-9-
The Harvest Moon

My shift in the dunking booth had come to an end. The Sun was now setting over the gable roofs of Iskay Village. The cobblestone square had fallen quite. I thought like most folk festivals there would be a dance at the end. I was wrong, there was no dance. The villagers simply retreated inside to the warmth of their houses.

Eighteen-year-old Nicholas Hammerstein is at the cusp of finishing high school in his hometown of Los Alamos, NM. He has a seemingly ideal life and is blessed with loving parents, a cute baby sister, and great friends. Nicholas is a gifted student and martial artist who has dreams of leaving for college at the end of his senior year. But, living in a world of Emergent humans, he will soon find his life turned upside down as his life and the fate of a kingdom hang in the balance. His future and theirs will be determined by how he navigates the drastic changes in his body and the magical and superpowered Mergent population he joins.

The Prodigal

My name is George, something you may think was not unusual. When I tell you that my older brother is also called George, as is my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, you can guess that I come from a long and wealthy family.

Eighteen-year-old Nicholas Hammerstein is at the cusp of finishing high school in his hometown of Los Alamos, NM. He has a seemingly ideal life and is blessed with loving parents, a cute baby sister, and great friends. Nicholas is a gifted student and martial artist who has dreams of leaving for college at the end of his senior year. But, living in a world of Emergent humans, he will soon find his life turned upside down as his life and the fate of a kingdom hang in the balance. His future and theirs will be determined by how he navigates the drastic changes in his body and the magical and superpowered Mergent population he joins.

I don’t get very many days off, “busy as a bee” doesn’t justify exactly how busy it is sometimes. It’s bad enough that I often take on too many workshop orders, but late Spring is really important for the harvest festival to go without any problems. Nevertheless me and my cousins always manage to come out of Spring okay. Earning quite a lot of free time in the process.

-8-
Dunk the Maiden (Part 2)

I quickly found myself soaked to the bone. My once perfectly styled hair had become a tangle web of loose strands. I felt myself starting to shiver a little. The fire had almost gone out in me. The crowd in front of me was starting to ease up a bit and I was glad. I thought maybe I could catch a little break. But then Wyatt came up to me and started to whisper harshly toward me.

Once we were away from the site, all a bit subdued at the thought that our time in Kielder was over, we stopped just outside Hexham, where I was going to leave them and get the train back home, before they all went back to Newcastle. Regretfully I needed to to change back into my boys’ clothes and revert to my life as Lyndsay for the last part of the trip to my home village. My time with the girls as Lyn was now over, or was it?

{Written as a parody and with due homage to a host of SF Authors, Films and TV}

The bedside comunicator beeped.
I slowly opened my eyes. I'd only had a few hours of sleep in the past two days.
The alarm bleeped once again.

Why did Commander Jvuznart always make him do the worst jobs, like replacing xenobiological specimens? It wasn’t his fault that Doctor Gralpuxt’s specimens expired. They should have had a failsafe on the specimen holding environmental controls. It wasn’t like he killed them on purpose when he shut off the lights along with the atmosphere generator and temperature controls, was it? These new specimens from the 3rd planet were so soft and needed just the right temperature and gas mix to live. Sheesh, how did they survive to make it this far? They were even fouling their own nest; give them another few hundred cycles, if that long, and they wouldn’t even be around, he was sure.

Chapter 1

They say that if you take life as a continuous learning experience, you will never be bored. You will also realise that you could never know everything. Some make learning an excuse for never trying to get a job, becoming life-long students. Others just learn as they go on the job. I fell somewhere in between.

Alienation
by Bryony Marsh

March 2023 story contest entry on the theme of abduction. After many years, an old friend arrives with a strange tale to tell. An engine that dies on a lonely stretch of road; a brilliant beam of light from above; being kidnapped and experimented upon by those of another species... with a transgender twist, of course!

Trevor looked in horror at the gaping vagina before him, the same one he had impotently obsessed over and fantasized about for so many years, he couldn’t help but think: where had everything gone so very wrong?