Back to the Future

    I speak with my sister every week. Our Sunday night phone calls have developed into a tradition that we haven’t missed in the past three years no matter where I am in the world or how hard she’s working. We plan in advance to both drink the same wine and since she likes lights, fruity whites and I’m always drawn to deep, rich reds so we take turns choosing a bottle.
    We try to keep the topics light and the bitching to a minimum but you know how it goes, sometimes you can’t have that conversation until you unload some stress. The thing is this: I kinda love my life and I struggle to manufacture gripes just so we can have an even exchange. It’s never even, though. She tells me about the clinic and the losing battle with half her patients, the slog of fighting with insurance companies for payment and her family issues. I don’t want to get into that. Sorry, but just talking about it stresses me out. When we speak I am left feeling powerless and frustrated. Last time I saw her, on a layover in LAX, her hair was gray and wrinkles, sharply defined, were crowding her eyes.

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Let 'em Eat Cake

    “I don’t know, Pop, it just doesn’t feel right, you know?” Johnny Barsetti took a moment to check his hair in the restaurant window, the interior lights reflected off the glass and his coifed reflection stared back at him, framed against the black of night. “I was talking to Pauly the other night and he said most weddings are more for the parents then...”
    His father cut in, “Pauly? Now you’re getting wedding advice from Pauly the Puss? When did you see him?” Lou Barsetti wiped his mouth with a starched, cloth napkin and glanced at his wife across the table. She rolled her eyes.

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Last Words

    He coughed, a loose rattling sound, and a thin spray of bloody spittle stained the sheets. The nurse leaned in with a fresh towel to wipe red foam from his chin but the Colonel pushed her gently away and took a long, deep swallow of wine. He closed his eyes and held the thick red in his mouth, savoring the earthiness and memories. When he swallowed it was with a grimace of pain and the glass shook in his hand, spilling wine across his chest. His glare stopped the nurse and she settled back into the chair beside his bed. His other hand hovered to the bandages around his belly.
    “Bah, if a man’s to die there are worse things to taste on his lips. Eh, Captain Fletcher?” His voice was strained but he spoke with clipped, quiet, precision. “What was the last thing you tasted? The morning gruel? Vomit and fear? Bollocks, man, pour yourself some Malbec.”

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The Glistening Arc

    A flat sheet of wet, black macadam reflecting a white sickle moon and the echoes of folding metal swallowed by the dark. Shatter glass buckling, a spider web glowing in the halo of fluorescent headlights.
    The memory of a single cobweb, floating, lazy in the bleach of afternoon sunlight and a loop of spittle frozen against the dashboard. White teeth in a camera flash.
    Potential and kinetic energy, stretched taut to the point of breaking. A glistening arc.

The Drone

    The crater, a smoking, attenuated V, cut a ragged furrow across the prairie. At the head of the crater a lopsided ball of metal twitched and hissed with stress fractures as slabs of earth, crystalized by the heat, settled across its dome. The external communication arrays were slagged, melted by the re-entry or scraped from his shell on impact, and Blister ran diagnostics with little hope that any of his core systems would be online. Given what happened he was surprised to get cognition at all.
    He had been attempting to slingshot off the planet’s gravity well when the first missile gutted his fusion drive and dropped him into the atmosphere. The second missile knocked out his anti-grav sending him spinning towards the surface. If he had been a war drone, with heavier plating, the missiles would’ve thrown him off course but he’d be halfway around the world by now and ready to catapult into deeper space with only a few dents to show. Recon drones weren’t made to take direct hits. But then, he had no reason to think he’d be at risk, deep scans hadn’t shown any indication of Separatist activity on the surface. Where had those missiles come from?

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