Burst Fiction
An active e-zine of one shot short stories, around 1000 characters in length, set in near contemporary times preferably, with scifi tendencies.
Curated by Erik Chevalier.
Visit the new main site!.
Mobile?
An active e-zine of one shot short stories, around 1000 characters in length, set in near contemporary times preferably, with scifi tendencies.
Curated by Erik Chevalier.
Visit the new main site!.
Mobile?
“Have you been injured since we became…what we are?”
“A couple of times. Why?”
“What did it feel like?”
“Painful.”
“No I meant as they repaired you.”
“Well, the first time, I was in a major car…
He had seen them before while on the hunt, but it felt again as if it for were the first time.
Who had they been—the four men these massive granite faces represented and which had been carved…
“How close?” We could be famous, and rich if we could get a good scan of the first aliens ever encountered.
“Real close. Their signal only traveled for a couple of kiloseconds.” With her head…
Grax772A awoke with a start.
A rumbling pitch of the ground beneath him shook his tiny body and sent it flying off the molecular awnings, along with at least a thousand of his compatriots, their…
After only two months of operation we’ve decided that we’ll no longer be posting here.
Well, we’ll still be posting, just at our brand new, bigger, better, and cooler site:
We love Tumblr but the site needs more functionality & the only way we could think to do that was by moving to a WordPress base. The new site allows comments, OpenID logins, better subscription tools, easy story sharing tools and a new story editor. Yup, Jenna Leng, seen lurking in our Chatterous room, will be helping me hunt down progressive fantasy bursts & tweaking the site’s theme.
So come on over, read some fantastic stories & join the conversation.
Be seeing you!
“Not anymore, Herr Doctor,” she said. “And never again.” Behind her teeth brass cylinders rotated, clicking together to form the right shapes to transform the air from her bellows into words.
“How can you say that?” the Doctor asks. Behind his glasses his eyes are red and swollen.
“I cannot”—the cylinders catch and hiccup—”love, love you.” The Doctor reached out to her with his good hand and brushed her porcelain face. “I cannot—not, not—love you,” she said again.
Mortimer spoke up. “I’m sorry, Doctor.” He pulled a phonographic record, black and grooved, from the front of his apron. “Do you want try number 221?”
The Doctor put his plush-and-fabric hand to his eyes, scrubbed away tears. “I don’t know how many more of these I can handle today,” he said, taking the record and swapping it with the one on the back of her brass skull. He cranked up her insides, like the weights inside a grandfather clock, and fitted the needle against the new record.
“Good morning, my dear,” he said.
“Good morning, my love.”
Madge and Joe finished their drinks while flipping through books that Madge had carried in her purse. Joe was deeply engrossed in a copy of Home Furnishings of the 1970s and Madge was casually skimming through Mojo magazine when the waitress came by with the check.
“So now what?” Madge said pulling the book away from Joe who had been reading a section on wall-to-wall shag pile.
“Well, its Tuesday, and you know I like to watch sci-fi on Tuesday nights…” Joe said.
“Let’s go back to my place and watch Barbarella:Queen of the Galaxy,” Madge suggested with enthusiasm.
Joe groaned to himself. “I want to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey!“
“Again?!” Madge groaned.
“We can just skip to the good parts,” he suggested. Madge lowered her sunglasses on the bridge of her nose and gave him a look of complete annoyance.
“Have I told you that you’re a nerd lately?” She said with a smirk.
“Laugh all you want, Miss Queen of Kitsch, but I thought you found the nerd thing attractive,” Joe defended.
It was the end.
They were trapped inside the spaceship’s engine with no way out. When it powered up, everything inside would be atomized.
“Johnny,” Tricia said, bringing her lips so close to his that he could smell her sweet breath. “Now that we’re going to die, I just have to tell you… I fell in love with you the moment we met. I hope yo-”
John interrupted her with a passionate kiss. Tricia melted into him, pulling him tighter.
“Oh Johnny! I’ve waited so long.” she exclaimed, grinding her body into his.
“We worked together for years. You were always just out of reach. You mean you’ve been hiding it all this time, and now…?”
That’s right, but don’t waste what little time we have left. Take me Johnny!”
A buzzing noise as the wall next to them was cut open by a laser.
“Good thing we found you before we started the engine,” Chester said on the other side.
Tricia stepped away from John, smoothing her uniform.
“This never happened,” she whispered.
She climbed through the opening, and was gone.
by TreeBeard