Star Travels Tales of Science Fiction (9 page)

Behind us the wall began to hum and
change color. The gate slowly sank into the ground, and the two
small kids held my hands as we slowly approached the opening. There
were no dults anywhere. I thought about Ceep, but he’d already said
goodbye. So the three of us walked through the opening and never
looked back.

END

Thank you for reading my
stories with my new imprint Keyboard Books!

Here is a sample from my
next collection which features fantasy stories entitled
Feral Fantasy
.

Rhea Rose

Summer Silk

“That’s a wolf spider, not a
tarantula!” Milo, my ten-year-old son explained, as I ran around
the kitchen with the broom and tried to bat the huge beast out of
the corner and down the heating vent. The terrified arachnid
collapsed, crinkled its hairy legs and became as light as
dust.

Milo bent to retrieve the carcass.
“Don’t touch it,” I shouted, jumping backwards. Milo poked at the
brown, inert pile; they always reminded me of a ball of discarded
thread when they played dead.

“Toss it in the toilet now, before it
wakes up,” I ordered.

“I want to collect it,” he pleaded; I
caved. “Thanks, Mom,” he said with such glee you’d think I’d bought
him a video game. He ran off from the kitchen to a corner of the
barn to find a jar to store the critter in.

“Make sure it has a tight lid,” I
hollered. No response. He hears everything, but never lets you know
until one day he’s repeated word for word all your gossip overheard
during a phone conversation. Sometimes I could just kill that sweet
kid.

As the weeks went by the webs around
the kitchen window and doors thickened even though I worked hard to
clean them away. The porch lights became killing fields. The bug
blood from the midsummer slaughter stained the house’s vinyl
siding. The marks faded if I used bleach.

This morning I stepped onto the porch
to catch a glimpse of the late summer sunrise over our fields of
large, green and orange mottled pumpkins, I walked into a gigantic
web. It stuck to my neck; it stuck to the gloss recently applied to
my lips and snagged in my
eyelashes
; I imagined my reflection as it
grimaced back at me eight glistening times as the spider scurried
to take shelter somewhere in my long blonde hair. From the corner
of my eye I reluctantly observed the spider’s miniature butt swing
round in mid scuttle and disappear. I squeaked in stifled horror
when I thought I felt the eight-legged weaver’s tiny tickle as it
made its way down the canals of my inner ear. Several small smacks
to the side of my head didn’t seem to dislodge anything but my
sunglasses. A frantic visit to the washroom mirror revealed
nothing. Like some great ape, I checked for fleas, brushed and
parted, combed and flipped my hair around. No spider. I picked the
remains of its web from my brow and felt the silk still on my arms,
still invisible except for its insistent tickling
presence.

Days later, the incident forgotten, I
cleaned webs off the windows around the house. The outdoor lights,
thick with layers and layers of soft white silk and bits of tangled
insect debris, took on the look of large glass eggs in
cocoons.

Find the rest of the collection of four
Feral Fantasy stories from Keyboard Books second publication at
Smashwords and look for more Keyboard Books while you’re
there.
https://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=rhea+rose

The Table of Contents for
Feral Fantasy

Summer Silk

Bigfoot Boarder

Sibling Seed

Alia’s Angel

You can find these stories as singles also at
Smashwords.