Tag Archives: short story

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