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ROBOTS
by Adam Phillips the engineers shrugged; no one knew where the robot had acquired the sword and it was troubling, watching it hack as the rockets on its fingers sat unused, the atomizer dropped God knows where— when the dinosaur men showed up, shrieking and smirking, pounding their muscular chests, brandishing their long black forked tongues and loincloths, the robot, programmed to cleanse, held them down and crushed the backs of their skulls, stepped on their feet and threw uppercuts— during subsequent attacks, the giant crabs, their oozing shells stove in, the cyclops, confused and weeping, smashing through buildings, taking a knee to throw up, skull crushed with the hilt of the sword, in every case a battalion of tanks and police cars tumbling uselessly underfoot— it developed a propensity for posing, the robot, foot propped on a corpse, fist thrust in the sky, grim set of the eyes— by then we'd forgotten the promised miracle of chips, gears, oil, wires, metal, pegs, axel, input, batteries, bolts— all of it drowned, fried in a rain of blood— still, we held out hope of rectifying our mistake, one way or another, stockpiling brains and weapons until the day the robot floated into town cradling the homunculus, tiny machine, in its cupped hands. I have a message, it said. I have only ever had one message. I will repeat it one more time. |
GENTLE HAND by Peter Spencer |
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DINOSAUR TAIL
by Jane Blue The father's cells—his gene pool— mingle in the mother's womb and become part of her. I read this somewhere. I took only elementary biology in college. I learned the word zygote, I learned the word osmosis. This phenomenon, I guess is a kind of osmosis, cells seeping across boundaries. I didn't know then how soon it would happen to me, how I was on the verge of meeting that man who would penetrate me so profoundly that even his genealogy would become mine. Kansas, Missouri, Cherokee. All those lives trailing behind me like a dinosaur tail, all the way back to the Jurassic Age. His lives with each child. A dinosaur tail. Those feelings, "I know this place, these people." All those years of separation cannot diminish: Kansas, Missouri, Cherokee. |
SPARE PARTS by Matt Veazey |
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FISH TALE
by Doug Bolling The man who fished the seas swallowed a whale whole and lived to tell about it, make poems of how he began at the stern and finished at the bow, wiped his lips clean and sailed home to share triumph with the wife and kids, neighbors who stared far out but never got their feet wet. He walked with a certain swagger, held head high in the clouds, donated the bones to a museum of champions. When he died quite suddenly the ocean shuddered. |
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