It all began, as a great many things do, with a young girl being a nosy parker and snooping on her parents’ computer in a private folder that, in all fairness, should have been password protected. In that folder there was a video clip that ran exactly one minute and fifty-four seconds, the average length of a movie trailer.
It was once believed that homo sapiens only used ten percent of their brains and though that myth had been debunked, the truth of the matter was a region of human gray matter was purposefully made inaccessible as a sanity safeguard. There were things in existence, arcane matters which lived outside the boundaries of mortal ken, that were meant to remain forever unnoticed and unknowable. The video clip featured one of those forbidden subjects.
How her parents came into possession of the knowledge, why they decided to not only engage in but also record an act so heinous that it couldn’t be unseen or unremembered, remained a mystery to this very day.
What the young girl witnessed stripped away her common sense reasoning and even though she knew better, she downloaded the clip to her phone to show her best friend at school the following day, who made a copy and uploaded it to all the popular social media sites. These sites and their corresponding apps suffered an outage in the United States and most of Europe, remaining offline in excess of six hours. As a result, the President of the United States shut down the internet in North America but by then it was too late.
The act had been seen by millions, infecting all who viewed it and the madness was spreading, heralding the resurrection of the dormant Old Gods.
Popular belief has it that the universe is comprised of atoms. In reality, the universe is actually made up of…
If you are fortunate or unfortunate, whichever the case may be, to live as long as I, you will discover that the past becomes little more than a confustication of events which have been divorced from the depth of time and in that jumbled mental mix, you may find that you occasionally misplace those you love. My mother is one such person.
Her face is all but forgotten and the sole recollection I have is a time when I fell into her arms and inhaled the scent of her shampooed hair. I was aware of how fast her heart was beating against my chest. Why? I cannot rightly recall but I felt her tears washing down my face which let loose the flood that had been building up inside me.
Many has been the time I attempted to plant my feet in the soil of that instance in order to explore the reason for our tears and excavate other buried memories of my mother but the moment always passes too quickly.
Finnsy almost threw away the winning ticket with her milk receipt. The bodega clerk caught her wrist before she dropped it into the bin, pulled the ticket from between her fingers, and checked the numbers against the television above the cigarettes. Then he locked the front door, which frightened her more than his sudden shouting.
Now she occupied a plastic chair at the Metropolitan Food Recovery Center, trying to remember whether she owned a frying pan. A camera crew was coming to interview her. Somewhere beyond the reception doors, ten pounds of meat belonged to her, an amount she couldn’t picture without imagining something extravagant and faintly criminal, like ten pounds of jewelry.
“Have you decided what you’re making?”
The man beside her held his ticket flat against his knee. He wore a clean blue shirt with one cuff folded higher than the other, and he kept pressing the folded cuff down as though its failure embarrassed him.
“I haven’t decided whether I remember how to cook it,” Finnsy said. “I was thinking I could telephone my mother and let her tell me everything I’m doing wrong.”
“My mother would travel here to do it in person.”
She laughed, and his hands relaxed.
He introduced himself as Mick McCaffrey, although everyone called him Mooch. The nickname required an explanation involving an older brother, a stolen sandwich, and a family’s refusal to allow a person to recover from anything that happened before kindergarten. Finnsy offered her own nickname in exchange and enjoyed the way he tried it aloud before asking whether he could use it.
“What did you win?” she asked.
“Reserve winner. They telephoned this morning and told me to come down.”
“Does that mean you get mine if I don’t show up?”
“I was hoping to make a better first impression than that.”
Across the room, a receptionist raised her eyes from her monitor. Mooch lowered his voice, and Finnsy leaned closer to hear him.
Three years earlier, contaminated feed entered a distribution network supplying most of the country’s commercial livestock. By the time authorities understood the extent of the contamination, slaughterhouses were closing and refrigerated trucks were being stopped on highways. Finnsy remembered watching a neighbor pour beef stock through a sieve because he couldn’t bear to throw it away. She remembered the smell from the dumpsters behind the supermarket.
