The Slush Pile

The man trembled behind the thick pane of glass. He was all sweat, from the crown of his shaved skull to where his lower half disappeared beneath the table, the sheen of the overhead fluorescence making the beads of his anxious perspiration glisten like the scales of a fish. Watching him from the far side of the one-way glass, it was hard for Ellie to imagine the man in the fishbowl as the strong, confident leader that his file claimed he was. She’d only ever handled ranch hands and truck drivers before, rural folk who’d never hope to convince anyone outside Chaves County of what they’d seen. But now some CEO was sweating through his shirt in her interrogation room and Ellie honestly wasn’t sure which of them was more frightened.

Continue reading Patching the Dam

There was a beep. A beep then a sudden sense of cold that Mikaela had never known before. It was what freezer-burned meat must have felt like as it wasted away in the forgotten back corner of an ice chest, cold in the most absolute sense of the concept, abated by nothing. Then out of nowhere, warmth. A bead of heat that started so small she could barely recognize it. It grew until every ounce of her sang with a numb ecstasy. And then she was moving.

Continue reading On Ice

Rex had grown slow. He creaked and rattled with nearly every step now, and frequently his legs would even shift beneath him, teasing the inevitable collapse to come. It might have bothered others, trying to keep up with numerous chores while slowly descending into immobility, but it didn’t bother Rex. He was good like that. He liked to be busy, liked the work. There was a peculiar peace he found into the monotony of it, a comfort in the repetition that had helped keep him sane over the years.

Continue reading Rex

It wasn’t until late in the night, after the thunderous cries of derision had long given way to silence, that Dan Skeevy emerged from his dressing room. Clad in a heavy coat that masked his dwindling figure, he slunk his way through the Jodorowsky until he reached the docking station near the bow. The gatekeeper’s eyes narrowed as he scanned Skeevy’s identification and when he opened the door to Maxson Station he told the actor that the vessel would be leaving at eleven the following morning, and that if he was smart, he wouldn’t be on it. Skeevy might have let that fester, let it pry at his fresh wound, had his attention been diverted immediately after stepping onto the station.

Continue reading Kind of Skeevy

The Tribunal Hall was rife with tension as the well-dressed ambassadors of more than three hundred different peoples stared at the pale blue maps that hovered at the center. The three dimensional display was speckled with archipelagos of various star systems, glowing either yellow to denote settlement by the Garu peoples or red, the shade of their aggressors.

“Intervention is inevitable,” said the representative from Tarus. It was what his people always said. Warlike and domineering, they’d wrestled their way to galactic dominance by tearing down the civilizations of their neighbors and spring boarding off of their progress until they faced an enemy that they could not defeat. “We take the Tarusian fleet and lay waste to the aggressors, put them back to a single planet and keep them there. They are an untempered and dangerous life form, let them grow unchecked and soon races from this Tribunal will be facing their horde.”

Continue reading The Aggressors

“It’s only for a little while.”

The words echoed in Tom’s ears as he sprung out of bed, doused in sweat. He looked around and, seeing he was alone, collapsed back against the mattress, hoping to steal a few more minutes of sleep. But the second his eyes fell shut the alarm blared, bathing his micro-apartment in flashing red light.

Continue reading A Little While

The girl blinked a few times and examined the drab faces of the rest of the children in the classroom. Then, wearing a curious scowl, she raised her hand.

I stumbled through the seating chart searching for her name, “Yes Miss…”

“Hamilton,” she finished for me. “But you can call me Maggie. I was just wondering, Mr. Andrews, if we were going to be covering anything about the planets today?” She sprouted a peevish grin, a knowing grin, and somehow I could tell that she had seen through my facade.

Continue reading Tenacity