The Cruise

by David Sydney

So far there had been 20 days and 20 nights of non-stop, torrential, pitiless rain. Stuffed to the gills with animals two-by-two, the Ark wasn't a pleasant place.
“This has got to be your stupidest idea yet. How long did you say we have to keep this up?”
Did Noah have to hear that again?
What would his wife be like on day 28? Or 39?
“I told you. We're just following orders.”

They glared at one another in the limited, dank space available with so many animals.

“Orders? You had an order to float around with two rhinos?”
She had a point. Rhinoceroses are terribly large, ungainly, and far from pleasant passengers. They are provoked by the slightest insult.
“Hippos are even worse.”
Another good point. And Hippos take up even more space than rhinos.

“Noah, did you know there'd be 40 days and nights of this? I mean, before you agreed to become captain of this… This…”
What was the word?
“Do you mean Ark?”
“No, I don't mean Ark.”
“How about ship?”
“No, I don't mean ship either.”

It was more like a floating garbage barge.

Everyone enjoys a pleasant voyage, maybe a day at most. At that time, boats were wooden and flat-bottomed. The Ark was, well, in her opinion, ridiculous. “Do you realize we have weasels here, Noah? Who wants to be shoulder-to-shoulder with weasels?”

His defense, again, was following orders. From Noah's point of view it was simple. If you hear a booming voice from out of nowhere – seemingly from out of a whirlwind – shaking you to your very foundations, commanding you to do something, you do it.

“Suppose it told you to sacrifice one of the children? I suppose you'd do that?”
“Who'd ever ask for anything like that?”
She asked out of frustration. It's difficult to clean up from rhinos.

After the third day, she turned a green color from seasickness.
By the end of the first week, she gave up on any idea of having a night of restful sleep.
Now into the 20th day afloat, she disliked all creatures great and small. “Noah, I thought that there'd always be some relief, no matter how bad it got, when you talked about the Ark.”
Her face might've been a bowl of split pea soup, that shade of green, if soup could have so many lines of irritation.
“Look… I'm just following directions.”
“Yeah… But I never thought it would get so I didn't like platypuses.”
They are adorable creatures. Everyone likes them.
“But try to sleep when they're squirming and growling all night.”
Platypuses are nocturnal creatures. When one of them lays an egg right by you, that egg takes up added space. There's only so much room you can give up – that is, little – when you're pressed next to a rhino. Next to a hippo… It's even worse…

She looked at her wet, bearded husband.
At the so-called "captain".
“Alright, Captain Noah, from now on when it comes to cleaning up, you take care of the hippos…”

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
David Sydney is a physician who writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

 

Where is my story?!

Dear authors, If your story was scheduled for a particular day, there is an excellent chance that it actually will be published that day.

Stories appear, one by one, between 10:00am and 11:00am (Pacific time) every Wednesday. The story at the "top" of the page is the one most recently posted. To see earlier stories, scroll through the page.

If you can't find your story, please try scrolling again. Make sure you have gone all the way to the bottom of the page. Sometimes we have more than a pageful of stories, so you may need to click on "Older Posts" (bottom right). If you still can't see your story, you might want to try using the "search" box (on the right-hand side of the page) to look for the title or your name. Check the time. If you are in any time zone other than ours, you may be too early. Check the time in Seattle.

Please don't panic. Don't assume we cancelled or forgot your story. So far, we have never missed publishing a story as scheduled. Of course, glitches and mistakes can happen. If we have erred, we will do our best to correct the problem.

Also, please be aware that we have an account at BlueSky. We post links to all stories there, trickled out gradually from Wednesday through Saturday.

 

Hongbao

by Huina Zheng

“I don’t want to go back,” Lan said, her voice calm and firm. “I’m not paying for a family reunion.”

“You don’t usually go home anyway, and you hardly call your parents,” Yong said uneasily. “If you don’t even go back for the Spring Festival, they—”

“They have more than just me,” Lan cut him off with a glance. “You think they’ll miss me? Their son’s right there, with two grandkids around. What more could they possibly want?”

“It’s not the same. They still miss you—”

“Let’s not argue,” Lan sighed. “On the second day of the Spring Festival, all my cousins are going to visit my parents. Do you know how many cousins I have there?”

