All The Difference
The mountains in the distance looked almost like the reefs of his own world, but there was no colour to them and it was easy to slide off their surface in sleep. The air was thick. You had to chew on it with the gills, but it allowed Yleeng to fly – a salvation, for this world possessed no seas and oceans.
Yleeng closed his eyes for a moment, giving them a rest. He missed the water expanse, but worse than its absence was this devilish red sky – savage and angry like a hot mouth of lava in the cracks of the ocean bottom, like blood left after a shark’s feast.
Yleeng could smell the difference, and, surprisingly, it aroused him. Perhaps, it was just fear pushing him to propagate.
The local females didn’t seem to mind his otherness. Whenever he flew lower, they came closer, catching him in their clouds of pheromones, sometimes even scratching him gently with their claws.
In his world, Yleeng was a scientist. His fins and tail had special sensors that analysed the physical properties of the environment. His tastebuds were a mobile laboratory. His brain stored information from the past generations, passed in the genes. Here everything went haywire. His pores absorbed the water from the air. With it they delivered tiny scabs and particles of saliva, sweat and urine. Some unknown mechanism inside him deciphered them and let him understand the locals without any prior knowledge.
It scared him to find them so similar. It pushed him to bond, to live his lineage not just a chemical trace when he died. But he was scared of the progeny he would create – more legal and yet not truly accepted, merging but not merged. The betrayal scared him. For parsecs away there were still the ashes of his own world and his family – not warm, but not completely blown away. His Mewjing was part of them.
Yleeng caught a taste of another local female. Too salty and assaulting. By the end of his life he’d be soaked in it like in brine. Maybe, that would do – that would mask him. They’d learn to pay no heed to his drawled speech, to the difference in the pheromones he exuded. Maybe, that’s how he’d sabotage it – by introducing the otherness, which is no different at all.
Perhaps, his eyes would finally accept the carmine colour of this bloody sky.
He dived down.
Written by inklore
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The Hall Of Fathers
I brush the non-existing dust off the skirt of my pink tulle dress and scratch my left wrist. My small, glittering shoe finally crosses the line. The scanner in the floor reads my approach and the tall doors of riveted, lacquered wood spread open. I enter the Hall of Fathers.
Graffiti Ghost
I arrive in the street cramped with huge lit signs of various shops and restaurants. There is a wrapper stuck to the sole of my trekking boot already. My shoulders ache – the trip from the airport included a lot of walking. A smell of hot bibimbap comes from the nearest door, enticing me to go in, take off my backpack – which is heavy with everything I own – and order a bottle of soju on top of everything.
The Shifting Tattoo
I feel it before I manage to see it and almost drop the coffee cup into the sink. I could nearly mistake it for the scald of the too hot water if it didn’t run up my forearm instead of down. It is rather precise as well, like tiny piranhas biting their way along the thin paths, very artistically. And when I look down – there it is. Or better say isn’t. Parts of my tattoo gone, vanished without a trace.
Ye and I…
The crack on the glass of the observation deck was branching fast, turning into a cave painting. Panic seized my heart, and my legs wouldn’t move to reach for the alarm button. There I was, glued to the floor in my customary observer’s position, knowing what awaited me and yet doing nothing to prevent it, to save myself.
Through The Hole
I can feel the layers of threads, but behind them the outer envelope is rock-hard. Each time I try to get through, my thin legs are sucked into the silk of the cocoon. Each time I pull back in horror, scared they would get trapped inside. Yet I cannot stop. It gets more and more cramped in here, and the air is stale, sparse. My new body wraps around me too tightly.
Karma On Pause
Yrid was escorted down the long white corridor by a lovely blonde-haired man. His features looked even more perfect when she tried to put her own face next to his in her mind’s eye – the aligned symmetry, the enhanced colours of the irises, the glow of the smoothest skin she’d ever seen. Not that she was very much surprised – every publicity material about Karma Inc. mentioned the high clinic standards, not only when it came to R&D and equipment, but the whole aesthetics.
Hobble Forward
I tense the muscles in my right foot and half-hop, half-skitter forward. Quick pause, then repeat. After a few steps I get the rhythm and the speed, and manage to climb the ramp with only a little bit of help from my wings, which too are clipped. This is an extra measure, because I am attached to a kid – they don’t want to traumatise her by having to use the disintegrating button. I have a few words to say about that, but my programming blocks them.
Phantom Heist
The things are finally quiet, and I glide down the corridors to the Egyptian room. I feel a bit nervous, so at one point I stop minding the cabinets and the walls and simply go through them. The benefits of being a ghost!
Switch
From my vantage point I look for any moving shadows, but they are always twigs or bushes, not even a stray cat. When I hear a rustling, I turn one-hundred-eighty degrees, but it’s just a chocolate wrapper carried around by the ecstatic wind, which seems to enjoy the empty streets. I wait and keep looking. They must be somewhere.
#FFA500
Their skin was a terrible orange colour. Still. If they could, they would peel it off and dump into the nearest trash bin.
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