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SETTING: The adyton at the Temple of Delphi. Smoke rises from a vent in the floor, partially obscuring PYTHIA, who is sitting on a high stool carefully positioned behind the smoke. ACHILLES stands, supplicant. Behind him, the CHORUS looks at their phones.
Dr. Nirwater Leera only agreed to study Mr. Girat because he is supposed to be dead. Tomorrow, they will meet in person for the first time. But today, Leera wastes time by staring at a cellophane bag full of Girat’s vomit.
Here is a boy, barely thirteen, broken, lying in the road, twisted metal around him, twisted metal in him. Here is his heart, pierced by the shrapnel of the truck, a truck no longer, now a confusion of tangled wire and torn steel and glass pebbles.
I am thinking of a word. I will not tell you what it is. I will tell you a few other words. The words you were looking for, though not all the words you were hoping for. Some of the words you were hoping for, I’ll let you have. Such as these: You were right. Doesn’t that feel good?
What is the colour of pain? In the growing carmine tide that creeps in her heart-mind, Mathilde would swear all that hurts is red, like her scratched hand, her wounded wrists, her slashed ankles. It’s the blood trickling from her fingers.
My dearest Evie: I am so terribly sorry, my darling daughter, but by the time you read this letter, I will be gone. I wish I could have delayed my departure long enough to attend your high school graduation as I always promised I would, but the timing was outside of my control.
The soldiers slit the woman’s throat every evening before bedding down so they can sleep without worry. She mocks them but never fights the knife coming to her. Two of the men still take turns watching her in case she heals before the rest of the cadre wakes.
Jill wiped xylem from her gloves and closed her car’s leafy hood. She’d kept Snapdragon on the road for almost twenty years, and if the world would leave her alone, she could keep him alive for five more, easy. It wouldn’t, and she couldn’t.
Muna shuts the storeroom door as quietly as she can. Holding a just-waxed bundle of letters to her chest, she sticks out her head to check the bookshop floor. If she walks between the shelves on the far right, she can slip out unnoticed in ten heartbeats. The main door of the bookshop is propped open, the sun shining after what feels like a year of sodden clouds and sludged streets—she can’t wait to feel its warmth on her skin.
The backdrop of the greatest concert performance of all time was catastrophic solar behavior that devastated the Tau Ceti system in 4032, knocking the technology of the three inhabited planets to the stone age and putting fourteen billion sentient beings in peril. Of course the news swept the United Systems and generated an outpouring of grief, support and promises of aid, but promises fell short and soon people moved on to other stories.
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