Issue 35 August 2016 Flash Fiction Online August 2016

When the Queen of Faerie orders you to do something, you don’t refuse. The lands are filled with the remnants of her commands, for sometimes – make me a boat of dead men’s nails – her creatures die from exhaustion or accident before their duty is done.

We have a lot of ruins here.

Her voice comes to me over the water, ringing like bronze against a stone. You don’t refuse that voice. You strive to fulfil its demands no matter how arbitrary and cruel. This is Faerie, after all, and all of us inhabitants live to serve her. Even if we chafe at our bonds within the secret gullies of our hearts.

Hands-of-Clay, build me a palace of despair. Build it with your own hands, she says.

So I begin to build. I quarry the land in a desolate location; we have plenty of war-ravaged land to sculpt. I carry an endless stream of stones in my amorphous hands through featureless plains, creating the foundation for the palace on this scarred hilltop that reverberates with sorrow. Despair is born of sorrow combined with hopelessness, after all. I have not felt the buzz of hope in my chest for centuries beyond count, and my hopelessness clangs against the sorrow susurrating deep in the hill.

I change to suit my tasks. I am many-armed when I need to carry boulders. My feet meld into the earth when I need stability, although of course, the earth of Faerie is itself an inconstant thing. Not like the earth I remember from the days of my youth, before they stole me here and made me inhuman, made me malleable as wet clay. I don’t remember who I used to be. These days I remember little about the mortal world apart from the smell of the awakening soil in the first days of spring. My mortal-name is lost to me. With it, I might remember enough to find one of the secret paths: names act as anchors, can pull a person back to the sunlit lands.

I breathe in the air of Faerie, its cloying-sweet vapours. I am Hands-of-Clay now. Nothing more.

* * * 

Stone by stone, turret by turret the palace of despair grows. No emotion can be pure in Faerie, not if you’ve stayed there long enough, but despair is purer than joy, so my task is not insurmountable. The palace grows grey and gloomy, its towers reaching into the haze of the sky.

I’m proud of my palace when I finish it after countless moments of toil. Months, years? Who knows how quickly time passes here. It is not a relevant concept in a world without a moon.

For a final moment, I allow myself to gaze on my creation. It is glorious in its despair. Something stirs within me, memories fluttering from a long-trammelled chamber in my mind. I have seen a palace like this before. I have seen such turrets rising from the earth.

The mortal-name rushes to my mind, sudden as a sea-squall. Castell Conwy. Yes, Conwy by the sea. I close my eyes. I see the castle with its tall towers, flags torn by the wind. I can almost feel the salt spray on my lips.

I did not know I had such mortal memories locked up inside. If I have remembered this much, perhaps it is not impossible to remember enough to find a pathway out. Hope trembles within me, dangerous and raw. A word surfaces: gobaith. Hope, in the tongue I had thought I’d forgotten, the tongue of my mortal people.

The reawakened memories have made my thoughts leap and bound like hares. I root my toes into the hill, ground myself. Soon there will be time to explore those thoughts.

But first, I open my eyes and call for the Queen.

Who disturbs my revelry?

“It is I, humblest of your servants. I have built a palace of despair for you, my Queen. With my own hands and the sweat of my labours, I have raised it to the skies.”

She is here in the space of a breath: a presence strong enough to make my eyes itch to burst out of their sockets.

It will suffice. Her hand brushes over me in absent benediction. The landscape shifts, the steady hill of sorrow growing spiky crags and treacherous paths. Two armies appear next to the palace I have made.

This is a fitting arena for a war, says the Queen. She settles back to watch in a throne of thorns that shoots up from the earth to receive her.

The armies’ tumult, the clashing of shields and flashing of lightning-swords makes the building tremble. All my carefully placed roof-tiles smash to the ground. The towers sway and crumble.

I know the Queen’s commands seldom lead to joy. Yet my heart is heavier than ever: this cursed heart, still human in spite of all my bodily transformations and the meaningless drudgery that eats away at my days. A dark anger kindles inside me.

I clench my many-jointed hands into fists. I walk away, leaving the fickle Queen’s armies to destroy my creation. I don’t want to witness it. If I close my eyes, I can still see Castell Conwy, standing tall on the Welsh coast.

On the winding hill-path, another memory surrenders itself to me, brought to the surface by the after-quakes of the palace’s demise. By my trembling anger. By the small seeds of hope planted by the newly unlocked doors in my mind.

