Fiction Vortex
A Speculative Fiction Typhoon
March 2014
Volume 2, Issue 2
Edited by Dan Hope & Mike Cluff
Copyright 2014 Fiction Vortex
Cover Image by David Revoy / Blender Foundation
Cover design by Dan Hope
Website: FictionVortex.com
Twitter: @FictionVortex
Facebook: FictionVortex
Table of Contents
Letter from the Editor
Short Stories
Drinking the Air — by Salena Casha
Doghouse Picnic — by Daniel Lynch
Bombardier — by K. Edwin Fritz (Editor's Choice Award)
The Mood Donation Center — by Alex Bottle
Article
Creativity Isn't About Ideas; It's About Execution — by Dan Hope
About Fiction Vortex
Letter from the Editor
Life is full of surprises, and sometimes you find yourself doing something you never thought you'd do. For instance, this issue includes something we swore we'd never publish: a vampire story.
We've sworn off certain kinds of stories because they're so overdone. Vampires fit snugly into that category, whether they sparkle or not. But one day our inbox was graced with a submission that showed us vampires could still feel new and interesting.
That's wonderful in it's own right, but it's also a fantastic reminder of the power of good storytelling. Just when something feels played out, a fresh viewpoint can revitalize it. That's the power of being a writer. You get to show people a way of perceiving the world they had never considered before.
In a way, all our stories this month include people with a new way to look at the world. We sure enjoyed their viewpoints, and we hope you do to.
Whirling Wishes,
Dan
Managing Editor, Voice of Reason
Fiction Vortex
(Back to Table of Contents)
Drinking the Air
by Salena Casha; published March 4, 2014
As a child, I had difficulty breathing. Sulfuric air, which my older brother wore like a suit, burned my lungs, and oxygen, which colored my younger brother’s cheeks, didn’t jive with my alveoli. Somehow, the elements had forgotten about me, the middle boy in a group of well-breathing beings. I didn’t say human because, with the exception of myself, everyone in my family was some sort of semi-immortal rock star. And, I guess, since my grandmother dug in Earth’s gardens with the singular responsibility of keeping the Planet alive, it was easy for me to feel small. Grandma Gaia, we called her. I guessed humans did too.
Still, being without powers was one thing, but I wasn’t just normal. I wasn’t like the healthy, mortal neighbors we lived next to in Greece. My body intended to suffocate me from the inside. Thinking me asthmatic, my parents (bless their Titanic souls) gave me an inhaler, a little grey tube with buttons that clicked and a spout. Two puffs, hold your breath for as long as you can, then exhale. The gritty medication scratched my throat and settled on my vocal chords, and I ended up sounding like my grandfather, an eighty-one-year-old-looking chronic smoker with an affinity for sunbathing. In his speedo. In broad daylight. And because he controlled the sky, clouds never crossed the sun. Unfortunately. I guess there wasn’t much else for a retired God to do, but no one in their right mind wanted to see that.
From what we could tell, and from my family’s experience with having a bloodline of Gods and Demi-Gods and Universe-Creators, power manifested itself one way or another rather quickly. But instead, they got stuck with me, a sickly, weakling who couldn’t walk up a set of stairs without losing his breath (let alone command a chariot or fly). It was lucky that the family decided to settle in a human neighborhood because they all believed, on some level or other, that I wouldn’t have been able to survive in the other dimensions (Olympus or Hades) let alone on Earth.
By my twelfth birthday, my breathing reached quite the shallow low (lower than the sagging flesh of a man who spends his time poolside). They tried to heal me and strengthen my lungs, anything short of killing me. But nothing worked. No amount of lightning or sulfur or air could inflate my body at all. Ultimately, my parents and their parents turned to the beings they had created and to whom they thought I belonged. They confined me to a hospital bed. I wore a mask like a pair of gills which forced oxygen into my lungs every few seconds. I got bronchitis monthly, pneumonia twice a year. I drowned and choked and suffocated countless times a day. Sometimes though, in those moments, I breathed easier. Fluid in your lungs has a funny way of making you feel fulfilled (or rather just full of water). My heart even stopped once or twice, but I only blacked out. Sadly, I never saw that other world where maybe there was a type of air I could breathe.
