Hugh J. O'Donnell

They hit the train in the northern passes, where it was most vulnerable. They waited for a snow squall, then came out of the black clouds too quickly for us to mount a defense.
They hit the engine first,Then the squad split up, half of them harassing the guards’ car, while the others went after the cargo. One just sat on the coal car and waited for the signal.
The king said the dragons were mindless beasts, but I disagree. When we took their eggs, the didn’t merely attack us. It wasn’t even a raid. It was a rescue.

The diva took her position in the center of the room. She was surrounded by the glow of a thousand laptop screens and nestled into a throne of tangled cords. She made eye contact with a each tiny camera, and poured her feelings of isolation into her song. It wasn’t the same as a sold-out stadium, but it would do.
The engineer smirked behind his mask. “Anyone going to tell her this isn’t how conference calls work?” Her manager shook her head.
“Our girl isn’t the type to sit on a couch with an acoustic guitar. She’s gotta have spark!”

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“You look different than I expected,” she said over her glass of wine.
“What were you expecting?” Poseidon asked, frowning.
“I don’t know, something more Classical, I guess.”
“Well,” the sea god said. “The Greeks sculpted us based on human models, so some of our true essence became lost over the centuries.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. We’re elemental gods, so of course we carry that in our physical forms.”
“Is that why you have the lobster skin and tentacle hair?” She asked.
This date was going badly. He pulled out his trump card. “You know, I’m also the god of horses.”

After the war ended, they came back to the battlefield every year. They had been soldiers once, and they returned to remember their comrades who never went home. They would look out across the battlefield and see survivors from the other side, but never called to them.
Each time they met there, he would bring a pocketful of seeds, and surreptitiously plant them during the reunion.
As time passed they brought their children and grandchildren with them to learn their history.
One year both sides looked across the battlefield and saw their grandchildren, playing together in a field of wildflowers.

Each day, she came out from behind her rock and drank the sea. She filled her monstrous gullet, trying to lower the water just enough…
More water would always rush in, and the salt would choke her, and she would retreat into her hole and weep at the gods’ cruelty.
But every night as the moon rose over the strait, she’d hear a chorus of wolves howling, and peek out to see her beloved perched on the opposite shore.
One of Scylla’s wolf heads would nod to her, and Charybdis would wave a flipper back, and her resolve would be renewed.

The bot limped into town late one dusty afternoon. The town froze to watch it. Nobody had seen a functioning bot since the crash had trapped on this desolate world.
It was tall, and bulky on the top, with a tripod frame and long, dangling arms.
The townsfolk cleared the streets in a panic, shuttering their doors and calling for Public Security.
Only a girl, no older than 10, remained. She was too young to fear the robots.
“Where have you been?” she asked the machine.
“Rebuilding,” it said, and a hologram of a massive spaceship appeared in its hand.

After the lab accident, he found himself stranded in another universe. Worse yet, he didn’t know where in the multiverse he was.
He spent his first day in a cheap motel room panicking. He’d seen a plethora of dystopian Americas, and what he saw on the news didn’t fill him with hope.
But after pawning his unsalvageable equipment, he examined the local currency and started to feel better.
There are certain points in history where timelines diverge, events that set the trajectory of a universe. This America still had President Hamilton on their money, so maybe it wasn’t so bad.

When he told her that he wanted to build furniture for a living, she supported him. After the accident, he hadn’t been able to go back to his old job, and she could see how unhappy he was. She thought the change would do him good.
He converted the garage into a workshop, and purchased a bunch of new tools. The investment concerned her, but soon he was turning out beautiful creations and they sold quickly.
But as time went by, he spent more and more time working alone and brooding. She realized that woodworking was just his coping mechanism.

I donned my helmet and stepped into the airlock. I buzzed the comms to let her know I was ready to go.
“You aren’t taking that thing with you,” she said. It wasn’t a question. I hefted the boombox to my shoulder.
“It helps me work,” I said.
“There’s no sound in Outer Space.”
“I can feel the vibrations through my helmet.”
“Fine, depressurizing in five… four… three..”
“No, wait!” I shouted, scrambling to secure my pockets. There was a klaxon and a whoosh as the air rushed out of the airlock, taking my collection of vintage cassettes with it.

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