600 Miles to Leadville

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Four Months' Hard Sweeping by Nancy Kay Clark

Sweeping’s for old women and crater-faces — everyone knew it wasn’t fair! It could have happened to anyone. It wasn’t my fault. The judge had it in for me. My mom cried when the judgment came down.\ “On the two counts of irresponsibility, how do you find the defendant?” “Guilty.” “On the count of smugness?” “Guilty.” “And lastly, on the count of untidiness?” “Guilty.” Then the judge lectured me on how I had endangered the whole community with my sloppy, uncaring attitude; with my inability to keep things in order, blah, blah, blah. The sentence? Four months hard sweeping. Un-fucking-believable. “Hey dusthead, wake up!” Someone whacked me on the head in passing. It was my supervisor No-face Jake. “Get your gear and come on.” I gathered up my mask and visor and scrambled after him — waddled after him actually. The orange coveralls I was wearing were gi-normous. Not really a good look for me. Jake was a veteran sweeper. Rumour had it that he’d been on the job for close to ten years — but...

Dreams of Flight by Frank Sikora

My father’s favorite test subject, a 57-pound bio-genetically altered male piglet, Wilboar, AKA Willie, soars over the storage shed. Its broad wings rhythmically flutter; its eyes dart up and down, left and right. A GoPro camera with AI-level stabilization lenses sits on Willie’s sleek head. I track Willie from the landing site, holding my breath in anticipation of another disaster, my weak legs barely holding steady. Wille, though, is unaffected by my anxiety. He squeals with delight. My mother and brother, Finn, also follow, riding in the three-wheeler, ignoring the stream of piglet poop trailing behind the silly beast, ready to transport him back to the lab. Microsensors in Willie’s tissues, organs, muscles, and bloodstream allow Father access to multiple physiological data points; the quantum processor calculates probabilities, certainties, and unknowns, all in real time. After one more circle around the shed, Willie descends. Father’s joyful whoops pour through our headsets. Until...

The Aftermath by Karen Schauber

The massive harvest table swelled with Soylent, Guinea Fowl, Sicilian oranges, Pule cheese, pandemain, honey, cloves, and black cardamon for the wedding . The dead bride propped in the cathedra. Her garland of Delphiniums shrivelling. A suckling pig, still shackled to the spit, its trotters tanned, skin crispy, made me swoon. We approached slowly uncertain if we would be welcome. They waved us forward, their hand motioning like the pope, partially outstretched with fourth and little fingers curled inward. Jerzy didn’t budge. Waited for me to do my thing. My garment concealing the weapon. Darkness obscuring everything, and nothing. Through the wee hours we gorged on the spoils, sucking bones and roux, leaving nothing but crumbs. Reclined in the winter garden beneath a mangled grapevine canopy until dawn, smoking fat hand-rolled cigars, the toothy wrappers full of dark flavour. When morning broke, the mayhem and horror of the previous night was laid bare. Stone walls executed with torre...

"The Heart of the North" by Frank T. Sikora

Outside the Heart of the North, it’s 2061 . Inside, it’s 1957, and the veterans prefer it this way. At the Heart, we keep the technology simple, hell, nostalgic: black and white televisions, a 1955 Frigidaire for the beer. A jukebox by the door. No computers. No phones. A cash register straight out of the Smithsonian, and definitely, no weapons. My wife, Latisha, suggested that the bar’s moniker should be, “Leave your war behind.” But that’s impossible. Even the best drugs can’t make you forget the killing. The terror. The guilt. They lie too deep within internal spaces to be eradicated. Despite the latest storm, almost a blizzard, many of the regulars have shown: Menawa, Aydan, and two others sit in the corner hunched over chessboards sharing good-natured insults, and, on occasion, stories of their tours in Mongolia, Vietnam, and other mineral-rich countries. To my left, next to the pinball machine, Cassie and Ellie share the latest pictures of their grandchildren—color prints. E...

"Hey, Brad Pitt" by Steve Nelson

HEY, BRAD, I WAS READING ABOUT YOUR DIVORCE FROM ANGELINA again and I can hardly believe that it’s finally done. Even though your official dissolution has taken eight years, I still had hopes that you two might get back together, because when you were together it felt like destiny, like your coupling had a Darwinian inevitability to it. As the sexiest man and sexiest woman alive, of course you couldn’t resist each other, since isn’t that the point of natural selection, that we can’t help ourselves from trying to land the best partner available? And with you and Angelina, isn’t that what happened? Your divorce sounded messy and I know how those things can go, but ah … I really thought your place was with Angelina, and that it went beyond lust or love or wants and needs. To me, your relationship was evolution, as natural as gravity, as inevitable as water running downstream. Sure, it took you a while to find each other. Both of you were even married to other people, but you hadn’t...

Early Recollections by Karen Schauber

YOUR FINGERTIPS CARESS ITS AGING SPINE, traipsing over embossed gold lettering, faded now, the little flecks that remain still smooth to the touch. You lower your nose to take a whiff and your nostrils brush frayed threads trifling out from the seam, tickling, like fringes on a desert tapis, and you close your eyes when you fan the first few yellowed pages, the warm musty smell wafting stories you remember so well—living in the country, wet laundry sheets flapping out on the line in the backyard, the summer breeze filled with shrieks of children chasing Lulu, your black cocker spaniel around the yard, tufts of soap bubbles airborne as the mutt jumps ship overturning the washing bin, her fur full of soapy suds, still reeking of skunk, and she won’t be let back into the house tonight until the foul stench is gone. You three children chase and corral her back to the tub, cajoling her with promised biscuits, and father standing on the porch watching the melee, not smiling, while every...