Fantasy
Standardized Test
DIRECTIONS: Fill in the correct letter with a #2 pencil on the answer sheet. Do not use ink or ballpoint pens. Questions left blank will be marked incorrect. Completely fill in each circle.
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Flash Fiction
Fantasy
An Omodest Proposal
Esteemed neighbors, emissaries, ambassadors, and dignitaries, I write to you today not only as a statesman but as a scientist. We in the city of Omelas have been exceedingly lucky in recent years. The wars, diseases, and financial instability that have rocked the world have so far passed us by. Partly that’s been due to prudent precautions and smart public investments, but it’s also true that our fine city benefits in unique ways from ancient, dearly-held customs.
Science Fiction
After the God Has Moved On
We saw her staggering down the promenade, gills flaring as she sucked for the gods’ aether that no longer fueled her breathing. By her gasping breaths we knew the god had moved on, swimming the invisible aether to another, leaving her gasping in the void as she fell back into the strained, recycled, and slightly fishy-smelling air of the space station.
Fantasy
I Eat the Sky for Us
Baba’s skin splits open with the sound of thunder. A parent’s intuition, he says, switching on the news. A ticker tape warning runs across the screen telling us to leave, leave, leave. The sky over our home is cracking but Baba will not go. He runs up to the roof instead and grows larger than I ever knew him to be.
Science Fiction
The Exquisite Pull of Relentless Desire
The dancer switches the camera on as his ship falls into orbit around the black hole; the opening image of his unmuscled chest squeezed beneath translucent polyester blasts out toward a thousand points of watching light. He’s shaved his body for the first time in his life, the nicks of the razor lingering in little scabbing cuts. He hits the music.
Fantasy
A Heap of Petrified Gods
It was a different kind of migration when our parents moved to Lagos; Dad, a young accountant, had got a job at the federal secretariat, and Mum, a teacher, lugging three boys aged one, three, and five, transferred later from her state civil service job to the Federal School of Arts and Sciences on the island.
Fantasy
Three Birds That Came Out of Grayson Huff and a Bunch More That Fell from the Sky
I was on the school bus when the second bird came out. The bus struggled up Trabuco Hill Road. Gears ground. This was the part every day when we all joked about getting out to push. Another year and I’d have my driver’s license. Then no more bus.
Fantasy
Sleeping Beauty and the Restless Realm
The beautiful princess was cursed by a wicked fairy to sleep for a hundred years. She slumbered in a bed of silk in the golden castle surrounded by tangles of briars and roses on the top of the hill. Nobody much cared. Why should the villagers have felt bad for the magically slumbering princess?
Science Fiction
Ancestor Code Error
It is 3024, and there are no longer shrines. They long since washed away by nature’s fury in the form of quakes that split across continents, countries, cities, down schools, fields, homes neatly in two. You are to receive the memories of a late mother, a late father.
Fantasy
The Last Word
I am running out of Words. I stumble down the temple steps, clutching my wounded side. I had been too slow to use my fourth Word and the prison guard’s spear had drawn blood before he choked to death under the weight of my suffocation spell.
