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In this universe, we fight because we can’t fuck. Call it Universe A, or One, the Golden Age where it all began. Though “began” is relative when your timeline is constantly rewritten, rebooted, shattered to bits. Call it the universe where we aren’t even supposed to show emotion, unless it’s anger, let alone kiss. Your fist skates over my jaw, bone against bone, skin brushing skin. I tie you up. Your muscles strain.
You always told her you’d give her the world if she wanted it. So it should have been no surprise, really, when she asked you for the Moon. You might have known something like this was coming; she’d been on her best behavior for a week, chores done without nagging, shoes lined up neatly in the hall closet.
Tilda stands at a crossroads just outside of town. It’s a place where worlds meet, and the perfect place to create a new person. The crescent moon glimmers through the oaks bent thick along the roadside. The cold-burning stars in the sky hold a sort of magic if you know how to swim in their light. Tilda spits in the dirt, turns a tight circle, and recites the incantation she learned as a child.
There wasn’t a lot of me left after the war.
I was in a skipship on my way to being deployed when the Drinzit attacked, and I got sucked into a hole in the ship’s wall before the patch system kicked in. My comrades put what was left of me in cryo, and we retreated to Known Space.
I heard you’re returning to our world again. What do you want here exactly, Orhija? The Earth is dying slowly. It’s losing its sheen and glow. The blackness of the soil that you used to say was as beautiful as mine has changed since you left. It’s redder than black. The air is tense and heavy with smoke. I doubt you can survive it.
The thaw comes early. Though I’ve been held here for dreams upon dreams, I am not ready. Shoals of us overwinter in the ice. As our bodies slow to quiescence, the ice resonates between us: signals that would be battered unintelligible by moving water.
Mark was aware that he looked more dead than alive, so he did not have high expectations for his first, and last, night on the town. He had fled the hospital’s cancer ward fuelled by stolen methamphetamines, wearing stolen clothes, and armed with just his credit card.
The woman’s name was lost in The Fall, as was so much else we once thought vital—seasons, rivers, uncharred air—but her image persists, has become indelible. The giant wall of white upon which her travesties are projected once yearly has become a mecca for all in this, our new world. The desert for miles around is littered with the bleached bones of those who would gaze upon her bare body, to confirm for themselves and their outposts that one such as her ever actually existed.
By the time he went to reclaim himself, it was too late. As a young man, he’d realized there was a power to being alone. Relationships were tethers that held you back, sapped you of strength, of will. People were poison. And not all poisons were bad; sometimes the toxic taste, the caustic kiss, was a good thing. But too much killed you all the same. No matter how alive it made him feel in the moment, he knew that in the end, it would cost him.
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