Kin

I look one more time at the faded Polaroid. Me, Grant, Big Yin, Franko - and, of course, Budgie; all the old crew. The familiar, bittersweet memories gnaw at me as I think of past times.

Good times.

Blood brothers, raising hell. Girls, drugs, brawls, and the occasional cell - we shared them all. High on recklessness and life’s promise. Invincible. Admired by all the wrong people.

But they’re gone now, except Grant. That’s still hard to believe, some days.

I put the treasured photo back down and pick up the gun. Remembering.

There’s a good reason I’ve left Grant until last.

A Rude Awakening

The harsh braying eventually broke through the wall of dreamlessness that cocooned him. What had he been drinking last night? Connors didn’t remember going to the ship’s bar, but the god-awful pain in his head suggested that it must have been a helluva session.

He tried to silence the bastard alarm clock, but nothing was moving properly. Christ, they hadn’t tried rocket fuel cocktails again, had they? He must be face down in his pillow because he was struggling to breathe.

A surge of adrenaline brought him a last, lucid moment. It was the hull breach alarm! An asteroid had --

Romance Is Dead?

Unusually, they had the park to themselves.

It was a serenely beautiful morning, too. She was contented; amazed that it had worked out so well. They lay together where the clump of woodland, burgeoning and brightly splashed with the caress of Spring, sprawled into the neat beds of grass.

Was this, she wondered, the right moment to make her intentions clear? The thrill of anticipation was an almost unbearable ecstasy.

She looked blissfully at the corpse. Its head was shattered; the fresh, spilled contents tantalising her so that she shivered.

"Let me slip into something more comfortable," said the boreworm.

_________________________________________________________
[Thanks to Tim Whitten for the punch line.]

A Slap On The Wrist

The bang! of the judge's gavel woke me rather rudely from my doze.

Through bleary eyes, I could see the disapproving glares of the oh-so-worthy denizens assembled before me. I regarded them in much the same way as I did the numberless dust pixels floating in the drab chamber.

"Aesh Petersen, for the crime of Artificing..." - a muttering of disgust went through the public gallery, as it always did - "...I sentence you to fifty years of death."

Bad.

Pretty damned bad, in fact.

But it could be worse, I thought. I might have been sentenced to fifty years of life.