postorbital

POSTORBITAL: very short science fiction by Romie Stott

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The country's gentle magic was like video game rubber banding; fall too far behind, and you'd find yourself flying. When Tisha's friend Katie's acne was at its worst, Katie's eyes literally sparkled. The ends of her hair shimmered with rainbows. Tisha deliberately failed a few math quizzes, in hopes she'd get floating equations or a fairy tutor, but the magic wasn't fooled. It could see into her heart: it was magic.

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Skeletons wearing gas masks that are Slinkys

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knife ships cut the sky into ribbons of fire

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They'd never managed to form a common language with the aliens, so the chief diplomat relied heavily on puppeteers and musicians.

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Worm War III: a worldwide meat grinder of the poor while the rich were mildly inconvenienced, and engaged in speculation

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She wore a foaming wave as a rain cape, a swirl of absorbing water. When the storm was done, she deposited the water in a safe place - an unblocked drain, a field, an existing waterway. Sometimes she threw it at a rude motorist who didn’t respect pedestrians.

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Narrowing her eyes, the diner waitress pulled out her other order pad, the one for Hell's Kitchen. "86 this whole group of people," she scrawled in stuttering ballpoint.

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"you're going to die" hadn't been a threat, but a warning—the aliens conveyed distance in time by holding their appendages wide from their bodies, emotional tone with vocal frequency

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When adrift, you must perform an act so offensive to the sea that it throws you back to land.

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The mandated robot's here.

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Travel through red zones was forbidden. Not because they were dangerous to humans. Because humans were dangerous to them.

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The scientist who had lived lives beyond life unwrapped another world.

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When they grow faster, they are more susceptible to mutations.

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Attempts at human contact had failed because the aliens looked like small bits of string. They kept getting intercepted and repurposed. From these encounters, they incorrectly deduced a grand alliance of cats and birds, and made further tactical blunders.

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It's not reincarnation if we were all the same organism to begin with.

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heritable tattoos, heritable ink passing symbols from my mother's neck to mine, growing as I grew but never seeming to fit

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Adrienne was knocked sideways as her employer’s birdcoat fluffed out; stumbled again as the gust of cold hit, the one the coat’s automated fabric had anticipated. “All the warmth of a puffer jacket, all the conveniences of a sleek silhouette,” the ads said.

Adrienne wore more convenient, more elegant, more energy efficient thermal regulator patches against her femoral arteries, but the ultrawealthy recoiled from any fix that implied the non-divinity of their bodies. It was the world outside that had to alter into a cocoon. Even if that meant nearly knocking an expert surveyor off a scaffold.