I spent time playing chess against myself and, when my brothers visited, against them. While they were giants, sometimes their mental prowess failed them. You would think, because of my inability to absorb any air, that I would have turned into a vegetable with fewer brain waves than a lake on a calm day, and therefore that I would be terrible at chess. Why play something you’re awful at? But my logic was sharp, and even though my youngest brother could wield lightning bolts that leveled buildings (thankfully he never demolished my hospital) and my oldest could call your soul to hell in a split second, I still beat them both.
Sometimes, for fun, my brothers would wager the game.
"If I beat you, I take your soul back with me to the Underworld," my oldest brother said.
From what he’d described of Hades, I didn’t think the Underworld seemed all that attractive. My life was true hell already and hospitalization exposed me to far more death than necessary. Just the other day, I heard the last whimpers of a young girl with leukemia crying out for her mother. My brother visited the room minutes later, all stealth and solemnity. When he returned, wiping his flickering blue fingers on his black coat, I wondered if he sentenced her to another eternity in another hospital bed in a world that smelled like sulfur. I sighed as he settled back in his chair, his pale limbs oozing fire and brimstone.
"If I win, you buy me Rocky Road. Waffle cone. With sprinkles."
With my youngest brother though, who said, "If I win, I get to use you as target practice," I nearly lost on purpose. Maybe if I spontaneously combusted in a cloud of smoke, electrified by his lightning bolt, I’d enter life anew with something that wasn’t an inhaler. Maybe with a trident.
And so, like most middle children incapable of living up to their siblings — or even living at all in my case — I was passed off to my grandfather for a day at the pool. I put a pair of Hawaiian swim trunks over my oxygen tank. That way when people saw me the first thing they thought was "That kid must be crazy," not "That kid is sick." I’d rather be a nutcase than a diseased other. The doctors decided to try adding a bit of helium to the oxygen so the combination kept me lightheaded, and once in a while I saw a fish hightailing it into the clouds. So maybe I was going crazy.
Anyway, as I sat on a lawn chair with an uneven plastic coating and prepared to marinate in the sun, next to my silent, tobacco-scented grandfather, I noticed a wiggling river of water. It seemed to spread outward from the tips my toes and snake to the pool. I stood up, oxygen tank in hand, and followed it. As I stepped, barefoot, on each pool of water, I felt something in me. My lungs expanded, grasping for it, and with each step the world became clearer, less fuzzy in my air-deprived state.
Never follow a trail of water anywhere if you aren’t sure where it will lead, which was, for me, the deep end of the pool. Maybe it was the hallucinations, the strange airy feeling my meds gave me that day, because while my grandfather simmered like an oiled halibut on a pan, I walked straight off
the ledge.
I wonder what other people saw: a little boy wheeling an oxygen tank behind him diving straight off into the water. They must have thought it was suicide. I argue it was sheer dumb luck and obliviousness complicated by an unseen mirage.
Side note: I don’t know how to swim. Never tried it. And my grandfather, even with all his poolside sitting, never has either.
The cold water shocked my senses as I plunged to the tiled depths. I struggled, but given that I had no fat (or muscle, for that matter), I sank quickly. My oxygen tank fell faster, straight through the water like an anvil, and hit the bottom with a heavy clunk. I thought I’d black out, thought this would be an apt ending, drowning from the outside rather than from the inside. If I had taken the time to stop and think about the irony of it all, I’m not sure which one I would have thought was better. Instead, I clawed with outstretched fingers. Water streamed past, bubbles erupted from my fingertips as the light above me grew farther and farther away. A jet stream of drowning.
