Poetry : Dawn of the Dead…Planets

A Sequence of Clerihews. From Romeo Esparrago. I. The Undertaker. White dwarf J thirteen-twenty-eight Long ago met its fiery fate; Now, cold and tidy as a tomb, It keeps a graveyard in the gloom. II. The Inner Ghoul. The inner survivor, a few kilometres wide,Is the zombie that lived when its neighbors died;It shuffles a … Continue reading Poetry : Dawn of the Dead…Planets →

Story : The Unfinished Amplitude, Part One

Woodcut banner of a diverse cast gazing upward beneath a glowing sphere, symbols, a space station, a rocket and a vortex

From Romeo Esparrago. Part One : The Memory of Spacetime. A wave passes, and the detector does not come back to where it was. It comes back almost. That "almost" is permanent. We call it memory, and it is the most ordinary thing in the universe: everything that has ever happened has left the world … Continue reading Story : The Unfinished Amplitude, Part One →

Story : Part 1 “A Kiss Before the Feast”

Curly-haired woman in red lunges at a man in glasses with a knife as two women grab them and a ghostly old man looks on

A Rondo Patungan story from Romeo Esparrago. PART 1 OF 2 : THE INVITATION. A Postcard at Lunch, Round Rock 2026 Rondo Patungan was sixty-two and three spoonfuls into his bowl of tinola chicken stew that had a squirt of patis and a squeeze of lemon at Lil Mama’s in Round Rock, Texas, when he … Continue reading Story : Part 1 “A Kiss Before the Feast” →

Story : Detection

Collage: scientists briefed by a radar dome, a soldier in a trench, white pods, a cube splashing into sea near warships

By Romeo Esparrago. The Soviet Union detonates their first atomic test on August 29, 1949. Radioactive particles collected over the skies of Alaska confirm this. President Truman announces this to the world on September 23, 1949. Massachusetts, 1953. John V. “Jack” Herrentown had drawn an aircraft on the blackboard. Beneath it he had drawn a … Continue reading Story : Detection →

Story : The Clays of Proteus

A probe beams into a huge crater with banded walls on an asteroid ringed by orbits, between a blue planet and a pink moon

from Romeo Esparrago I. Residuals Mara Castellanos found the problem the way most problems are found: by refusing to accept a number that was merely good enough. It was 2031, five years afer the James Webb Space Telescope paper, and the paper was still the most-cited thing ever written about Neptune's inner moons. Everyone knew … Continue reading Story : The Clays of Proteus →

Blister Mister

Silver aliens with huge bare feet walk from a landed flying saucer along a moonlit shore, leaving human shoes behind

Blister Mister By Ornay Mahornayorn.  From Planet Mister’s silver stream, Where moonlight flows in chrome-like gleam,   Came river-aliens, sleek and bright,   To conquer Earth one starless night.    Their skin was silver, smooth and grand,   Their saucer hummed above the land;   Their leader cried, “Prepare the way!   Earth shall be ours before first day!”    But there … Continue reading Blister Mister →