by Mikki Aronoff

Father doesn’t talk much, except when he’s gripping a tool. He leads me down to his basement workshop, his after-hours refuge, plucks the spirit level from its place on the pegboard, and hands it to me. I wobble to its jittery fluorescence. It’s challenging to zero the bubble. “It’s not what you think,” Father says. I look at him, nervous, perch myself on a stool, settle in for a story. 
 
He tells me the vial that’s now in the spirit level replaced the original. “Didn’t know where else to put it,” he said, adding that it came to him via one of his patients, an astronaut recently returned from a mission to a faraway planet. There he was seduced by an extraterrestrial charmer familiar with Father’s obsession with interstellar communication. She desperately wanted contact. She’d implanted a coded message to him in the vial and placed it, unsterilized, into the astronaut’s neck when he fell asleep. By the time he returned home, it festered, as was part of her plan. Father conducted the sensitive and costly surgery necessary to excise it from the space traveler’s septic skin. “The level's a bit useless now, really,” he adds. “More keepsake than tool. Not sure why I bothered to keep it after I decoded it and answered her back. But it’s yours when I go, if you want it. Might fetch something on eBay if you find yourself strapped.” 
 
I hand the spirit level back to Father, chuckle at the back roads the vial's taken to get to him. He nods, tells me he considered the alien’s strategy circuitous.  Outside later that evening, he points towards Orion, pronounces, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” He tilts his ear to the stars. A long breath, a bit like a whistle, escapes from his chest. “The heart is a lonely hunter,” he sighs. I wrap a tentacle around him, give him a squeeze. 

* * * 

MIKKI ARONOFF lives in New Mexico, where she writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. She has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2025 and Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025. She is a co-author of the book, Neverafters. 
More at https://www.facebook.com/mikki.aronoff/.

by CJ Erick

They came from the sky in shining, oblong ships.

When they came for our water, we gave them our last icebergs and sent them back to their home world with festivals.

When they came for our grain, our fruits, our sugar, we helped them harvest, gave them seed, and taught them to plant.

When they came for our children, we wept and begged them, and watched in anger as they lifted away, our homes and hearts emptier.

When they came for our wine and chocolate, we built jump-drive plasma ships and our suicide commanders burnt their world to ashes.
​
Amen.

* * *

CJ ERICK has published with Brilliant Flash Fiction, Camden Park Press, and others. His short fiction received a Pushcart nomination and inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2023 anthology. He writes in multiple genres, self-publishes a space fantasy series.