My name. My mortal-name.

Dafydd. The name rings in my malleable head like a clear silver bell. I shift to a form approximating my long-gone human self.

Lost I may be, lost perhaps forever in Faerie and a thrall to the Queen’s whims. But here, now, I have gained my mortal-name. And with that knowledge, I can begin to seek the hidden pathways that lead back home.

On a personal level, this has been a challenging year. It’s not something I like to talk about. Or even want to talk about, much less share the details in an editorial. I learned a lot about sadness and regret, but ultimately I learned the most about what hope feels like. It didn’t come in the way I expected–wrapped up in a sweet box with a bow on top and a candied well-wishing. I found it in the backyard one day, not too long ago. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, one that went all the way down into my belly, and I smelled it–like freshly baked lemon cookies and blue skies and my children’s sweaty hair after a day in the sun.

Yes, my future is still uncertain. It is for all of us. But I’m learning hope comes in unexpected places–a stranger’s generosity in donating a few more dollars a month to keeping this little magazine alive, a staff who believes in what we do here at Flash Fiction Online, friends who can see past all the weirdness life throws in our path and merely say, “I’m here.” And for all of you, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

“Creation” by Sara Norja is a haunting Faerie tale of a creature tasked to build a castle of despair. But what he finds in the ruins is more than he ever expected.

Marina J. Lostetter returns to FFO with “You Are Not a Metaphor,” a dark yet beautiful story about a disease that robs the individual of their identity. If love means putting the other person’s needs ahead of your own, this story is a true testament to what that means.

Originally published in Crossed Genres, we’re delighted to bring you Rachael K. Jones’s “Mamihlapinatapei,” a dinosaur story we couldn’t resist. With a name like “Mamihlapinatapei,” it’s not a stretch to say language is a powerful tool in identifying and processing the world around us. But what exactly is the worth of naming how the heart feels?

In our final story, an original time travel caper from Benjamin C. Kinney, “The Time Cookie Wars,” friendship goes astray when tested by a box of Milano cookies. If you’ve ever hidden your cookie stash in the frozen broccoli box to keep your roommate from eating them all, this is the story for you.

Don’t miss Jason S. Ridler’s latest installment of FXXK WRITING: The Glom of Doom. He may not be tossing around sunshine and roses over there in his column, but Jason knows his stuff. He’s been in the trenches and back. Go check it out.

Finally, if you enjoy Flash Fiction Online, please consider becoming a Patron at http://www.patreon.com/flashfictiononline. Or consider becoming a monthly subscriber at WeightlessBooks.com. Your continued support is more vital than ever, and every little bit helps. If you can’t donate right now, just tell a friend about us. Or send us a story. We love those too.

Thanks for reading.

Thanks for being here.

All my best,

Anna

On Navarino Island off the coast of Chile, Marta mops outside the tyrannosaurus habitat as the tourists press in to see the dinosaurs.

They come with their reluctant children in tow. They weave their fingers through chicken-wire fences and gaze down into open pits while the kids tug at their legs and demand ice cream. Outside the tyrannosaurus pen, the children snub the King of Lizards and chase the gulls instead.

For these children, there has never been a world without dinosaurs.

Inside their sunken habitats, the thunder lizards browse among replica ferns and preen their plumage, geneticist’s pride and janitor’s bane. At night Marta descends the slopes and collects feathers by the binful.

As the tourists wend their way toward the exit, the parents will confess to one another that the dinosaurs were not what they expected. Not the green-scaled dragons of their youth, which they shaded in coloring books and treasured on T-shirts and on lunch boxes. Not the wise-faced apatosaurus with artful vegetation clenched in its jaws. The beasts were extraordinary, they will add, but they were not otherworldly. It is as if they have revisited a childhood home and found the rooms shrunken, the lawn fenced, the woods dispossessed of sprites.

In the resurrection of the dinosaurs, something else has gone extinct.

As Marta mops outside the tyrannosaurus enclosure, the elderly zookeeper guides her tour through the exhibit, expounding upon prehistory in rapid English. Marta feels within herself a deep pining, an intense ache, a desire for more than dung and plumage and discarded gum.

In Russian, there is a word for this feeling, toska, for which there is no perfect translation.