Seeing Yong’s blank face, she held up her fingers. “Eight.”

“The more the merrier, right?”

“Do you know how many kids they each have?” Lan fought the urge to smack him. “At least two per cousin.”

“So?”

“So how many hongbaos stuffed with lucky money do you think we’ll need? You do the math.”

A week later, hongbaos bulged in Yong’s pockets, making his jacket puff out awkwardly. One by one, he dug out a hongbao, grinned, and handed it over, moving from child to child like a man emptying a treasure chest.

Lan stood by, watching him with a tight smile. With each hongbao he pulled out, she felt their year-end bonus shrink a little more. The lambskin quilted handbag she had hesitated over for months, the limited-edition matte 999 lipstick, the SK-II essence, the silk summer dress, the Kyoto trip they had dreamed about, all vanished, one hongbao at a time.

The kids clutched their hongbaos and passed them straight to their parents, whose faces lit up with satisfaction.

Lan clenched her fists in secret, thinking: Should’ve had kids earlier. Two at least. Might’ve gotten the Arashiyama train ride and kaiseki dinners paid for.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Huina Zheng is a college essay coach and an editor. Her stories appear in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, and more. Nominated thrice for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she lives in Guangzhou, China with her family.

 

I Saw It Coming

by Michael Gigandet

Until that electrified instant, that explosive moment with us standing there with our goofy grins in front of all those people who came to tell us goodbye, I would never have condoned punching a woman in the nose. But, since it was a teenage girl who delivered the blow and this woman had it coming to her, I guess it was okay.

One minute the woman, all dressed in white with sparkly bling draped down her floor-length gown like icicles on a wedding cake, was standing there with that self-satisfied smirk on her face, and the next she’s in mid-flight backwards, her hands up like she’s going to catch a beach ball and her stripper heels sailing over her head in different directions.

She rocked around several times in that giant lamp shade of a gown with her legs in the air dangling like the ringer in a bell.

The crowd immediately got silent, which is saying something considering all those people were cheering and roaring just before the punch. I could hear her crown rolling around on the stage like the wheel off a wrecked horse cart. The spell was broken when the woman’s shoes hit the ground. Thump! Then thump!

We’d been through a lot. Pretending to help the girl return to her home country, the woman and that con artist boyfriend of hers had deliberately set us out on a grueling expedition where our lives were in peril at every curve in the road. We’d been attacked and trampled by wild animals, set on fire on one occasion, drugged near to death, tormented with death threats from a psychopath and even kidnapped and tortured by said psychopath who swore she was going to kill us all by the most horrible means possible. We only escaped because the girl killed the psychopath. So, it’s easy to understand the girl’s fierce reaction when she realized that the woman had sent us on a fool’s mission to cause the death of her political competitor. We trusted her, and she used us!

“Dorothy you’ve had the power to return to your home all this time,” the woman said. “Just click your heels three times and say ‘There’s no place like home.’” Dorothy looked stupefied. We all were.

“That’s it?” Dorothy asked.

“Hm hmmm.” I can still see the woman’s self-satisfied smirk.

“I could have done that all this time?” Dorothy asks.

“Hm hmmm.”

“You knew this all along!” Dorothy shouted, but it wasn’t a question. You’d think a woman with magical powers would’ve seen that right cross coming, but apparently, seeing the future was not among her special skills. Call me brainless, but even I could see that punch coming.

“Where’s that wizard?” Dorothy said, shaking out her hand. I could tell this wasn’t over.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Michael Gigandet is a retired lawyer in Tennessee. His stories have appeared in Bending Genres, Quarencia Press, Great Weather for Media, Syncopation Literary Review, Pure Slush and The Hong Kong Literary Journal. He is being nominated for a Pushcart Prize this year. His published stories are available here http://michaelgigandet.com. He administers a music page on Twitter/X at @motobec810.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Credit: originally published online in "Bending Genres" Issue 26 on June 7, 2022

 

The Magician and the Bounty Hunter

by Jennifer Monsen

Lirah crouched along the roof's edge, studying the crowd below. She'd followed the Magician through the dusty palaces of long dead empires and alien gardens, the railways of the past and the skyways of the future. But if her intel was good, then this city was her quarry's home. Mundane enough on the surface; a sea of umbrellas and middling technology. If this world had magic, she couldn’t sense it.

