The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: wordle title

  • The Queen’s Skin

    “I haven’t seen you before. How many times have you inhabited that skin?”

    The girl looked up and slid her hood back to reveal the series of dark dots tattooed above the bridge of her nose, just above the fine lines of dark hair. “Seventeen, m’lady.” With that, she pulled the ivory fabric back up over her dark hair. The soft blue lights overhead danced over the fabric, like an oil slick on water.

    Nicoletta looked out the window to the planet below, at the churning swirls of cloud obscuring the landmasses she knew to be there. Two years ago the storms had been frequent, but now they were unending, the planet below deluged. Her chief advisor assured her time and again that her people below had been working around the planet’s unforgiving weather for centuries. A tug at her ankle brought the queen’s attention back to her servant. “Have you been below?”

    The girl didn’t look up from her work of winding and fastening the ribbon of the queen’s sandals. “I was remade below. We all are.”

    (more…)

  • The Red House

    The red house shuddered as Tony poured gasoline over the dining room’s bare warped floorboards. He felt its shiver and wondered if it was afraid.

    The voices whispered, a tiny insect buzz that the drugs kept brushing away. Tony tried to ignore it, to remind himself that houses did not talk. The doctors had told him so–over and over again–for the last eight years.

    He carried the red plastic gas can in to the kitchen. Light warm rain fell through a hole in the collapsed ceiling. Tony raised his face to the soft overcast sky, gray and as smooth as slate.

    A rainbow sheen surfed the rain-glazed floor as he sloshed gas across the peeling linoleum. The red house groaned, a guttural vibration. Tony told himself was just the settling of the house’s rotten frame. (more…)

  • The Heart of Stone Monsters

    Leia’s heart seized as the lovely yellow flower was crushed beneath her brother’s stone foot. He marched on as if nothing had happened. In truth, he probably hadn’t even noticed or felt a thing. She shouldn’t have felt a thing, either; golems weren’t known for their feelings, physical or emotional. Either way, her heart broke at the destruction of such a simply beauty.

    Her heart. It was a problem. As far as she could tell, her entire clan was a group of stone-hearted monsters, their hearts as hard as their stone bodies. She alone showed any remorse at the destruction they wrought or joy at the things they built. They were slaves, only animated by the will of their creator, but Leia couldn’t help but feel that she was different. Had she been made differently? Had their creator been distracted when she had come into being?

    (more…)

  • Flight Mother

    It was a calm, crisp autumn day. Perfect weather for jetpack flying.

    Cadet Betty Clarke joined her partner, Cadet Margaret Leighton, looked smart in their sky blue uniforms and leather flight caps. They helped each other suit up on the flight field, checking over their instruments as they went. These were no longer the heavy packs that women had used during the war. These were streamlined affairs, sleek and beautiful.

    Betty stood to attention in front of their Flight Mother as they received their instructions. “All right girls, nothing fancy out there. There are ten targets. You’re to retrieve them and return here within the hour. If you fail, points will be deducted from your graduation score,” the Flight Mother said.

    She felt the wind on her face as they took off into the clear sky. The pit of her stomach dropped a bit as she looked down at the ground below, but it was exhilarating. She couldn’t help but smile as the flight school dropped further and further away. Flying was the only thing Betty had ever wanted to do.

    (more…)

  • Stone Gods in the Heart of the City

    Winifred met me at the door, though I had arrived a full fifteen minutes early. She was clearly eager to begin, her enthusiasm for this evening’s adventure in antithesis of my trepidation. As planned, she had divorced herself of her dress and bustle, wearing instead her riding jodhpurs and one of her father’s coats. With her hair tucked beneath a wool cap, she looked a bit like her younger brother, Thomas.

    “What took you so long?” Her hushed tones made it clear she didn’t want anyone inside to hear.

    “We said we’d meet at 7:00. It’s barely a quarter ‘til.”

    “Keep your voice down. I don’t want my father to know I’m going out.”

    “You’re perfectly capable of making up your own mind.” Winifred’s mind was capable of a great many things. It was the thing that most attracted me to her, and she was a woman with many attractive qualities.

    She pushed me out of the doorway and closed the door silently behind her with the delicate grace of a pickpocket. Grabbing my arm, she led me down the stone steps to the darkened street.

    (more…)

  • Last Men

    She flipped through page after page of headshots. The smiling, clean shaven faces felt false to her. Occasionally she would pause and trail a finger along the stern outline of a jaw before flicking her gaze down to read the words printed beneath. She skimmed the paragraph listing his vitals and skills. This man with dark brown hair and dull gray eyes was a proficient marksman and had an above average IQ. His short stature promised that any children she had with him would be compact enough to comfortably roam the underground tunnels without stooping.

    She carefully wrote M764 on her list she was compiling of men whose qualities lined up with those she wanted to pass on to her children. Though, as a marksman it meant he went abovegrounds and that always brought with it the chance of introducing contagion. Her pen hovered over the number. Would M764 be the type of man who would want to visit his children? Or would he be content to father them and leave them be. She surrounded his number in question marks. (more…)

  • Deep Flight – A Tale of Broken Memories

    Tenance groaned involuntarily as bright lights flooded his vision once more. His pod door slid open with a smooth hiss of hydraulics, revealing one of the security drones. Again.

    “There are four critical issues which require your immediate attention,” it said, as the various LED lights in its chest flashed red. “Please make your way to the Command Deck once your thoughts have recovered from sleep sickness.”

    He rolled his eyes, following the robot back to the central computer. As if someone of his importance could be affected by something as mundane as sleep sickness. His mind was perfectly fine, and there was no way extended hibernation could affect his thoughts. Sleep sickness was something that affected other people. Tenance was the leader of some tens of thousands of civilians. It made sense that his intelligence would be without equal.

    His luck left something to be desired, though. This entire voyage had been nothing but bad luck.

    This space ark was one of many that had been sent into space, in the hopes that at least some of the ships would escape devastation at the hands of Earth’s invaders. It seemed likely that Earth would be destroyed completely, but if the space arks could manage to colonize other planets, there would still be hope for humanity.

    They had made it past the blockade, but not without taking significant damage. The opposing armada had pierced the hull in several locations, killing about a tenth of the population. The captain and most of the leadership had been among those killed, leaving Tenance in charge. But that was only the beginning. (more…)

  • June Stories at the Confabulator Cafe

    Welcome to another month of free fiction at the Confabulator Cafe. We have a brand new prompt and a whole batch of new stories lined up for you this month.

    For June, we were tasked to write stories to go with story titles we created. These titles came from a Wordle generated from titles of stories published in Clarkesworld Magazine. Clarkesworld is a science fiction magazine, so it’s actually pretty impressive that we ended up with our usual range of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror stories.

    If you’d like, you can take a peek at the Clarkesworld Wordle to see if you can spot the titles the Confabulators used this month. There’s lots of good title potential here, so we may revisit this prompt again in the future.

    Here is the story schedule for June. We hope that you’ll visit us every week this month and enjoy reading the stories as much as we enjoyed writing them.

    Thursday, June 4: “Deep Flight – A Tale of Broken Memories” by Neil Siemers
    Monday, June 8: “Last Men” by Eliza Jaquays
    Thursday, June 11: “Stone Gods in the Heart of the City” by Kevin Wohler
    Thursday, June 18: “Flight Mother” by Dianne Williams
    Monday, June 22: “The Heart of Stone Monsters” by Sara Lundberg
    Thursday, June 25: “The Red House” by Jack Campbell, Jr.
    Monday, June 29: “The Queen’s Skin” by Ashley Hill