Opportunities are scarce for natives on the island. Marta’s mother spends her days making traditional Yaghan baskets for tourists who want something exotic for the mantle at home. Her father wears a reproduction loincloth and squats in a reproduction shelter in the Heritage Village so that visitors can understand what Charles Darwin meant when he called the Yaghans savages. Darwin couldn’t comprehend how civilized people slept naked in near-freezing temperatures.

Marta takes her lunch in the employee break room, where a flyer has been taped to the wall. Open interviews on Monday morning for the retiring zookeeper’s job. Marta asks a coworker to translate the last line for her: Candidates must speak English.

She wants the job more than she’s wanted anything, and knows there is a way. Last month, an uncle paid for a new procedure which promised instant fluency in any language, swapped his Yaghan for French and moved to Europe. Language, the ads claimed, is a lattice of paths through the tangled wilderness of the brain. If you didn’t mind erasing the map, losing your old tongues, you could learn any language in the company catalogue almost overnight.

She does not wish to lose the Yaghan language, but Marta feels the future closing around her like the glassed-in walls of the pterodactyl habitat. In the mornings, she winches herself to the roof to polish off the dust prints where they throw themselves at the glass all night.

In German, there is a word for this feeling, torschlusspanik, for which there is no perfect translation.

Two days, the ads promise, and you will speak your new language fluently. Just two days.

Outside the tyrannosaurus habitat, the old zookeeper wraps her coat a little tighter and shivers beneath the heaters that warm the dinosaurs. Marta mops in short sleeves and thinks nothing of the chill. Her grandmother said Yaghan blood runs a full degree hotter than the blood of white people, but that wasn’t the secret to living naked in the cold.

It was the fires, said her grandmother. They lit fires up and down the coastlines in the shelter of the rocks, and when the sailors passed near our shores, they called it Tierra del Fuego, The Land of Fire, and wondered at the perpetual plumes of smoke rising in the night, as though it were the abode of dragons.

On Friday evening, Marta arrives for her appointment thirty minutes early. She pages through a book on velociraptors she bought at the zoo’s gift shop. The cartoon lizards are green and scaled and featherless in deference to the sensibilities of the older patrons. She thinks of velociraptor bones in museums around the world. What would their ancestors make of the resurrection? Of the cages? As if summoned by her thoughts, a featherless raptor steps from her shadow and nips her hand. Marta drops the book in surprise.

The nurse calls her name, gazes straight through the raptor. Marta searches the lizard’s black eyes for an explanation, but finding none, she abandons it in the waiting room. The nurse places something like a spherical cage around her head. When the doctor touches the button, it is as if a fiery ball smashes deep into the surface of her brain, throwing up a screen of dust so that all her thoughts are thick and blurred.

After the procedure, Marta stumbles alone into the rapidly descending night. The cold assaults her from all sides. Shivering, she lifts her chin and sees smoking bonfires strung like beacons along the dirt road that leads to her grandmother’s home. The velociraptor darts from her shadow and bolts toward the fires, and feeling an answering tug in her navel, Marta follows. As they reach each fire in succession, the flames sputter and die out. Always fire ahead, always darkness behind.

The ground is thick with mud. Their feet leave indents with each step, but when she looks back, she sees only the velociraptor’s delicate, birdlike impressions. At the final bonfire, Marta staggers to a stop. She cannot see what is beyond–whether the road continues, or branches, or falls into nothingness. In the rapidly failing blaze of the last fire, she gazes into the velociraptor’s strange, beady eyes, and suddenly it is as if they understand one another perfectly.

Marta thinks, There is a word for this in Yaghan.

Previously published in Crossed Genres, 2014. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

The diseases that pop up these days–they say that they’re just stand-ins. Metaphors for real illnesses. Like, the world got so fed up with comas and Alzheimer’s that reality decided to rewrite itself and give us sleeping-beauty disorder and zombieism instead.

He’s not really undead, they keep saying. She’s not really a werewolf. It’s all something else–those “real” illnesses are still there. We’re just all hallucinating as a species, using sickness as an allegory.

But you are not a stand-in, or a cipher, or a symbol. You are not a character in a story.

And I am not a narrator. 

The doctors call what you have “Escapist’s Disease.” At first, they thought it had replaced multiple-personality disorder or schizophrenia, but now they’re saying people with “Escapist’s” had a daydreaming problem back when the universe worked properly. The disease infects people who read more novels than news, or who obsessed over plot holes in TV shows. People whose imaginations were always in high-gear. People who could dream bigger than the rest of us.

