Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction

A Parasite

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From the Microcosmicon, 39:

They crawled under his skin, blindly squirming and squelching. He wheezed in agony. How had they gotten in? How had he become their host?

Then he felt the large scar on his wrist. That’s how!
Longing for liberation, he dug his nails into his arm, pulling strings of living matter out of it.

A blade of light. The nurse calmed him, pointing at the blood and tissue he’d scratched out of his body. No parasite.

A week passed.
He felt them, blindly squirming and squelching. How had they gotten in? Then he felt the scar on his wrist. That’s how!

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

Makers of History

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From the Microcosmicon, 38:

“I’m Empress Rathoi!” Nili screeched from her dingy cubicle.
“Every two damn minutes,” Anned grunted, turning in her sleeping bag. Old Nili was getting worse.

Anned wasn’t much better off. She’d wind up a meaningless husk, like everyone else on Toreadis.
Yet something rebelled within her, coherent, alive, like the stars judging her from above the collapsed Toreadian skyline.

The following day she snuck onto an airship for Arctamam. First, the pirates welcomed her among their ranks; and when the constitution was abolished, the revolutionaries. After the war, she was crowned empress.

Nili never knew of her role in history.

MQS

Fiction

Grandpa Dell

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From the Microcosmicon, 37:

Grandpa Dell always had the most sensible explanation for everything. When we kids discovered an alien in the forest and everyone was weaving stories around it, Grandpa Dell said it was just an aborted deer.

When the seamstress was accused of witchcraft and everyone swore she’d hexed them, he laughed at people’s credulity.

Around him, I felt the world’s contours were well-defined, its contents ordinary.

It was when I went looking for him and caught him in the forest sucking a doe’s blood through suction cups in his mouth that I understood the world truly was unremarkable, compared to him.

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

The Jewel in Space

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From the Microcosmicon, 36:

It glinted like a forlorn beacon in the night of space.
“No heat from it,” the captain read from his control panel.

“Never seen anything like that before,” his companion muttered. “Let’s turn back.”
“I bet the Empress would want it among her crown jewels. We go.”
So the spaceship approached the light. From up close, it was no larger than a life capsule, suspended by a thin rope.

Then the captain saw it taking shape behind the radiance. The fish whose fangs opened like jagged mountains on a starless cosmic throat-chasm. Its body going on. And on. And on.

MQS

Creativity, Divination, Fiction, Fortune-telling, I Ching / Yi Jing

On The Way To Follow

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From the Microcosmicon, 35:

Master Feiyu scolded his pupil, Qiang, for consulting the I Ching by tossing coins instead of using the meditative yarrow stalks.

Mortified, Qiang, who’d been deriving great benefit from the oracle, set about manipulating the sticks. He asked if he’d been wrong in using coins. He got Hexagram 7, The Army. Not understanding the answer, he abandoned the divination.

Later he asked again, but tossed his coins instead. Again he got Hexagram 7, which he still didn’t understand.
What Qiang did understand was that there was nothing wrong in his choice of method, but plenty in his choice of master.

MQS

Creativity, Fiction

The Scarecrow

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From the Microcosmicon, 34:

I was born with only two arms, and I grew into a scrawny, spindly lad, ridiculed for my grotesqueness. Nor would anyone give me a job—not with my face, not with my weak body.

So I did what I could to make ends meet—I started following space pirates. They knew what to do with my ugliness. They sent me out to scare gullible folks of distant planets into handing over their goods without fighting.

Soon, my reputation began to precede me. “Watch out, they are sending the Scarecrow!”
There is no acceptance for me in it. Only peace.

MQS

the scarecrow

Creativity, Fiction

The Soul’s Journey

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From the Microcosmicon, 33:

The Explorer III reached the end of the Suctan system eight months after departure.
But when the ship was about to trespass, it… bumped into the sky?

Suddenly a slit of light tore across the vastness. Then it yawned open, revealing not the outer universe the Suctanians had observed from afar, but an endless contortion of titanic interlocking mechanisms, each feeding into the other with impersonal, meaningless coherence.

Finally, a voice echoed from the reddish depths.
“Welcome back, souls. Now that you have spontaneously gained consciousness of the nature of things, you are fit to enliven us. We’re one again.”

MQS

The Soul’s Journey
Creativity, Fiction

Space Hagsploitation

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From the Microcosmicon, 32:

“I didn’t know Wild Rose had a sister,” he said, his eyes wandering to the dark space outside.
“She didn’t talk much about me,” the pudgy old woman conceded.
“Why didn’t you give news of her passing?”
“She wished to… keep her legend alive.”

“I’ll have to tell the Empress her ally is dead.”
He got up and made for his capsule.
Then a thud came. A muffled voice. “Help!”

“You bitch! Forever ruining everything!” Wild Rose’s sister screeched chidishly at the spaceship’s walls. “Couldn’t keep quiet! Always the center of attention! It’s your fault he has to die now!”

MQS

Space Hagsploitation
Creativity, Fiction

An Age Without Titans

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From the Microcosmicon, 31:

When the last titan was felled, my people rejoiced and called me their leader. Long had been the battle, and full of grief.

I still see it. The great shape folding in half under our bombs, then lying down on its shadow like an unruly mountain. I was raised to my late mother’s throne, to rule over a peaceful planet.

But soon the unused valor of our warriors turned inward. Children started hating their parents. Siblings called each other enemies.

And I understood that to rule in an age without titans is to rule in an age of small people.

MQS

An age without titans
Creativity, Fiction

The Circumstances of Greatness

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From the Microcosmicon, 30:

Finding the draft card in my mail, I knew I had to flee. I had so much to live for. Not that I’d ever done anything with my life, but I wanted the option.

I stole a military pod and left Alpha-Fenoler. For months I survived on freeze-dried food in the great star-washed nothingness.

Then a ship appeared. My capsule was pulled in. I panicked. They’d call me a traitor! I’d be quartered!

But they were not Alpha-Fenolerians. They were from the Interstellar Reconstruction Forum. They hailed me as a hero for preserving Alpha-Fenolerian DNA to repopulate my war-consumed planet.

MQS

The circumstances of greatness