Escape Pod

Chasing the Start (Part 1)

by Evan Marcroft

There, quick—the blue sky bleeds. A runner in red tumbles across it, unstoppable, the sun itself shattering against her armor. One leg outstretched, the other flung behind her, vaulting from one moment to the next, and between them suspended in flight for a small forever. You read the number that burns on her armor and you that this is not the end. She is proof that you are not finished yet, a promise chiseled into the diamond of history. She will always be here, always this strand.

You want to say something to her, but she is already gone.

The date is June 18th, 1815. The place is Waterlô. And Sa Segokgo is racing against time.

The treads of her boots scoop up huge tracts of bloody, Belgian soil and thresh it into aerosol. Archaic bullets dart about her like swarming mosquitoes, pinging noisily off her poly-diadmant suit, its staalglas facepiece. An experienced strandrunner, she is not daunted by such minor impacts. Over ridges and craters she leaps, devouring meters with each stride, explosively imprinting the IOvac corporate icon wherever she lands. Her armor does its work, yes, but it is her conditioned body that knows how to exert itself most efficiently. Every movement must barter energy for distance, and profit. There are no pit stops in this sport; to spend recklessly will purchase only a quicker death.

Her brain thinks to itself in the voice of her spotter. ͼ-Sa, on your five, Luboy cautions. Another runner in the strand. Watch out— -ͽ

Sa pings a wordless acknowledgement to her crew, but doesn’t bother looking back. Her lead is enough that this newcomer is irrelevant. You are the Dragonhoof, she tells herself, the Hot Number 99. First place starts behind you.

Ahead of her, the front lines of the French and British armies are crashing together. Wellington on the left hand, Napoleon on the right. Her suit blasts a klaxon that yanks every eye towards her just as the two great waves of bodies meet in the gully between two trampled hills and blast themselves apart. Sa has ten seconds left in this strand; she is going forward, no matter what. Better they see her coming and get out of her way.

More Than Simple Steel

By Aimee Ogden

Micah misses the adults most when he wakes up each morning. Part of him is still waiting for the buzz of an alarm clock and the smell of toaster waffles to coax him up from sleep. But it's been four years, and there is no mother to nudge him awake.

He sits up on his mattress and scratches crust from his eyes. The bedsheets smell like sweat and grass; is it laundry day today? He's the closest thing to an adult under the roof of Grand Avenue Elementary, and if he says it's laundry day, then it will be.

Clothes on, shoes on. Everyone has to wear shoes all the time. That's the rule, ever since Marco got tetanus last year and they all thought he was going to die. It was the worst sickness they'd seen since the flops cleared out all the adults. Micah doesn't know what he'll do when something worse sweeps through.

The door of the teachers' lounge--he can't stop thinking of it as the teachers' lounge, even though there are no teachers here and not much time for lounging--clicks quietly shut behind him. Then he moves down the hallway, opening doors, calling names. "Fabián, garden. Jack, laundry. Vee, babysitting. Carrie, fishing."

The Anatomy of Miracles

by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko

For half a song every evening, the sunsets reminded the miracle worker of home. The hills were reddish-brown in daylight, but when the two suns, one after the other, slipped below the horizon, they came alive with purple highlights. He could almost pretend the hills were blue, instead, that the sea in the distance was true water and not liquid methane. On those occasions, he leaned back on his rear limb-pairs and, from a great distance, heard the timekeepers singing time.

He didn’t know what the window was made of. He couldn’t have said there was a window there at all, but for the fact he didn’t suffocate. He understood why his masters always sent him to inhospitable planets. His work was imprecise. It was safer that way. But this was the first planet that had been beautiful, the first that had brought the old songs ringing back. It was different. He felt it in his bones.

By first dawn, the hills were red again, and he was merely an old man who had not seen home in a long, long time.

Key Component

By T. R. Siebert

The first thing you need to understand is that you don’t have a body. You are a body.

They pulled you from your mother, kicking and screaming, and you haven’t found silence since. You are too much.

Too much to handle, too much to hide. They tell you as much, with words and in a myriad of other ways. Too large to overlook, too obscene to see. You fold yourself into yourself and cannot escape the confines of it.

The ship wasn’t built for you like you were built for it. In most hallways you have duck to not hit your head on the ceiling. You avoid chairs with arm rests because you know you won’t fit. You haven’t slept comfortably in a bed since you were ten years old. Back then, you had nightmares in which you never stopped growing until you pushed against the hull of the ship, bursting through it into the never-ending void of space.

You move, and the world breaks around you.

Flash Fiction Contest Winners 2020

Our stories this week are the winners of the contest, as chosen by you: our listeners and readers. All four stories are Escape Pod originals. Out of 224 stories, the top four stories were:

“Butterfly” by Drew Czernik, narrated by Hollis Monroe

“In Roaring She Shall Rise” by Rajiv Moté, narrated by Katherine Inskip

“Death Poems of the Folded Ones” by Carol Scheina, narrated by S. Kay Nash

“The Day the Sun Went Out” by Hannah Whiteoak, narrated by Tina Connolly

Now, get ready to explore new worlds of space, time, and relationships, because it’s storytime.

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