“A Snail’s Pace” • by Pete Wood

Kurtz wanted the entire world to be five seconds away.

Maggie pretended to lose phone service and switched to email. She’d had enough of Kurtz’s rants, even 8,400 miles away from her boss and Corporate in Los Angeles. Kurtz could zap to Cape Town in seconds. It’d still be six days by boat to her home on Tristan da Cunha.

From her bungalow balcony she gazed out at waves crashing on the beach. Gulls squawked. A fishing boat puttered by. She sipped sangria.

She skimmed Kurt’s latest email rants. She didn’t care if Tristan da Cunha—unlike most of the world—still didn’t have instantaneous transport pods. So what if the Luddite Resistance had blown the transport depot in Iqaluit to smithereens. She understood how that remote arctic town felt. Her village wanted the world to be far away, too.

She’d snail-mail him her resignation. Corporate wouldn’t get bragging rights for connecting the world. Nobody else on the island would replace her. 

Maggie slipped on sandals and slung her guitar over her shoulder. She ambled down the well-worn meadow path to the village pub.

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Pete Wood is an attorney from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his kind and very patient wife. His first appearance in our pages was “Mission Accomplished” in the now out-of-print August 2012 issue. After publishing a lot of stories with us he graduated to becoming a regular contributor to Asimov’s, but he’s still kind enough to send us things we can publish from time to time, and we’re always happy to get them.

For the past few years Pete has been in the process of evolving into a fiction editor, God help him, first with The Pete Wood Challenge, then with Dawn of Time, then with The Odin Chronicles. Along the way he’s introduced us to the creative work of Roxana Arama, Gustavo Bondoni, Carol Scheina, Patricia Miller, Kimberly Ann Smiley, Kai Holmwood, Brandon Case, Jason Burnham, and many, many more. We suspect Pete’s real love is theater, though, as evidenced by his short movie, Quantum Doughnut — which you can stream, if you follow the foregoing link.

Pete Wood photo by Lee Baker.

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The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

Categories: The Pete Wood Challenge