrying a faint scent of ozone, rippled as her mass displaced it. Zac, her e-familiar—a sleek, obsidian drone —hummed into existence beside her, hovering resolutely near her shoulders. Its sensors rotated, making a swift threat level assessment, which, finding none, released it from its station to hover near the ceiling.

“Are you doing menacing?” she asked, a wry smile trying to break free as she looked up at Zac.

“It’s my go-to pose, boss,” Zac replied. “It goes nicely with the multi-terajoule directed energy array I’m wearing.”

Ké favoured making solitude a stranger, at least since the Insight Agency claimed her from the orphanage in which she grew up, but her hit-and-miss relations with other humans meant she never travelled without the irascible but likeable drone. The upside of this is drones never forget anything. This is also the downside, but Ké liked the constraints of always being on her mettle, especially when her witness was a combat-enabled drone with no firmware interdiction of human casualties.

There she lay

By Sandra

There she lay, under the pink eiderdown, her face slack, cheekbones hollowed, mouth open. For a long moment Amy thought she’d arrived too late, but then she saw the almost imperceptible rise and fall of the chest. Still alive, then. Leo had said she’d be too late if she left it any longer, but no, the old bag was still going and would probably keep them all waiting on her, if history was anything to go by.

Well, Amy wasn’t going to wait on her; she had made that decision an age ago and the small matter of her death was no reason to change that in her mind. Amy tapped her fingers on her leg and sighed, ‘Well. I came, I saw and all that. I’m off.’ Leo turned from the bed, her face showing the shock she plainly felt, ‘Amy, you only just got here.’ She stood up and crossed the small bedroom, her long floral dress and white cardigan, fitting in seamlessly with the flowered wallpaper, and Lladro ornaments on the bedside table.

She took Amy’s arm and gently ushered her out the door. In a soft voice, she said, ‘Mum is dying, Amy. I know you had your differences, but…’ she began.

Differences,’ Amy said, and gave a broken laugh, her voice mocking, ‘is that what we are calling it? It’s called narcissism in my book. Not exactly mother of the year, was she?’ She flung her arms up, frustrated as always whenever the subject of Sherri -she didn’t deserve the moniker mum or mother– came up.

You cannot copy content of this page