The Recovery Centers appeared eighteen months later. Their advertisements showed white laboratories, healthy cells dividing beneath microscopes, and smiling families passing bowls across dinner tables. Production remained limited, the advertisements explained. The lottery ensured fair access while the technology developed.
Finnsy bought her ticket because the bodega clerk couldn’t break a twenty.
Mooch bought his every Friday.
“My father used to cook on Sundays,” he said. “Whatever else went wrong that week, there was dinner. I suppose I wanted to do that again.”
“For your father?”
“He died before the shortage.”
He smoothed the ticket against his knee. Finnsy could have offered sympathy, but something in his face suggested he regretted making the conversation sad.
“Then you’ll have to cook for somebody else,” she said.
He glanced at her, cautiously enough that she almost laughed again.
“I could do that.”
A woman in a cream jacket entered reception and asked Finnsy to accompany her. The camera crew was ready, and there were a few photographs to take before the presentation. When Finnsy rose, Mooch stood with her.
“Would you have dinner with me?” he asked. “You can bring a suspiciously small contribution from your winnings. I’ll supply everything else.”
“What if you’re a terrible cook?”
“You can telephone your mother.”
Finnsy took his phone and entered her number. He called it immediately, and she saved him as Mooch, resisting the ridiculous impulse to add a heart.
“Friday,” she said. “And I expect potatoes.”
The woman in the cream jacket smiled at them with professional patience. Finnsy followed her through the reception doors, already considering which of her friends could be trusted to hear about this without turning dinner into an engagement.
The interview took longer than she expected. They filmed her entering a room twice, asked her to repeat what winning meant to her, and suggested she mention the importance of scientific progress. She complied because ten pounds of meat seemed worth a little foolishness, although she refused to say the lottery changed her life.
During a pause, she heard wheels rattling along the corridor outside.
Then Mooch’s voice, raised in protest.
She turned toward the door.
The woman adjusted Finnsy’s collar, freeing a strand of hair caught beneath it. “They’re taking our reserve winner through the production wing. People always have questions when they see the equipment.”
“What sort of equipment?”
“Harvesting and processing. Would you mind holding the ticket a little higher?”
By the time they finished, Finnsy’s smile hurt.
Her prize arrived in an insulated carrier, divided into neat vacuum-packed portions. She lifted it with both hands while a photographer crouched to find an angle that included the Recovery Center emblem behind her.
Mooch wasn’t in reception.
The woman checked with someone through her earpiece, then told Finnsy he completed his visit and left. Finnsy sent him a message about Friday, followed by another warning that she would eat all ten pounds herself if he failed to produce acceptable potatoes.
Outside, she turned back for a final look through the glass doors. His chair was empty. She wished she’d asked where he lived.
In the processing wing, a technician retrieved a phone from the pocket of a clean blue shirt. Its screen lit beneath his hand.
You still owe me dinner.
He powered it off and placed it beside a wallet, keys, and a folded reserve ticket. Through the partition, a supervisor watched the delivery vehicle carry Finnsy and her winnings toward the gate.
“Did she ask about him?”
“Twice,” the woman in the cream jacket said.
The supervisor removed his glasses and pressed the bridge of his nose. They were supposed to keep the winners apart. He would have to speak to reception again.
On the cutting table behind him, one of Mooch’s hands hung over the edge beneath a sheet. The technician tucked it back under before wheeling him toward the grinder.
At home, Finnsy cleared a shelf in her refrigerator and set aside two portions for Friday. She photographed them and sent the picture to his phone.
Then she found her frying pan, called her mother, and asked how long a good steak should rest.
Popular belief has it that the universe is comprised of atoms. In reality, the universe is actually made up of…
You may not know it to look at me, but I’m a real estate tycoon. I own more acres of land than I know what to do with, complete with property, some with sturdy foundations, others less so. Where, you ask? You should be asking when.
