“Wandering the Cosmos” • by D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Ejected from the shuttle, I thought I’d freeze-dry to death.

I never thought the alien-forged space suit would keep me oxygen- and nutrient-supplied. It looked too flimsy to keep me sustained.

Homeless, on a trajectory not of my own design, I was pulled by great cosmic forces. The suit kept me preternaturally alive…for aeons. Stars grabbed me until they burst, flinging me; black holes passed me by; comets became my steeds. I no longer knew where I was, or who I was. 

A modest moon, not unlike Earth’s, stuck to another moon, like the shape of a peanut, held another planet-sized alien-touched figure, tucked into a crater. I slipped into its counterpart.

We were like conjoined hermit crabs who found their shells. 

---

 

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as NY, Hawai’i, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. She has a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology, writes speculative fiction and poetry, teaches martial arts, paints fantastical art in sumi ink and acrylic and convenes around tabletop games and RPG’s. Her multifaceted writing, including fiction and non-fiction, reflects her interest in food systems, ecology, technology and society. Her stories appear in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Nature and Galaxy’s Edge—and have been selected for The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories and The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time Stories. Her poetry has been nominated for the Dwarf Star, Rhysling, Best of the Net and Pushcart Awards. She enjoys microfiction, micropoetry, microwaves and microphones.

---

 

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.

This time the challenge was to write a flash fiction story of no more than 125 words in length that played off the keyword: “homeless.”

REMINDER: There is another Pete Wood Challenge that is open for submissions right now. For details on how to enter, click this link.