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Her Name Will Be Eleanor by Frank Sikora

“Her name will be Eleanor ,” says the clerk. “She will be your wife. Your best friend. The mother of your three, maybe four children, depending on the probability wave functions at the time of insertion, and in the end, on your deathbed, she will betray you. Gus stares at the clerk. He was sold until the end. He leans forward: “Are you serious? As I’m dying? That’s the final coda? The punctuation at the end of the sentence?” The clerk nods. He appears tired, which isn’t unexpected given the holiday rush. The annual year-end sale. Gus glances back. The line is 15 deep and restless. People just want to get home. Presents to wrap. Football to watch. A gaunt, pockmarked face, middle-aged woman in an old fur coat scowls at him. She looks like some sort of synthetic psychedelic addict: New World Mollys and N-bombs currently popular, especially among the subcontractors — the gig workers that support the economy. The clerk patiently waits. He’s young, 25ish. Indifferent. Bored. Gus knows he sh...
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Jill by Richard West

Frank opened his eyes . “The sun’s up,” he thought. When he was younger, he’d get out of bed as soon as he woke up. For the last ten years, he’d learned to lie there for a while and enjoy the gift of another day. There are four windows in his bedroom, which let in sunlight from three directions. He likes having windows that look out in all directions. After ten minutes, he rolled his legs out of bed, grabbed a handle he’d screwed to his headboard and stood up. His knees complained. To help them calm down, he stretched as tall as he could, straightening as many muscles as possible. Especially, those in his legs. Twenty minutes later, he’d washed, dressed and was ready for the day. He headed for the elevator in his bedroom. “The best thing I’ve ever done was installing the two small elevators. This one to the main floor and another from there to the basement,” he thought. Downstairs, he made his way to the kitchen and started to prepare a simple breakfast of muesli and yogurt. His cellp...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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"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...
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"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...
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