How awful is that? You spent a few too many hours a day with fictional people and fictional scenarios and bam; now you’re stuck running through fictional lives for the rest of yours.   

But it’s not a metaphor. What’s happening to you is real. Even though, sometimes–probably like right now–you don’t think so. 

“Stop referring to me as he,” you say sometimes. What gender are you are today, I wonder? “Stop telling me I’m sick. I’m not sick. Stop telling me things about myself that aren’t true. I don’t live in a world where fantasy illnesses are real. Stop saying you you you.”

I get it. I do. You never did care for second-person point-of-view.

But it’s true–all of my ‘yous.’ No matter where you think you are right now, who you think you are, I know the blood and bones of it. The flesh. The reality. Maybe you think you’re dreaming right now. Maybe you think you’re reading this and can’t actually hear me talking to you. I don’t know anymore.

You’re sitting there on the broken bed, wrapped in our stained sheets just staring at the orange prescription bottle. There’s a half-eaten, poor-excuse-for-a-hamburger from yesterday on the nightstand. It’s stinking up the place, but I’m afraid to take it away from you. Sometimes you think garbage is important, like it’s an object of power and only you know its secrets. 

I can’t tell if you’re conscious of me at all right now. Can you hear me? See me? Feel me?

I look at your big body and those little pills, and I wonder how anything so tiny could make a difference. With them you’re fine, you’re here with me. Without them…

There’s one left. If I knew who you were today, I could figure out if it’s worth making you swallow it or not. I want to save it for when you don’t like who you are, because I don’t know how long it’ll be until we’re given a ticket for the pharmacy line again. 

I want to save it, but I also want to make you take it.  Mostly because I know you don’t know me.  You never do when you’re like this.  You’ve forgotten all about me. 

What’s my name?

…that’s what I thought.

It hurts. How can it not? You can’t love me if you don’t know me.

But I’m being selfish. Maybe who you think you are today–how you believe you live–is better than all this. Better than the breakdown of physics, and the insertion of minor magics, and the inversion of truths and untruths. Better than ration lines and quarantine zones and martial-law states. Maybe that’s why you chose to be that person–or the disease chose, whatever.

I can tell, with the way you’re stiffening, that every fiber in your being is fighting what I’m saying–fighting with the narrative. 

But at least it’s an indication I’m getting through.

I need you to know that I love you.  The real you.  And part of the real you is this disease, I understand that. 

I’ll leave you be now.  I’ve got our ration tickets–five of them if you can believe it.  I’ll come back soon with bread and cheese, and maybe you’ll be able to talk then, be able to tell me who you are and what it’s like where you’re from.

Wherever you are today, I hope you’re happy. I hope you love and are loved. Maybe you’ve got kids… you used to say you wanted kids. 

In truth, I won’t give you the pills ever again if you ask me not to. If you like who you are today, you can stay. And tomorrow, if you’re the same person, and the day after that. Maybe if you like a life enough, it won’t get interrupted by another.

But if you don’t like it, if you need to escape, all you have to do is ask. 

Come out of the stories if they’re too much.   

Don’t turn the page. Don’t keep reading.

Come back to me.

I miss you.

I’ve been investing more time into short stories, essays, and articles, and with a nice bump of success, too, as I finish a novel and conclude a massive historical project. It’s been great fun, for the most part, and I’ve tried to improve the quality and quantity of my shorter material.

This weekend, I carved out a couple of hours to get my short-stuff back into the slush piles of the world. Out of nowhere, a very bitter nostalgia crept over my tired mind, a pall that glommed on and took days to shake.

My professional writing career started with short stories. For ten years, that’s what I wrote. I finished a bunch of novels, too, but, since I was in grad school and working on an epic biography, I only wanted to work on short pieces as the primary arm of my fiction career. Plus, I was getting better at them, and increasing my rate of acceptance (thanks in part to the amazing Ralan.com site . . . which still exists and looks oh so 2003!). My crazy stat? In one year (2007, as I recall), I received 243 rejections and 13 sales, while keeling about 30-40 stories perpetually in the market. Yes, there is a story about perseverance here. But that ain’t the point.

I switched novels after I’d finished my doctorate, moved to the US, got married, and hoped (and tried) to turn novels into part of a successful writer career. (CUE SAD TROMBONE). Four years of voracious effort produced skill and craft, projects I loved (like my steampunk WWI zombie horror novel, or my gonzo punk rock sex novel, or my “Karate Kid with Wizards but with a fat hero” novel, or . . .  I could go on), but no bites, no dice, no thanks. Divorce, tragedies, and poverty followed.