There. She almost missed when the Magician stepped into the street. His clothes were uncharacteristically non-descript; his hair messy. She was not fooled.

The Magician darted through the streets, playing a game of leap frog with the rain. Lirah scrambled to keep up, jumping from rooftop to rooftop. She missed her own world, where gravity crystals made a run like this easy as dancing. But unlike the Magician, Lirah was bound to whatever magic framed her current world. No cheating.

Marks never look up. The Magician wasn't looking around at all. He charged ahead through a dozen near collisions, until—

He'd dashed into the road. Unnoticed, a box shaped vehicle sped towards him. The crash was inevitable. Lirah expected magic; she wasn't surprised when time froze, raindrops pausing midair like glass marbles. But the Magician was also frozen.

Another caster? Lirah looked around, realizing that she was unaffected.

A polite cough from above broke the stillness. Marks never look up. Lirah raised her head.

The Magician floated in the air above her, clad in silver-blue, arms crossed behind his head. His grin was smug.

So, her intel had been good after all. Too good.

“You shouldn't be in the same time twice.” Lirah growled, not bothering to aim her crossbow.

The Magician beamed at her. “I worried you wouldn't make it.”

He was playing with fire. “If you break this timeline, you could crack the world tree. Even you wouldn't survive that.”

“Oh, I'm not breaking anything.” The man flipped down so he was standing beside her, almost nose to nose. “This is exactly how I remember it.“

Arrogant, cocksure—there was a reason the bounty was so high. The Magician broke all the rules. He dragged magic between worlds like an invasive species. It should have been impossible. Lirah couldn't even use a simple flame spell in this world: here he was, playing with higher level Chronomancy. She needed a way out of this without a world ending paradox.

“You remember dying in the street?”

“I remember—” he grinned, “a beautiful woman dropping out of the sky to save my life.”

“No.” Lirah said.

"You have to.” The magician shrugged. “Or don’t, and let the timeline shatter. If you think that’s the better option.”

He was right, Lirah realized. Letting him die here would be a paradox, one that affected too many timelines. She couldn't risk that.

She wouldn't get paid.

The Magician reached for her. She jerked back but all he did was pull something midnight purple from behind her ear. He handed it to her, gallantly. It was a small stone. Lirah's hair began to float away from her face. Oh. Oh. A gravity crystal. A working gravity crystal.

The Magician winked. “Payment for your services.” He sighed. “Must be going. Time will start again any moment. But don't worry, we'll meet again very soon.”

He was gone in a burst of light. Around her the raindrops were starting to move—slowly, at first, but she didn't have long to decide.

Lirah sighed, and jumped down from the sky.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Jennifer Monsen works as a music therapist by day; by night, she is a writer with a bent towards the strange and fantastic. Currently her focus is custom murder mystery parties. Her first love is storytelling in all forms; her second love is pizza. Find her at: https://jentellingstories.blogspot.com/

 

Beachcombing for Body Parts

by Ron Wetherington

The ocean deposits body parts, strewn across the wet sand at water’s edge like abandoned memories. Tissues, organs, some fresh and mushy, their glutinous surfaces still pulsing. I scoop them into a bucket and assemble them in my garden shed.

My selection is precise: only two kidneys, but a single bladder; two lungs, but a single heart. Long coils of splotchy colon. A liver all purply in its lividity. I carefully arrange them on the potting table, placing them correctly: pancreas behind the stomach, above the spleen but just below the gall bladder.

I take pictures for my biology teacher, before decay sets in: the jellyfish-kidneys and the stringy kelp-colon will begin to smell soon; the sea cucumber-lungs and the anemone-heart will begin to dehydrate and shrivel. I clean it up before Mom sees it and screams.

I expect to get an A, though.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Ron Wetherington is a retired professor of anthropology living in Dallas, Texas. He has published a novel, Kiva (Sunstone Press), and numerous short fiction pieces in this second career. He also enjoys writing creative non-fiction. Read some of his work at https://www.rwetheri.com/.