People are Strange: Two New Stories

Two new microfiction stories – Water by Brandon Crilly and Equivocation by Theresa J. Barker – one more fantasy, the other science fiction however both hinge upon on the strange and unpredictable behaviour of people.


Water
by Brandon Crilly

They sometimes sent other people to the Grove. There was no pattern; I tried to time it, until I got bored. No pattern to the people, either. 
    
The latest was a guy, looked mid-twenties, like me. He spent hours circling the Grove, trying to get a signal on his smartphone. He talked at me a bit, but it wasn’t like I had figured out much since I got there.
    
“I’m guessing that’s safe to drink, right?” he asked me after a few days, or a few hours, and pointed at one of the little pools that dotted the Grove.
    
Not an original question. I shrugged and said what I always said: “Just be careful it doesn’t drink you back.”
    
He gave me a weird look – yeah, because I’m the weird one here – and crouched over the pool.
    
Fast as last time, the water shot up like a geyser and fell over him. It always looked to me like the person got flattened into the ground or erasered away or something. There was never anything left behind, either way.
    
I tossed my bucket made of leaves into a different pool and tugged it gently back toward me using the vine I attached. Then I sat down to wait for them to send someone else, and wished the water wasn’t quite so warm.


* An Ottawa teacher by day, Brandon Crilly has been previously published by On Spec, The 2017 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide, Third Flatiron Anthologies. He contributes regularly to BlackGate.com and is the Assistant Editorial Director of TEGG Games. You can find him at http://brandoncrilly.wordpress.com + on Twitter https://twitter.com/B_Crilly. His first TEGG short story Wizard-sitting is now available at http://onderemporium.com.



Equivocation
by Theresa J. Barker

We all borrowed bodies from the loaner pool. There were the 10K runs, the red carpet evenings. The pregnancies. The power trip weekends and the all-night raves. We all borrowed bodies and they were starting to wear out.

Tereza got the idea of starting a swap with the folks in Lakeland down the road. Let's face it, Lakeland was a much smaller community, less affluent, and they could use the extra income, we figured. So the deal was made. It was a win-win interaction.

Only it didn't quite work out as we expected. For one thing the bodies we borrowed from Lakeland were new to us, and they didn't behave like the ones we used from the loaner pool in our own community. They were a lot harder to command. You'd want to go water-skiing in the gulf and instead find yourself in a soup kitchen helping the homeless. You'd start to get dressed up for a night on the town, all diamonds and Valentino or Alexander McQueen, but then somehow you'd be reading to children in a schoolroom instead.

The final straw was when the mayor, who prided himself on his all-hedonic platform in the last election – spent a week in a borrowed body putting up a tent city for refugees from the Middle East.

In the end we gave up the agreement with Lakeland and went back to our own loaner pool bodies. No thanks, we said. We'll just keep on like we always had.

But now some of us still find ourselves down at Lakeland on a Wednesday night Gospel singing, or up at the state park on a Saturday afternoon doing litter cleanup. It's unexplainable.

​We're hiring an expert to come in and straighten the whole thing out.


* Theresa J. Barker has always longed to live in other worlds, which she accomplishes through her writing. Theresa writes science fiction. Her  fiction has appeared in Shaking the Tree (an anthology of Not One of Us), Keen Science Fiction, and The Pitkin Review. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and co-curates the Two Hour Transport SF&F reading series in Seattle. Find her at http://www.theresabarker.com + https://twitter.com/theresajbarker +
http://www.tjbarkerseattle.wordpress.com