Wish You Were Here • 2

Today, the second installment in the second iteration of The Pete Wood Challenge. This week we will be presenting ten microflash stories, all of which spring from a simple challenge: to write a 100-word story that revolves around the line:

“Wish you were here.”

 Yesterday, the first two. Today, the next two. Enjoy!

—brb

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“Long-Distance Relationship” by Carol Scheina

The golden envelope always caught Joe’s eyes, despite his rotting ocular tissue. (A downside to being a zombie.)

He didn’t know how his girlfriend got the letters to him, but there they were, gleaming from a bush or near a bench. Was there a post office in the underworld?

Ella wrote few words. She always ended with a “Wish you were here.”

Joe wondered about that. How much did Ella recall about her death? He licked his lips, remembering, then frowned. Was there a reason she wanted him dead instead of un-dead? 

He wondered if this relationship would work.

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Carol Scheina is a deaf speculative fiction author whose short stories have appeared in Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, The Arcanist, and other publications. You can find more of her work at carolscheina.wordpress.com.

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“Worlds Enough and Time” by Jonathan Edelstein

She left the room. Tears, pleas, desperate words hung in the air, but she wouldn’t be back.

I stared at the screen, and at the expanding dataweb beyond, that now reached 10^800 universes. I should have been researching alternate microbiomes. Instead, I was searching for the world where I knew how to stop this. 

Ten trillion universes so far, and I hadn’t found it. In those worlds were more evolutionary lines than I could study in a lifetime, but in none of them was I wise. 

Downstairs, a door closed. Somewhere, it didn’t.

“I wish you were here,” I said.

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Jonathan Edelstein was born in 1971, is married with cat, and lives in New York City. His work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Intergalactic Medicine Show, GigaNotoSaurus, and elsewhere. He counts Chinua Achebe, Ursula Le Guin, and Bernard Cornwell among his literary heroes, and when he isn’t writing, he practices law and hopes to someday get it right. 

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