Nicole Tanquary

It was early morning when Sand woke up from dreaming about the ocean, the smell of brine still seeming fresh in his nose. He blinked, then wriggled under his blanket, flexing first his fingers, then his toes, then his wrists. The night had been a cold one. There was a wet, decaying odour in the air, of dead things buried beneath drifts of leaves.

Still numb, Sand threw off his blanket and dug around in his satchel for a chunk of bread, tearing off pieces with his teeth and chewing quickly. He gathered his things into the satchel, which he flung across his shoulder. Since leaving the ocean, he had crossed sparse moor-grass fields, then richer, golden plains, which now gave way to trees. Sand made his way back to the path, his sandals clapping down against hard-packed earth. According to a wheat-planter he’d met the other night, these weed-trees would give way to denser forest soon.

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Simon Petrie

Up until now, it’s been cruisy, but you get the sense things are beginning to turn.

For starters, there’s the discomforting recognition that, for all the bonhomie still somehow coursing your veins, you’re not here by choice. You’ve been abducted. You, of all people. For long enough now, that your chin has started to stubble. And you notice, too, which you somehow hadn’t before, that your hosts are, to put it mildly, butt-ugly. And then some.

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Gerry Huntman

I owe my life to Ginger Fred, but I can’t thank him because he’s gone.

I’m a real estate agent, and I’ve lived in Rievesport for ten years, lured by the prospect of the growing value of sea-side properties, and the increasing willingness of workers to commute the long distance to Melbourne—the Big Smoke. I used to work in the BS (as Lisa and I frequently call it) as a well-paid commercial lawyer, but the rat race got the better of me with a triple-bypass. I’m not disappointed with my sea-change; I’ve done well in my adopted town. I even have an office on the top floor of the four-storey Chamber of Commerce Building, the only structure with more than two floors in the entire town.

For all of my time in this locale I’ve been witness to a regular ritual carried out by the town’s itinerant dero, Ginger Fred. It was hard for me to miss, because his activity took place on the large cement paving area directly in front of the Rievesport Chamber of Commerce Building, in perfect view of my office window.

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Alan Baxter

Simon stared at the answering machine on his study desk, the small red triangle beating like an electronic heart. He pressed the button. “You have one new message,” said the mechanical female voice. There was a pause and a click, then:

“Goodbye.”

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David Conyers

From the one hundred kilometre altitude viewing platform of the Quito Space Elevator, Natalya Serov counted the hundreds of corporate logos spread like quilts across the Andes and the Amazon rainforest. Brands included MaxiCola, Conical Energy, MarsPlus, Jovian-Briggs, Europa Water, 8Quantum, LaPlasta Limited, France Inc. and many more of the Solar System’s wealthiest corporations. She was reminded of a sponsorship notice for a trade show convention, but one that used an entire country as its billboard.

“Impressive, isn’t it?”

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Barry Rosenberg

It was a few weeks before Christmas, and despite the Queensland heat, people were rushing to and fro with bulging shopping bags. Everyone was busy with buying, buying, buying. The shops on Cobble St were close together and their weathered look suggested that they had been there forever. They were traditional shops, too: the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. It was the type of street, with its suggestion of antiquity, in which a young man could wander and his mind could turn to fantasy.

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Simon Petrie

It had been known since the early 1950s that high levels of radiation could induce gigantism in certain species. But since most of the early cases had involved arthropods and poisonous lizards of, it has to be said, a rather aggressive disposition, the commercial implications of this line of research were not as obvious as they might otherwise have been.

“Nuclear Physics for Market Gardeners,” p. 126, by Hank Bremsstrahlung

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Trent Jamieson

The Prosperity Act needed good people. Not everyone could handle the work. Not everyone could kill children.

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Patrick Hew

Hell to a violinist is the ticking of a metronome, the robotic, relentless and remorseless tick, beating out the time, beating the soul out of the music. And in every tick of the metronome, you can hear The Devil. Practising.

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