My toes scraped the bottom, the last orbs of air escaping my lips like lazy tobacco circles. I watched them float to the surface where I knew they would explode in a helium-oxygen nightmare. Why did I even want the surface so bad? I couldn’t breathe up there. I wasn’t made for that world. And what would happen, really, if I came to and flopped on the deck like a fish? When I took that sweet breath of oxygen, wouldn’t it choke me anyway?
Vision tunneled and for a second I paused mid-stroke. The oxygen tank was still with me, its suit waving in the pool’s current. I could easily just slip the mask back over my face and breathe that stifling, hallucination-filled air. But I didn’t. Instead, I looked up. Above, no bodies floated like otters on their back or dove down to look at me like a specimen in an aquarium. And the lifeguard hadn’t shown up either.
The last tendrils of air snaked out of my lips even though I tried to seal them for the sake of my aching lungs. But then again, they always hurt. Something like this would never have happened to my eldest brother: Being king of the underworld, he never really had to worry about dying himself. My youngest would blast his way out somehow. I was a sniveling little weakling and images of my flopping body choking up water on the pool deck made me more nauseated than the helium air. I couldn’t live like that.
I decided if the one thing I could control, could claim as my own, was to enter my brother’s world with a smile on my face, smelling of chlorine and saying, "I’m dead now, and finally, I can breathe," then so be it.
I opened my mouth and whispered.
"Checkmate."
Water flooded my alveoli, fluid pumping into every aspect of my being. Humans are seventy percent water anyway, so I was just filling myself the rest of the way up. The water burned my nostrils and my throat, streaking like acid. I win, I thought weakly.
But just as the pressure became unbearable, just when I was about to put a hand on my forehead and swoon to the depths with my eternal soliloquy, the pressure disappeared. The water opened up my chest, a rolling wave of freedom.
I thought I died. Instead, I breathed.
I drank in this new air, long deep breaths of lovely fluid. The water filled me and pushed me, and I swore my heart grew three sizes, like the Grinch. I left my oxygen tank, the suit rippling in the jet’s current, on the pool floor. It was that drowned half-person I’d been up until this moment. Up until the day I drowned.
Like my grandfather, I didn’t leave that pool for days. Eventually, the owners called the police to get me out, and it took three marines and a fire truck to extract me from my watery home.
My parents, used to adapting to their child’s needs, set up a kiddy pool in the backyard for me. I didn’t need an inhaler or a mask or a hospital bed. I just needed a different element. Sometimes, I spent hours breathing, enjoying the feeling of being whole. Feeling like a human being, which was the same as feeling like a God.
And now, when I play chess with my brothers and we begin to wager, I don’t ask for ice cream or bet continents and worlds. I say, "If I win, you must breathe the air of my murky depths."
This wager gives them pause. No one likes being unable to breathe, being robbed of their element.
Needless to say, we don’t play anymore.
Salena Casha’s work has appeared in over 30 publications. Her first picture book, Stacia’s Sticky Situation, was published by MeeGenius Books in July 2013. She has two more titles with MeeGenius published in January 2014. Her goal in life is to rewrite the future and drink an infinite number of soy lattes. Her website is www.salenacasha.com
(Back to Table of Contents)
Doghouse Picnic
by Daniel Lynch; published March 11, 2014
When the apocalypse started about half an hour ago, I thought about cupcakes. It wasn’t really the cupcakes, and I’m sure I don’t know why that was the memory I focused on while the buildings around me were bending like slinkies, but I’d never been in an apocalypse before and for all I knew that was exactly the sort of thing that’s supposed to happen.
"Have you been in an apocalypse before?" Gus asked me about a minute after it started.
I think I made him up.
"This is my first," I said.
"Remind you of anything?" Gus asked.
~~~~~
The first girl I kissed was Cassie Anderson. I was eleven and she liked to share her cupcakes with me at school. She was twelve. She said to me, "How come you never bring cupcakes for lunch?"
