Stories tagged “drabble”
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Jerry and the Earthtones
It’s a sweet gig: house band, Wednesday nights, year round. It’s like an airport bar gig, except it’s a spaceport, and half your audience are aliens who’ve never heard human music before. They tend to listen intently. God knows what they’re u...
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Wish You Were Here
My folks were rich enough when they retired that they decided to go off world. Two first class ticket on the Polixaci liner pretty much cleaned their savings out, but they’d have two pensions and the house rental piling up for the five years they wer...
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Render Unto Caesar
I joined the Deacons right after getting out of the Army. They’re always looking for urban combat vets. Pay ain’t as good, but there’s less risk, short of large-scale rioting. After training I requested a post in my hometown, Harrisburg, and they...
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Safe As Houses
The curtains are drawn, always. That doesn’t affect the infrared cameras, but if you block those the Proctors come knocking to see why. Once you’re outside you are weighed and measured, sniffed, and biometrically interpreted at unknown but frequent...
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Chuck
I mean, it’s nobody’s fault, really. We rested whenever it was safe, though that wasn’t very often. Most of those first few days were spent running, creeping, hiding. But even sitting motionless and silent under those circumstances is stressful. ...
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Risk Assessment
He could see the whole playground clearly through the binoculars. There were four zombies, crouched over the body they’d pulled apart on the wood mulch. So far, they were ignoring the baby in the safety swing even though it was clearly screaming it
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Who's There?
“Rob? Is that you?” The answer was a slow, soft knocking. “Who is it!?” She had seen the news reports; the apartment was locked up tight. Rob had gone to work that morning, but she was expecting him any minute. “…Rob?” The slow knocking c...
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Mom
Both kids came home sick from school Thursday. By Friday afternoon they were so sick she drove them to the hospital, but the ER was closed, swamped. She made them as comfortable as she could at home. The family doctor didn’t answer his phone. The kid...
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Historically Speaking, Not Good With Tools
When I was seven, my older brother and I got bunk beds for Christmas. My dad put them together. He also put together the bookshelves I got at ten, and the computer desk that Aunt Jean gave me that I used all through high school. Freshman year, I had an...
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Pain, Trust, and the Final Decision.
Pain is unbearable. No one wishes to feel, and yet we do so anyway. Everyday. We either notice or don’t, but it’s always there. I continued to sit on the bench that sat in a lone corner of the park. Seperating myself from what just seemed t...
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My Brother
Carrie’s diary, 12th Feb In my dreams, I always have a brother. His name’s Liam, and I dream about him a lot. It’s strange to wake up and only have two sisters. Every time I walk past the computer room and don’t see his battered...
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Congratulations
I could have sworn that, for a fraction of a second, her eyes had glittered with a joyful rage that I’ve seen in my nightmares. I wondered what it meant, that look of malevolent victory, which had seemed so unlike her and yet seemed to fit her so wel...
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Lilith
She looked up out of thin gray walls that curled up over her bare skin. Later she would think of it as a sarcophagus, but for now it was simply the first thing she’d ever seen, along with his hungry face. “Lilith,” the man above her d...