Sci Fi – Blogs Don't Burn

After waking up from a deep, all-consuming sleep, I leaned forward in a groggy daze to kiss my wife and found only blank space. Believing that I had missed the target of my morning affection, I aimed blindly downward and tried again – only to be met with the same absence. How odd, my wife must have been sleeping at a most peculiar angle. For by my estimation, what with my arms currently being wrapped around her gently heaving body, to miss my kiss her head must have been positioned at an almost complete right angle to her torso.

The macabre unnaturalness of this image disturbed my sleep-addled brain, forcing my eyes open only to be instantly blinded by the bright sunlight streaming into our room from the far window. Blinking, I searched with increasing bewilderment for any sign of my wife`s head. In that space where a human head should have been, where it always was at 7 am on a Wednesday morning, there was nothing but plump and unpressed pillow.

My wife breathed steadily under my arm.

On our fourth day alive we killed the elderly, as has always been the custom. Three days of tolerance, of something like restraint, then when the great Chroniker chugged into gear for another cycle, we had at it. I would not have waited so long, but tradition does have some brief part to play in life’s journey.

The three-day rule has its purposes, of course. The baton being passed, lessons from yesterday brightening today. But frankly, my people need very little instruction before being ready to blaze out into the world, and our days are far too few to be spent lingering in lecture halls, enduring those withering old Tenners droning on and on about bygone decades. Five, seven, even ten minutes at a time we are expected to just sit and listen! If you knew anything at all about my race, traveller, you might appreciate a little more how tortuous that kind of patience really is.

Tag: Sci Fi

Short Story: ‘Human Stilts’

Short Story: ‘Chroniker’