Master told us that the earth was hollow, and that we lived on the inside of it, clinging to the top of the crust. Below us was another world, a world inside the world, a glowing bright sun of a place. What Master called the summerlands.
Five years after her husband died, two years after she moved to a cabin in Montana, and six months after the world ended, Marie opened her curtains to discover her front garden overrun with roving, stumbling advertisements.
The phone call from Johnny came late that night, after nine, when I’d already decided that the dinner was a bust and was sadly finishing the entire pan of chimichangas.
The girl lived in the basement where the air was cool and damp and quiet. Company was coming over tonight, her mother had said, so the girl had better make sure her room was spotless.
The mud looked up at him and grumbled, “Who the hell are you?”
The musty smell of the grass and ground clogged his nostrils as he strained for a single, clean breath and dug his fingers deep into the dirt. His eyelids quivered and strained to open while he felt himself mixing into the ground as blood and flesh sought refuge in the soil of the battlefield.
This story from issue 2 (August, 2009) is one of the earliest known examples of Afrofuturist steampunk. Resistance and revolution served up on a memorable plate of characters and airships.
This 2009 reprint by the late Eugie Foster is one that feels eerily prescient.
Citizens change their identities based on the masks they are mandated to wear. But one person longs to be their true self. Eugie's story is an incisive, devastating look at society and its control of self-identity.
My throat clogging. My nose running. My eyes stinging with tears. I track down R in our game room. He’s playing backgammon with O. He rolls his eyes, gaze panning up from the board to me. “What now?”
