dreamszilla

Rachel reaches her big empty home before the big storm hits, but she is not alone; by Nick Young. Image generated with OpenAI In the late evening sky to the west, a canopy of ugly indigo thunderheads crowded the tree line. Beneath the ragged edge of clouds the sky shone with a sickly glow. August was just beginning to nudge its way into autumn, and a sudden stillness had fallen, signaling that a hell of a storm was brewing up to disrupt Wellesley's leafy peace. On Pond Road, in an especially cloistered corner of the town, headlights speared the lowering gloom as a Range Rover topped a rise, banked around a gentle leftward curve and braked at a driveway entrance leading to a large Georgian colonial set back seventy-five yards from the street. As the SUV pulled in, a gust of wind shuddered through the old maples lining the broad driveway. Lightning strobed the scene, catching the first of three garage bays on the east side of the house as it glided open. Once inside, ...

Fifteen-year-old Rosie spends time at her sister's boyfriend's house getting high, but maybe takes it too far this time; by Bill Tope. Image generated with OpenAI After she had spent the last thirty-six hours with her sister and me, and Sunday morning had finally come round, it was time to take Rosie home. She regularly spent her weekends with Cathy and me - the boyfriend - at our apartment, a fact which did little to elevate the fifteen-year-old's GPA, no doubt. She rarely cracked a book. On Friday night I had retrieved her from her mother and stepfather's home, about twenty miles distant. She was waiting for me out front of the house, as was usual. On the way home I stopped at Kroger's and we soon bounced back into the apartment with a weekend's worth of food, drink, and others comestibles. Rosie didn't come empty-handed: she brought a bounty of really powerful pot that seemingly was available only to high school students. As she marched thro...

via American Short Fiction https://ift.tt/7EbYmZj

At the height of the Great Depression, fifteen-year-old Frank leaves his Indiana home to try to survive on his own; by Scott McDonald. Image generated with OpenAI Frank and Noble are sitting outside near a huge pile of used bricks. They have gathered their own smaller pile, and are knocking off the old mortar, one brick at a time. Frank is tapping away with a small hammer, and is much slower than his father, who uses a shovel. The cold breeze bothers Frank, but he is determined to be productive. A half-dozen other ragged men are working. Noble's pile of cleaned bricks grows slower than the other men's, but with Frank helping he hopes to make at least a dollar. Frank has learned not to rush, after breaking too many bricks at first. He stands up to stretch as an excited young man rushes up with news. "Hey, they hung that boy! Right over by the courthouse!" The whole group gets up to go look. Noble quickly counts his pile of finished bricks and only then ...

David dines with his cousin Sarah, a food critic who refuses to take seriously his phobia of salt; by Tony Bicât. Image generated by OpenAI "It's not about the beef, it's about the salt; and anyway the salt's not in the beef." Sarah seemed to think I would have known this. Lunch with my cousin is often difficult; she's a food critic, so even when she's off duty it's not easy. The wine's too warm or too cold, it's the wrong kind of grape, comes from the wrong side of the hill or even the wrong side of the Andes. I remember a perfectly good coq au vin being ruined by a lecture on the Great French Wine Blight of the mid 19th century. I did not reply, I just hoped that we'd get to the îles flottantes or the époisses without a string of foodie information preventing me from bringing up the urgent subject that had led to my inviting her to lunch at The Trough - yes I know, an absurd name, to go with the minimalist line drawing...

Three spacefarers embark on a rescue mission to a newly discovered mineral-rich planet that harbors a dangerous secret; by Eric Dawson. Image generated with OpenAI From far away, the ship looks like the silver-gray carapace of a beetle, somehow discarded and floating in the depths of space. As it draws closer, it appears more streamlined: a Spanish galleon slicing through an obsidian ocean. Inside are all the trappings of a late 23rd-century space exploration vessel: splices of metal interwoven with spirochete-like wires and sinewy tendons of titanium, some like branches and others more like the antenna from a 1950s-era radio. Along one of the corridors, burrowed deep inside the viscera of the ship, a woman. A woman sound asleep - or almost. Her eyes flicker. Emily didn't even have to open her eyes to sense the hovering presence. She couldn't stand it when anyone watched her sleep, which was just one of the reasons she'd always refused hibernation flight...