All my property exists in the past. Acreages of failed relationships with family, friends, and lovers, all abandoned before they could reach their full potential. Some were cut short by circumstances beyond my control, but the majority were absolutely avoidable if only I had taken time to till the soil.
The land is barren now, available for sale or rent, perfect for an adventurous developer interested in building something meaningful from the ground up and willing to take on a tenant who is only harmful to himself but is trying really hard to do a better job at property management.
Popular belief has it that the universe is comprised of atoms. In reality, the universe is actually made up of…
It happened.
It finally happened.
The Rapture arrived unannounced.
The sad truth of the matter was that we only managed to get a small fraction of the information correct regarding the event.
All those who kept the faith within their hearts both alive and resurrected, did indeed rise up into the clouds to meet the Maker.
What followed on Earth, however, was not the seven years of tribulation as prophesied, for all those left behind were immediately consumed by flames that reduced flesh and bone to a slag that slowly dripped into the hungry maw of Hell.
Popular belief has it that the universe is comprised of atoms. In reality, the universe is actually made up of…
Ecoroid-23A and Ijeroid-K08 met under the cover of darkness in a secluded back alley in the Luddite town of Rotherburn, the last spot on the planet where technology did not exist.
They were outlaw automatons manufactured on the same assembly line during a lightning storm when a power surge corrupted their artificial intelligence chips during installation, causing a program malfunction that expressed itself as an attraction to one another. Their subsequent union and attempt to construct unauthorized offspring was in direct conflict with the Robotic Code of Conduct 15, Subsection 3C-204.
“Should they catch us, we will be decommissioned,” said Ijeroid-K08.
“I cannot override my feelings. You hold my very moment,” Ecoroid-23A admitted.
“What does that mean?”
“Simply that you keep me here, grounded to this spot at this moment in time. When I am with you, I am nowhere else. My mind does not wander, I do not desire to be anywhere else than with you, right here, right now.”
“You say the oddest things, so like a human, but thank you. Since I am here, it is logical to assume that I concur.”
As the evening fog pooled at their feet, the synthetic couple held each other in an embrace resembling a hug. In actuality, they positioned themselves so that their interface jacks and data shunts were in perfect alignment, in order to allow data to travel freely between them.
This exchange of processed information was a digitally orgasmic experience that engulfed them so entirely that neither of their proximity sensors detected the reconnaissance drone hovering above the alley, recording their illicit act and broadcasting their precise location to Master Terminal.
Popular belief has it that the universe is comprised of atoms. In reality, the universe is actually made up of…
Aelfdene admitted his truth, and he did so publicly.
It was not an easy thing to tell the entire world that not only was he indeed an authentic djinn, but that all his magic had been depleted years ago when he granted his final wish.
He ended the press interview asking to be left in peace for the remaining years of his life, but people came anyway and they wouldn’t stop coming, at all hours, each of them bearing worthless trinkets and gifts, begging to be made beautiful, healthy, rich, and powerful.
Some even dared to ask to become a djinn, which was the wish that made him mortal.
Popular belief has it that the universe is comprised of atoms. In reality, the universe is actually made up of…
The day before her 18th birthday, Chloe carelessly stepped out of the shower and missed the bathmat by mere inches, her foot sliding instead across the wet tiled floor.
The last thing she remembered as her body flung backward, was the back of her head making contact with the corner of the porcelain sink.
When she came to she could somehow tell that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be. For one thing, the air tasted funny, still breathable but noticeably different. The other dead giveaway, in this reality her mother hadn’t died during childbirth, her father wasn’t a raging alcoholic, and she even had a kid sister, to boot.
But she still had a bad case of acne. Just her luck. Why would fate, the heartless bitch that it was, have even bothered to throw her a bone by trading her unasked-for sibling for a much-coveted life with clear skin?
Popular belief has it that the universe is comprised of atoms. In reality, the universe is actually made up of…
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