Brodsky
Catherine’s husband, Douglas Hewitt, had been famous in scientific circles for being a boy genius. He was still a genius at forty-five, though now no one made a fuss about it. In fact, his current work was a secret from the general scientific pool. For the past six years, he’d been working exclusively for Rhys Milestone, the British billionaire. The personal goal of Douglas’s employer was to be the first layman in space using his own ship. He claimed that he wanted to take tourists to space, even to setting up “space hotels,” but from an occasional comment from Douglas, Catherine...
Read MoreThe Girl Who Was Like Ruby Tuesday
Belinda Palmer and Clinton Pierce met at a pot party in 1969. Clinton did not like being at such a party, mainly because he feared getting busted. A drug bust would mean the end of his future plans. He resolved not to smoke but also knew he risked his clean reputation merely by being there. He walked out in the back yard, away from the smoke, the crowding, and the noise. A quiet sky spread above him, a fingernail of moon and the first stars shining in the pale blue over a scrim of trees. The sight of a girl sitting on a bench startled him. He smiled at her. She returned his smile. He...
Read MoreDunkirk Dilemma
Who would have thought such a disaster could happen! And that I would be caught up in the midst of it? I was in Dover, working fast to patch up wounded soldiers coming off the boats from Dunkirk. Hundreds of thousands of troops surrounded and trapped on a beach in France, the Luftwaffe strafing them with bullets, and all we could do was get everyone who had a boat to go off and rescue them. Had we gone back to medieval times? My meager nurse’s training from the last war was not enough. Three young men dead on my hands already; one of them leaving me with a most nerve-racking final request....
Read MoreThe Courtship of Battlecruiser Dancing Light
We had recalled our ambassador. Dunno why. They don’t tell the grunts that kind of thing. We’re mushrooms: keep us in the dark and feed us shit. I know our countries hadn’t been getting along for years. They said there was no war being planned, but we had guns that could tear apart stars pointed at each other. It was insane, if you ask me. I don’t know how the war started. Trade disagreements. Economics. Jealousy. Who knows? Remember, we’re mushrooms. When the war started, I was a comm tech on Network Omega, the immense shell of laser cannons in orbit around our...
Read MoreOle
The moment her head broke the surface of the blissful water of consciousness, Mandy knew there would be no bullfights today. Her aching bones are crushed under her faded quilt and her head sizzles like a hot air balloon impaled in a blazing Spanish sky. “Get up, Mandy. I’m not phoning in again,” her husband, Bruce, says. Again? For him, she phones, and pleads, kisses ass, and irons shirts but when, once a year, she pleads from her deathbed for a favor, all she gets is a whine. “What if I were unconscious or impaled by a bull?” “You’re not unconscious; you have...
Read MoreOne of Ours
Sophia Fontaine’s final trip to England didn’t go as planned. Not to put too fine a point on it, the country was not her cup of tea, and it had nothing to do with that disastrous Tosca at Covent Garden in ’99 when she’d tripped over Scarpio’s outstretched leg and fell, face first, onto the stage, breaking her nose. She remembered all too well, while nursing her aching nose and even more severely bruised psyche, how the sun seldom came out from behind rain-soaked clouds. London was always damp and cold — the houses and hotels vastly under heated — and everything was horribly...
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