The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: short story

  • Accidental Kaiju

    Grendela climbed the volcano in the early morning light of her 13th birthday. Thirteen was a magic age. At 13 she would become a fully-fledged kaiju. Grendela: Destroyer of Cities. It was supposed to be a great honor in her family. They had a nice little village all picked out for her to smash into the ground this morning. There would be a ceremony while the villagers fled for their lives. Her grandmother had probably made a cake. It was probably cooling right now, waiting to be frosted.

    She wasn’t going to destroy any villages today, though. Let them eat her cake without her; she didn’t care. Her whole family were kaiju, dating back to the old days of the legendary monsters. But Grendela didn’t want to be a kaiju.

    She wanted to be an environmental scientist. (more…)

  • The 34-Year Harvest

    The old farmhouse survived the second alien harvest. Kate wanted to make sure it survived the third one. The 17-year anniversary was coming up and Kate sat at a dining room table covered in materials scrounged to make shells for her father’s shotgun.

    She always thought of it as her father’s shotgun instead of hers, though he’d been dead for over thirty years. Killed in the first arrival. Just like she thought of it as his house and his table. The china in the cabinet was her mother’s. The silver and the crystal water goblets were her grandmother’s. The only things that she thought of as her own were the post-harvest additions. The maps of the county pinned to the walls. The metal shutters. The supplies and pre-harvest books stacked up the walls almost to the ceiling. And the bunker. The storm cellar under the house that she and her neighbors had strengthened and stocked to hide from the attacks. These were the things that she would pass on one day.

    Her daughter, Jean, burst into the room. “Mom, there’s a man coming up the drive. Never seen him before.”

    “Run to Boyce’s farm and raise the alarm,” Kate told her, taking up her father’s gun.

    She waited until Jean was safely out the back door and into the fields before she stepped off the front porch. They’d converted it to a wheelchair ramp when they rebuilt it after the last harvest. Boyce’s farm was miles away. They wouldn’t get here in time to help, but at least it would get her daughter out of the way. (more…)

  • Snakebite

    Sweat stung Trish’s eyes and she scrubbed her face with the hem of her threadbare shirt. When the shirt was new, it stretched taught over her soft belly. Now it hung limply and revealed the hollowed dimples of her ribcage as she lifted it.

    “Why’s it called the Library?” Susannah’s youthful tones cut through the silence of the barren wasteland.

    “In the old days, libraries housed thousands of books,” Lani responded as she stirred the pot of what would have to pass as soup—cactus water flavored with old bones, cactus chunks, and whatever insects, snakes, and rodents happened across their path.

    They were a ragtag bunch that she held together with little more than hopes and hollow promises that things would be better once they reached the Library. Most people thought it was a fairytale. They weren’t far off. It existed. At least, it did eight months prior when she dropped off her last group of survivors.

    “What’s a book?” Thomas cut in predictably. Though they were siblings, he shared few features in common with bright-eyed Susannah.

    “It’s how people used to pass along knowledge before the turn of the century. Before information went digital.” Lani couldn’t have been more than a child before the digital era began, when physical books were recycled as passé and replaced with space-saving tablets. Even Trish herself could count on her fingers how many times she’d seen an actual book, much less held one. (more…)

  • Missing Days

    I sat at the edge of the forest in a pile of torn clothing and howled. Long moments of silence answered my call and then, in the distance, I heard a response. I felt heat rush through my body, burning away the foggy haze that surrounded me since awakening.  A sense of belonging settled over me.

    The ground melted away beneath me as I ran deeper into the forest as I followed a familiar scent on the wind. I could catch faint whiffs of them on passing branches. I flung my head back and howled. The response came much quicker this time. My stride lengthened.

    Excited yips greeted me as I came into the clearing outside a den. Home, a whisper came from the back of my brain. Tiny pups slammed into my sides, all teeth and claws and fur. Mine. (more…)

  • The Last Sunny Day

    This morning.

    It was the first sunny day they’d had in weeks. The gray clouds evaporated in the night and the Spring sunshine was finally able to warm the day. Nina’s mood soared as she woke up to the glorious feeling of the sunlight in her eyes. It arrived just in the nick of time since her daughter, Sophie, was on her very last nerve.

    Sophie was bouncing with boredom. After days of crafts, tea parties, and dinosaurs flying around the house, Sophie was done with her toys. And Nina was done with Sophie’s attitude. A beautiful day brought with it the promise of a trip to the park where Sophie could burn off her energy. And Nina could burn off her frustration.

    She let Sophie dress herself this morning. As she waited to see what kind of combination her daughter would come down in today, Nina made a quick call to her husband. They tried to check in with each other daily when he traveled for work, and cell service got spotty at the park sometimes.

    “You’re going to miss her recital tomorrow?” Nina asked after Graham gave her the bad news. His return would be delayed a couple of days because negotiations weren’t going well. “Sophie’s been practicing for weeks and she’s so excited for you to be there.” (more…)

  • The Stork’s Feather

    The fortune teller studied the side of my palm. Her slender fingers traced the lines of my calloused hand, turning it this way and that to catch the light. I kept my eyes off of her, concentrating on the colorful tapestries on the wall. I knew what she was looking for. And I already knew what she would find.