Occasionally, in the aftermath of my agony year, I’d hunker down and work on a short story. Steve Tem, one of my heroes and whose Deadfall Hotel is absolutely brilliant, views short stories as little labs to explore intense emotional experiences or ideas. And I’m rather full of those. But I watched how my normal routines and subjects didn’t catch fire, and things I’d sworn off writing (especially military history, or history in general), began to pull me. Sometimes I’d send these suckers off. Some sold. Others didn’t. In my recovery year, I stopped being orderly and pragmatic about submissions and stats. Just too tired to care.

That was a major change. Because when I was just a Short Story Guy, I worked like clockwork, and approaching speeds near that of the late Jay Lake and other fast writers (but nowhere near Michael Moorecock’s speed of 30K a day, as discussed in his fun book interviews Death is No Obstacle). Two days outlining, three days writing, two days revising: DONE. I’d spend Sundays getting ALL my returned submissions out the door. While I wanted top tier markets, if I ran out, I kept them shopping to lower ones to get money and another notch on the belt. This also meant I sold to some awful stories to awful markets (may they rest in obscurity), but built up a published body of work that had, as the British say, “bottom.” It was fun. A tradition. A routine. A way to improve.

FF to last week. I’m recharging my knowledge of the short story markets. Lots has changed, (hello Submission Grinder, which isn’t as dirty as it sounds),  including newer and cooler markets for fantasy, the championing of diversity by much of the community, and rising stars who are fun to read (check out the latest Flash Fiction Online for proof!). Lots is the same, including generally poor “pro” rates, boring old men farting about the good old days (ever notice how women and people of color don’t pine for such things?), and the perpetually thin market for crime fiction (especially with the death of The Big Click) And while going to the “Grinder” to get some data, a bitter dollop of the familiar smeared my frontal lobe. In the common tongue, it sounded thus:

Well, look who’s back? That fast writing guy! Wow, you miserable shit, how far did you fall to end up back where you started before the 21^st century was born? Got an SASE for the post office? Feeling old yet? Feeling irrelevant yet? Feeling like a failure yet?

But I didn’t.

I’ve got book deals, history projects, comic book stuff, sales and more in the short story world. How might these be fails?

Right, it’s just stupid baggage about art and failure in my past, about writer identity that can be toxic, and other old junk from the nightmare box in my head.

The glom of doom didn’t last. It stung, felt ugly, reminded me I’m not twenty-five anymore, then left when confronted with some evidence and, frankly, another cup of instant coffee (don’t judge).

This year seems to be about new challenges in familiar fields. Novels are the clearest one, but short stories are another. My natural inclination with such feelings is to inject myself with work to kill the noise generated by uncertainty: with major projects done, I should do five massive new projects; or, write a short story a week for a year; or, became a Novella Man; or, finally get my degree in the history of snack food.

I’m holding back the itch to do all of above, because that drive to work until I’m dead at 45 must be resisted some times. But such moments of reflection are good for taking stock. I love short stories. I want to do more. It’s not a step back to do something you love. Letting anyone, including yourself, push you around so that you aren’t doing your work, your way?

That is a step back, into the shadows of your past. But if you end up there, trying kicking darkness until . . . well, you know the song. 

Support Jay’s Dream of Being a Short Story Success . . . uh, Story! Check out Jay’s short story collection, Knockouts: Ten Tales of Fantasy and Noir: , where award-winning author Norman Partridge refers to our hero as “The Man in the Barbed Wire Straightjacket!” Get it today and he’ll thank you tomorrow!

Ten hours smiling at potential donors to the Temporal Branching Lab, and two more tour groups to go, but my snack stash held only a box of crumbs, without even a fleck of chocolate. The other graduate students had left some milk and a few wrinkled apples in the break room fridge, but stealing those wouldn’t be worth the trouble tomorrow. For cookies, though, I’d shiv the lot of them.

My stomach growled. “Past self, why did you let the cookies run out? Current self wants cookies. Come on, past self, get with the program.”

I crept back to the lab’s main room. I had told a hundred rapacious philatelists: it takes you to a different timeline so you won’t change history; and the mass calibration term has 1.3 kilograms of leeway to bring things back. Things like stamps. So why not cookies?

