Aberrant Dreams - Speculative Fiction

     When Eira lifted the scented, cotton-fiber envelope from amidst the bills and flyers, her fingers tightened on her car keys. She stood in the post office, reading the name several times before she could believe it.
     Adalee Howard.
     Eira flipped it over. A note scribbled in delicate Copperplate calligraphy under the thick wax seal said, Regarding your request.
     A pain in her left hand tore her attention away from the letter. Eira forced her hand to unclench, and immediately grimaced at the oozing puncture wound her house key had left in the meat of her palm.
   She looked back at her Aunt Adalee’s letter. Half of her wanted to rip it open on the spot, but the other half was afraid of what it might say. (...)

Jenny had loved being an engineer once. She knew it somewhere in the back of her mind, remembered it a little bit, but it didn't seem to mean anything to her anymore. It was something she had once loved, like ballet, or Thomas Alison. It was something that had once mattered. Now—unlike ballet or Tom Alison—it was just something she had to deal with day in and day out.
She had thought that her professional cheer was keeping up appearances, but Russ, her team lead, called her in one Friday afternoon.(...)

He should have been terrifying. He was not. At first glance, there was nothing particularly imposing about him at all, and Agnes took him for an extraordinarily large cat when she saw him sitting in the oily pool of rain water in the alley flanking her apartment.
He had been yowling like any six of that species, loudly enough to draw her to his assistance despite the wind, lashing rain, and closed windows, but he fell into a soft whimpering as soon as she folded his shivering body in the blanket, experience and a strong survival instinct had moved her to aid in the rescue.(...)

     "Everywhere you go,” Aera told me, “take a piece of me along with you.”
     This is easier and less esoteric than it sounds. Aera is a purely digital being of zeros and ones and rather more light to pack than a live human. I take her embedded in the hilt of my sword. Every time it is unsheathed in battle, Aera is with my strike.
     With most people struggling to have power and food, it’s unusual to have such a companion on the Plates. But then, my family tree is rather unusual. There aren’t many sons of scientists left – most were killed when the plates broke apart, or have forgotten who they are.(...)

     "Hold it." The bell at the tip of his jester's hat dipped in front of the camera lens to obscure the couple standing in front of the painted balcony scene. Peering through the viewfinder, he was more than a little confused. "Methinks you have chosen a disguise fit more for the witness protection program than for a masked ball."
     "Try the picture again, Einstein," the star halfback snorted. "Your ball was in the way." His date, the head majorette, giggled and pressed her face, which was covered by a cat mask, into his shoulder. He smiled broadly to reveal cracked and broken teeth, then draped a muscular arm about the majorette's bare shoulders. "I mean your bell was in the way."
     "Good one," the majorette purred.
     The star halfback puffed out his chest a bit, then scowled deep into the camera. "Take the picture."(...)

Logos.
That means "the Word, the producing of words." It's funny that this is the first time the thing on my back has given me what seems like a direct command. Usually it's a gentle suggestion, a pull in a certain direction, along with the glowing feeling of well-being that suffuses my life nowadays. But as the months go by and the blood seems to quicken, I feel driven to record the experience. I suppose it's just another way of being a puppet, but I have no feelings of resentment or anger anymore, so I'm going with it.(...)

...a young woman in a shapeless overcoat, clutching a brown paper bag of little red caplets, stuck in the revolving door of a tall glass building: Miranda Martineau suddenly found herself on the street with no home and no memory.
The amnesia she could live with; the homelessness, according to Dr. Hong, was in her mind. “You live in a house on Jaguar Island,” she had told her, barely looking up from her fat file, “with your grandmother; it’s a subway ride away, then you walk to the edge of the river, then there’s a ferry; and we’ve already notified your grandmother of your release.”(...)

     Grengle crouched on Jerry's shoulder, oozing spite and malign displeasure into the sleeping man's ear. "Your life has been wasted," it whispered.
     The man opened his eyes and rubbed his shoulder. The tiny monster scuttled sideways, the tips of its wings flicking away from his rummaging hand.
     Jerry hated nights like these when his eyes refused to stay closed and his mind hissed and popped like white static on the television. When he had been younger, in college, he hadn't minded when sleep eluded him--his eyes burning with a fervid alertness and his mind abuzz with grandiose thoughts. But now, when college had long ago become a faint memory--misty faces and half-remembered achievements--the virtues of insomnia were less apparent.(...)

Okay, open your eyes.”
Lisa smiled. The giddy enthusiasm in her husband’s voice was playful and infectious. She had no idea what George’s “surprise” was, but the sun glowed warmly upon her face, and a soft breeze brought a chorus of crickets that was both calming and familiar. She did as George bade, and a confusion of emotion at what lay before her slapped her smile away with the brute force of erupting memory.(...)

The fire warmed Amalalaq as she wove seal whiskers into an ornament for her hair. The constant ‘chick-chick’ of Raven Boy’s rock-hard fingers, chipping a whale vertebra into a harpoon, echoed from the caribou hide walls. Amalalaq smiled. Raven Boy might rest the vertebra on his protruding ribs. His long and narrow eyes might seem to study his work. In truth, Raven Boy watched her more closely than he watched the harpoon head.
Kykvat the shaman, in whose whale-rib and caribou hide house Amalalaq and Raven Boy lived, sat beyond the circle of orange firelight. He tapped his open-frame drum and journeyed among the green and red lights that the Dancing Dead splash about the night sky. Without warning, Kykvat shot upright. He so startled Amalalaq that her seal whiskers fell into the fire. “A visitor approaches,” Kykvat barked.(...)

Tucker Juergenson woke up screaming, hands clutching spasmodically at clinging, salty sheets, just as he did every morning.
Flopping back onto the damp pillow, Tucker forced his eyes shut again and counted backwards from twenty, purposefully slowing his breathing in hopes that his heart would take the hint and follow suit. As his body gradually returned to some semblance of stasis, he rolled his head to the side and attempted to make sense of the throbbing liquid crystal numbers on his alarm clock. Ten thirty. He had plenty of time before the appointment.(...)

(Class-room lecture given by the Most Honorable Erru Saggus, Professor of Hamurriquanean Archaeology at the World-University of Toshtush, on the 365th day of the year 5998.)
Males, females, androgynes and neuters of the class in archaeology, you have learned, from my previous lectures, all that is known or inferred concerning the crudely realistic art and literature of the ancient Hamurriquanes. With some difficulty, owing to the fragmentary nature of the extant remains, I have reconstructed for you their bizarre and hideous buildings, their rude mechanisms.(...)

It was October 57 th, Martian Halloween; the day we had planned to break out of prison. There were just the four of us in the machine shop: me, Blaine, Ibrahim, and the Monkey. None of us knew the Monkey's real name. That's what the guards had called him since they brought him in, and he never told us any different. (...)

The ships always hurry away when they see me. Or rather, they try to; I try to make sure they can't. I wish I could call out to them and explain. I'm not some horrible thing, luring men to their deaths simply for the pleasure of it. Killing them is just something I have to do. You see, they have something I need. (...)