    “You’ll never have any children,” she said.

    “I know,” I replied.

    Those lines had been scraped off of the side of my hand years ago. She must have seen the half line. The faint, broken line that signified my unborn child. She was tactful not to mention it. Most practitioners loved to bring it up. They liked to play it up to prove that they knew their business. But she sounded like she was giving me the specials. ‘You’ll never have kids, oh and the soup of the day is broccoli cheese.’ She didn’t even sound sad about it.

    “It doesn’t have to be this way if you don’t want it,” the woman said. (more…)

  • The Smell of Christmas

    The coffee shop smelled like Christmas when I walked in—rotten eggnog, burnt pie, and BO. I pinched the bridge of my nose, of all the days he chose to stop living up to my expectations, it was on the day that more than anything I needed to guzzle the world’s largest coffee—as advertised on the chalk signboard—in peace.

    I drew in a deep breath—through my mouth, because there are some smells you’d rather not be in your nose—and winded my way through the overcrowded tables to one in the back corner populated by a man in a stained crimson hoodie with the hood pulled up over a baseball cap.

    He grunted and pushed one of the cups of coffee closer to me. I watched as it sloshed over the sides of the cup and dribbled onto the table. I clasped my hands in front of me on the table and leaned forward. “What’s this all about?”

    “It’s good to see you, Sam,” he grunted. “Thanks for coming out on such short notice.”

    “Sure. Whatever. Are you in trouble?”

    “Why would you think that?”

    “Because the only reasons you’ve ever called me in the past decade is because you needed something.” I tried not to breathe in too deeply in his presence.

    “Fine. I was trying to be… nevermind. I finally found it.” He hauled a box out of his rank backpack and dropped it on the table. He’d wrapped it in dark green paper with snowmen and Santa hats all over it. Plaid ribbon wrapped about it several times and finished in an oversized, lopsided bow.”

    “Found what?”

    “It.” He gestured at the box. “It’s in there.” (more…)

  • The Sleeping Strategy

    “Well, the sign confirms it,” Bolero said, walking back over to where Nerek was standing. “It’s the old puzzle where one door is certain death, and one door is the treasure. One guard only lies, and one guard only tells the truth. You only get one question.”

    Nerek let out a deep sigh. When he’d accepted the quest to save the fair maiden from eternal slumber, he hadn’t expected it to be so complicated. Find the highest tower, kiss her, and go home. No one mentioned how ruddy difficult it would be to find the place, however. And instead of the plant barrier he’d been promised, he’d been forced to smash open several locked doors like a common thug, slay a fierce dragon without proper equipment… and now this. “Ugh. You’re a bard. Do you remember how this one goes?”

    “You hired me to record your adventures for posterity,” Bolero said, shaking his head. “I can’t get involved. Besides, I don’t remember quite how it goes. Something about asking one what the other would say?”

    “Yeah, that’s all I remember, too,” Nerek admitted, placing his hand on his chin. The two guards stared intently at him, making him feel ill at ease. “You know, it was bad enough that a full-sized adult dragon was able to live here for countless years… how in the heck are these two still alive? What do they eat? When do they sleep?”

    Bolero shrugged. “It’s magic.”

    (more…)

  • Death World One

    I finally found the exit. We had to double-back from the Interstellar 405 to find the damn thing. The wormhole was not well marked, let me tell you. Earth is out in the middle of nowhere and there are hardly any beacons out there. It was not a great start to our vacation.

    The kids were in the backseat, hitting each other, pushing, pulling each other’s face tentacles. It had been a long trip to the Sol system. But goddammit, we were going to spend two weeks as a family. No vid screens. No comms devices. Just us and a whole planet full of untouched, pristine nature.

    Landing couldn’t come soon enough. It was either that, or risk injuring one of the kids when I lost my mind from their fighting. Which is to say that I set the ship down in the first piece of wilderness that I could find. We lucked out and the view outside of my window was breathtaking. We’d parked on a beautiful stretch of tangerine desert dotted with plateaus. A greenish-blue waterhole off to one side supported some kind of silvery-grayish-green shrubs all around us. It was absolutely perfect. (more…)

  • Super Support Group

    The blood forms a red bead on my middle finger as the orderly withdraws the needle and squeezes. He dips a white strip into the drop and pops it into the reader with a click. The reader’s familiar whirr ends in a single beep and a friendly green light as I’d expected. Acceptable levels. But I must intervene when the orderly, who is new, makes no move to replace the used needle.

    “You’ve got to discard that one, and get a new one now,” I say helpfully. When he looks skeptically at me, I smile to show him that I am a friendly and good patient and not troublesome.

    “Oh.” He replies. “You’re the last one in my line so it doesn’t matter.” He looks down before he can see my face sour. This one is too lazy for safety, it seems. What would it matter to him if some Obuny Syndrome patient gets a contaminated needle?

    I open my mouth to say something when the alarmed shrieking of a red, unsafe levels light sounds. I turn to the other line of patients across the cafeteria’s dining room. There, shirtless, braless, with a wholly tattooed torso and a Mohawk—bright blue this week—is Darvey. She is laughing, of course. (more…)