I flicked a switch, and the Temporal Branching Machine began to hum.

* * *

I rifled through the cupboard, setting aside the chocolate chip and peanut butter as I dug toward the Milanos deep within.

“Excuse me?”

A woman stood in the break room doorway with a phone in hand, its titanium case flipped open, her thumb over the Call button. A tallish, round-faced woman. A very familiar woman.

I said, “Oh! Hey, Sanna. I ran out of cookies. Mind if I grab a box?”

“What the hell? Get your own cookies!”

“These are my cookies!” I pushed my hand into my pocket and pressed the recall button. “Thanks, past self!”

“That’s not how it works, you stupid–” She hurled her phone at me, but I was already gone, carrying her snacks into my present.

* * *

I dunked the Milano’s edge into the glass and watched the milk drip from biscuit to chocolate.

Another Sanna said, “Oh, Milanos! Is this the first time you got them from the past?”

“Wait, what?” I dropped the cookie, and it vanished into the milk with a liquid plop.

My future self, Sanna-3, waved a hand dismissively. “Anyways, brilliant idea. I do it all the time now. I just need the milk, d’you mind?” She plucked the half-empty gallon of milk from the fridge and vanished in a pop of air.

“What a complete asshat! What is her–my–problem?” I slammed my fist on the table and sighed. I lifted the glass of milk and watched a murky blob of half-dissolved cookie swirl through the white.

I had more cookies, but some asshat had stolen the milk.

Two could play at that game.

* * *

I arrived with my arms around my head, but in this timeline, my past self was staring in bemusement, her phone nowhere in sight.

“Hi!” I waved. “Got any milk?”

Sanna-4 recoiled. “How would I have milk? You stole it already!”

“What? I didn’t steal anything. I mean, not from you.” I hesitated. Who else would have the tools and the motive? “Does this happen to you a lot?”

Behind her, Sanna-5 looked up from the cabinet and rolled her eyes. “Apparently. Because all she has left are these peanut butter cookies. Why did I even buy these?”

Sanna-4 whirled around. “Because someone kept stealing the Milanos!”

“Hold on!” I raised my hands. “We can all get cookies, you know that?”

* * *

We shouted in unison, “What do you mean you’re sold out?!”

“The — uh — I’m sorry, miss — the six of you were just in here, and–“

* * *

Sanna-18’s baseball bat hit Sanna-31’s head with a sickening crunch, and the latecomer crumpled to the floor. The leather-jacketed version locked eyes with me and raised her gore-stained bat.

“Wait!” I raised my empty hands. “What’s going on?”

“You don’t know yet?” Sanna-18 lowered the bat, her face furrowed with exhaustion. “We’re such asshats sometimes. Infinite timelines to steal cookies from, we thought. You know what happens when you divide infinite thieves by infinite targets? Every target can still get infinite goddamn thieves.“

“Oh god. I didn’t realize.”

She smiled bitterly. “I can’t exactly throw stones, can I? Look, future self, if you’re new to this, you don’t want to go back unarmed. Take the bat.” She winked. “Plus, now your hands are full.”

* * *

I reappeared with bat in hand, stomach still empty, as a knife spun across the break room floor. Sannas 32 and 33 wrestled on the linoleum, struggling for a pistol. Outside the window, a siren wailed over the faint pops of more arrivals.

I lifted the bat. “Quit it, you two!”

Something flashed. I lay on my back, my ears ringing, a starburst of agony across my chest. I fumbled with my shirt, searching for the wound, cursing all my past and future selves.

Twisted metal stung my hands. Not blood, but the crumpled titanium of my phone case.

My other two selves still wrestled, fists and teeth and desperation. Cookie thieves I could understand; can’t exactly throw stones, as 18 had said. But these asshats came back armed.

I rose, grit my teeth against the pain in my ribs, and lifted the bat once more.

* * *

I wrenched my bat from the corpse of Sanna-whatever. I had lost count sometime before dawn. I pressed my back against the burned-out shell of an ice-cream truck, but no new Sannas appeared, for a few moments at least. Guns crackled in the distance. Maybe some locals still held out, confused and afraid, trying to save their last scraps of food from the endless, hungry horde of time travelers.

Another half-mile and I’d be home. The pantry would be ransacked, but I might find a few raw ingredients. Not enough, not of the old kinds, but this world had one resource in abundance. I would get my cookies at last if I had to bake with the blood of the future.