The cruise ship sailed into the night, beneath the lunar eclipse, and all the people danced on the deck. They danced and they laughed and they drank and they gossiped. They admired their shining bits, they admired the famous ones that they recognized, they admired the way the reddish moonlight made the waves glow. They ate and they laughed and they ( Read more... )

"Do you think they'll guess?" Nayla whispered, leaning closer to her sib-sister and running her long nails along the side of her face. "Never," answered Laya. "We are too clever for them, dearest not-sister." Layla chuckled throatily. "Most dear of not-sisters!" Nayla sighed and leaned against Laya, feeling the vibration of the spaceship ( Read more... )

And now for our local contestant, chef William Smith from the jersey projects! William, how pleased are you to be entering the chance of a lifetime contest? After an elimination cook-round, the winner will be awarded with the position of head chef at the intergalactic Smits restaurant on the interplanetary resort hotel. This is a very ( Read more... )

The black-eyed Susan was drying around the edges, looking as if it had just begun to wilt but still had some vigor to it. It looked exactly as it had twenty years ago, when she'd had it encased in a stasis field. The other flowers from the bouquet were long since dust, but that one survived. She kept it in a case hanging on the wall above her ( Read more... )

The ball ringed the hoop and then slid through the net with a sweet hiss that reminded him of his girlfriend's hiss between her teeth when she let him go all the way for the first time. It was a moment that he'd remember forever, he promised himself, just like that one. They'd broken up six months later, and he knew that everybody would forget ( Read more... )

Sudden death came not from above, where they had been watching carefully, but from beneath them. The cisterns that they'd been filling with rainwater went black overnight. Nobody noticed until the next morning, when the first girl to pull up a bucket of water, sleep still in her eyes, screamed and dropped her bucket to clatter against the ( Read more... )

With exquisite care, she packed the box full of flowers. Lilacs and narcissus, daisies and dandelions. Anyone who opened it would be astonished by a wave of fragrance and color that would dazzle the senses, coming in such a strange way. The blossoms would be bruised by their trip, of course, but that would only add interesting textures to their ( Read more... )

It itched and wiggled behind his eye, until he couldn't help picking up the pen from his desk and really working it around back behind his eyeball. It felt heavenly, just like the commercials had always promised it would. He heard a gasp and saw Sandra standing in the door to his cubicle. Papers fell from her hands as she stared at him. "Don't ( Read more... )

He smiled down at the little baby and then looked up at her parents, her father in a shirt that was buttoned up to the collar, horn-rimmed glasses, and a surprising bulge of muscle beneath his shirt, her mother in a prim shirtwaist and ankle-length skirt that nipped tightly around her waist, a lush mane of chestnut hair that was swept up into a bun ( Read more... )

The ship that sailed tonight had blood-red sails, Riva thought. Blood-red sails on the horizon. She shuddered. It was a bad omen. They'd followed the seers and the rotations of the wheel, but they'd still ended up with blood-red as the safest color for the ship. The seer herself had been upset by that, Riva had noticed. She looked out to sea ( Read more... )