A Buchladen in Brighton yielded Darien his first Magna Carta.
His second, he pilfered from a slow-verse where now was 1215. Cost him a crossbow bolt through the arm.
He came up empty where Rome was eternal, velociraptors reigned, or water drowned the Earth. Einstein-Rosen generator overheating and almost out of gas, he found his last behind dusty museum glass in an eerily empty world, its rad-count through the stratosphere.
Soaking wet, bleeding, arm festering, yet triumphant, Darian returned to universe alpha. He found Sarah sipping free bourbon and three pristine charters adorning the pub’s wall.
“How?” he asked, before popping another anti-rad pill.
“Easy, darling. A 1215-now branch, a little gold, and Johnny happily affixed his seal to three more copies.”
Jeff Currier works too many jobs so has little time to write, but the words kept screaming for release. Jeff finally relented and set them free, in very small batches. Now they’ve run amok with no telling what mischief they’ve caused. You can find them roaming in various anthologies or in Sci Phi Journal, Stupefying Stories, Dark Moments, and Flash Point SF.
If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read:
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 150 words in length, inspired by and using the phrase, “out of gas.”
Special Thanks to Paul Celmer: for going above and beyond to help with this challenge
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