Fantasy Drabble #213 “Roustabout”

Ronald Harvey Wayman, 25, car accident, June 15, 1967. Beloved Son and Brother. Tonight he is up and out and about, walking in the cool air, though not left to his own devices. Temporarily he serves another, one of the living.

The cast-iron cemetery gate is chained for the night, and his withered muscles are not up to the task of breaking through. No matter: his master would be along soon with the key. Ronald Harvey Wayman will have to wait. He doesn’t mind it: the night is still and quiet, and the dead are not precious with their time.

Fantasy Drabble #212 “Sucker Punch”

I don’t wear short skirts. My leathers do not have cutaways strategically placed to show erogenous-adjacent areas of skin, and neither does my armor plate. My hair is short, so it cannot be grabbed in combat.

When I come to kill you, I will not strike a pose. My war-cry does not sound like a sex noise, because I have no war-cry. You will not hear me coming in any sense of the word. You will not have time to want to fuck me before I cut your head from your shoulders.

I am no spectacle; I am a warrior.

SF Drabble #283 “Terraforming”

I always knew I would set the world on fire, just like the song. I just didn’t figure it would be literally.

The Reyes-Michaelsson device worked perfectly at first. I’m Reyes, if it matters at all. I get top billing because the original theory was mine; Michaelsson just refined it. We used to joke about the original Manhattan Project, how they took bets on a cataclysmic runaway reaction. Maybe that was our way of voicing our fears that it might really happen with our thing.

We barely got the colonists away: another week and they’d have started disassembling the landers.

Fantasy Drabble #211 “Heroine”

Wyndree stood above the monster’s corpse, her father’s sword still buried in its chest. The villagers began to reappear in their doorways and windows; she straightened her frame and attempted to look as if victory had been the outcome she had expected when she decided to face the creature rather than run and hide like everyone else.

It had been easier than expected: the monster was a dumb, slow creature, all brute force and no sense. There would be more of them, in the hills.

Wyndree had always imagined she would grow up to be a weaver, like her mother.

SF Drabble #282 “Designer”

He pushes the pill across his lips and chases it with mineral water, the expensive kind that costs ‡12.50 in the minibar. He settles into the recliner that surveys the telewall and waits for the trip to start. It does so without delay.

By the time the call girl pings the doorbell he’s already seeing things. She reads the pill bottle, does the math, knows she has an hour before he’s present in the room with her, so she calls room service and settles in. As she eats her sandwich he’s on the balcony watching the buildings opposite dance around.

Zombie Drabble #310 “Placid”

They sat quietly. Occasionally Red would cast his line again, or she would, and the quiet would be interrupted by the plonk of the lure and float hitting the water.

“Look,” she said, shocking him out of his tranquility. She was pointing at the dock, where a dozen or more zombies had gathered and were now staring at them.

“They won’t come in the water.”

“Is there another dock somewhere?”

“Down at the other end, near the road. Then we’ll have to double back to the car.” He cast his line again. “Might have to run the last few yards.”

SF Drabble #281 “Archeobot”

Inside the mangled case there was a hard disk: spindle-and-platter, ancient, but in good condition. He plucked it carefully from the wreckage and scanned the interface, finding one of the standard designs, one that he could configure his ports to accept.

Data came off of the thing at a crawl. Most of it was nonsense: system files, garbage data. It was minutes before he found the first photo: a human female, holding an infant. There were thousands of pictures, if he was interpreting the file system correctly. There would be video, too, somewhere. He settled in, crouched amidst the ruins.