"I don’t know, my mum never gives me any," I said.
"I always get cupcakes."
"I know."
"I’ve got a chocolate one today."
"Ok," I said, and then we kissed. It was a golf clap. It was very polite.
That afternoon my teacher made everyone draw what they thought the world would be like in twenty years on a big sheet of butcher’s paper. We were all spread out on the cement walkway outside our classroom, and I used a red marker. I decided by then hover-boards would be invented, so that was exciting. I drew my hover-board with a big red lightning bolt down the middle. The bolt was wonky and looked like broken twigs on the ground, but I knew what it was and I told people about it.
"So it’ll go faster," I said.
"Sure," they said.
There were a few hover-boards on that piece of butcher’s paper by the end. Some were drawn better than mine, but I think we all decided that they would definitely be invented and it was only a matter of time, so we better start practicing how to ride them.
The way I tried to practice was by putting some oranges under a small plank of wood. I thought the oranges would roll all over the place, and by staying upright I’d learn how to balance. I squashed five oranges. My mother was pretty angry about the whole thing.
"You’re cleaning this up," she said.
"Ok."
"What were you doing?"
"Practicing how to ride a hover-board."
"In the kitchen?"
"It’s where the oranges are."
"The mop’s beside the fridge," she said. It was.
~~~~~
We didn’t get any hover-boards in the future, by the way. Not even before the apocalypse.
"Always wanted one of those," Gus said when the sky turned purple. He had slicked back hair, more wet looking than greasy, and a bushy mustache that exploded from his face like frayed ends of a tightrope. "Shame about the apocalypse," he said, brushing the lapels of his tweed jacket.
"The sky’s not right," I said.
"Got any cupcakes now?"
"No."
"What else then?"
~~~~~
The second girl I kissed was a head taller than me. We were running on the footpath around our school over and over again. Her name was Sarah Duncan, and she stopped running to sit on a fence.
"They’re timing us," I said, breathing heavily.
"I don’t want to do cross country this year," she said.
"Me either."
"So sit."
I did.
"You’re not even out of breath," I said.
"You are."
"I’m not a runner."
"Your parents are still together," she said.
"Is that why you don’t want to do cross country?"
"No."
Then we didn’t say anything for a while. Sarah sat on the fence looking at her running shoes. They were worn, with little trails of mud holding a single blade of grass hostage on the outer sole of her left sneaker. Her calves weren’t worn. They had a nice shape. I liked looking at them.
"How’d you know?" I asked.
"Know what?"
"That my parents aren’t split up."
"Aren’t they?"
"No."
"You don’t look like a divorce kid."
"What does a divorce kid look like?" I asked.
"Same as regular, mostly. Little thinner maybe."
"Are you calling me fat?"
"The way you were breathing when you sat down, I bet you eat a lot of burgers."
"I used to eat a lot of cupcakes," I said.
When she kissed me I was still a little out of breath. She tasted like cigarette smoke and cotton candy. I didn’t know what to do with my hands and put them on her shoulders like I was trying to hang a painting. Neither of us moved our lips, just pressed them together. Some other kids jogged past us and started making smacking noises with their mouths. I opened my eyes. Sara’s eyes were open too. I’d never been that close to someone’s eyes before.
"Pervert," she said. And then we weren’t kissing any more. I was sitting on a fence, and she was jogging down the footpath. We were both fourteen.
~~~~~
"You know she made that up," Gus said. He was lying on the ground next to me, with his hands behind his head. He could have been at a picnic.
"Made what up?"
"About her parents being divorced. They weren’t, remember?"
"You shouldn’t know that," I said.
"Can’t help what I know."
"When do you think it’ll all be over?"
"Shouldn’t be long now, I imagine," Gus said. "But I’m not the one with all the apocalypse experience."
"I’ve got a minute and a half more experience than you."
"In apocalypse time, maybe. I’ve only been alive for three minutes."