Strange Navigations

by Rudi Dornemann

We rolled the wicker cage out of the water and onto the beach. Within, water poured from the convolutions of the brain shell.

From a gaff-pole’s length away, we rolled, waited, rolled; the shell tumbled, dripped. We repeated until the rolling didn’t spot the dry sand, and we figured it was as safe as it’d get. Dry, they’re sluggish.

“Careful!” said the captain. He stood twenty paces off.

Bellamy, a share-and-a-half man who’s been with the crew twenty years, buckled on the shield and glove. The shield was giant tortoise’s shell. Set in the middle, the glove was shark hide and stank from all the lard greasing it into flexibility. It hasn’t been used–or needed–for a dozen voyages.

We’ve been lost in mapless seas for two months, and becalmed for weeks. Some blame the captain’s timidity in keeping us far from stronger winds in hope of avoiding cyclones. Others say it’s simple bad luck.

But we all agree: if we ever want to get home–or anywhere–we need brain shell stew and the uncanny sense of wind and current it gives.

That’s why I volunteered to be a spotter, leaning down to watch and shout instructions to Bellamy, who couldn’t feel or see where he was reaching.

“Three hand-breadths to me,” I said.

“Down about half that,” says Higgs.

“A little away from me,” I say. “Right. That’s it.” Behind me, I hear the others setting up a cookfire for the pot of water that’s already boiling down nearer the ship.

“Good men!” said the captain. I didn’t look, but he sounded to be another half dozen paces away.

Bellamy’s fingers closed over the shell.

I looked up to see Higgs grab his throat, the welt flaring already up the side of his face.

“Gods, no!” said Bellamy, dropping the shell and its now-poisonous meat.

While Higgs writhed and cursed, the quartermaster and I ran and hurled it back into the water. We returned to find the captain and Higgs wrestling over a pistol.

“It’ll be… a… mercy,” says the captain.
The welts are stripes now, and Higgs’ skin echoes the brain shell’s pattern.

The pistol boomed; the captain fell. The thing that wasn’t Higgs struggled to speak.

We gathered to hear our new captain’s first orders, knowing we’d see home shores now for certain, if we survived to see any shores at all…

Reality

by Jen Larsen

At first I thought I should of never had said yes because they promise you fame all up and down the planets and all kinds of money, but then there you are head-over-heels and pissing into a squeeze bottle, or trying to figure out how to open one of those tubes of steak and you don’t remember the last time you woke up from one of those nightmares without flying across the room and smashing your face on the bulkhead. I just can’t sleep all strapped-in, okay?

But they said, Act natural! Like there’s anything natural about reality television I should of said but didn’t, because I didn’t think of it. I wanted to be better than that but you can’t act different than everyone else.  You just can’t. We acted natural, like monkeys. All over the space station. Zero-g has got a lot of advantages when you stop smashing your face—these chicks were pretty stacked I could not help but notice—and we did what we wanted and things were pretty okay, beer and tubes coming up like clockwork until they stopped and finally we noticed. The insides of our heads were banging and we noticed we were alone maybe for real. Chuck got right up into one of the cameras and he screamed his head off and Jamie cried pretty steadily when we ran out of tube lasagna and vodka, and if the cameras were still recording no one cared any more. Not even us, mostly.

We’re going to run out soon. Of squeeze bottles because Charlene won’t just wash hers like the rest of us mostly remember to do, and food tubes. Jimmy says we’re going to end up being like cannibals as if it was funny and then he said and I’ll eat Jamie first and the way he grabbed at her, and her shrieking, it was like they thought the cameras were still rolling.

Mostly we play gin rummy, or sleep or screw and wait for how it’s going to end. I’ve got a bottle of Jack under my bed, and I’m pretty sure I can take the girls. When Charlene’s down on her knees and I put my head against the window, when I look at that view, the Earth and all our fans floating out there too far away, I wonder if I should just crush her skull now.