fiction
‘Listen to the Birds’
by achrilock
From the diary of Paula Vigil, 2044
March 3, 2044
This is stupid. I’ve never been one for keeping journals or really even for thinking about what I think about. Who has time for that now? I’m working two and half jobs and raising a kid besides! I’m lucky to even have the work, honestly. I couldn’t feed Christina without it. I don’t even feel like doing this tonight. She just stopped crying and I need to sleep while there’s a little quiet. But the doctor says that I won’t feel any better until I get this out of my system. Doctor… pfft… Volunteer health worker from Atlanta coming down here to the coast to save the drowning from drowning again. I don’t even know if he was a doctor. He looked like he was about fifteen years old. But that’s to my eyes which isn’t saying a whole lot I suppose.
I tried to get him to prove that he was, asked him for somethin’ to just fix me, make me forget that I went crazy before and then that I was crazy enough to tell somebody about it. I was afraid they would take Christie away if anybody found out, but it bothered me so much that I couldn’t not get myself checked on. She’s got a daddy who’s disappeared and a momma who’s never around, she lives in a piece of paper stretched over a box of matches, and now if it ain’t the damnedest thing her ceiling’s started leaking in there. Maybe I can get it fixed before she’s old enough to notice. That creep who rents us this shithole ain’t gonna do it. I got nowhere else to take her, though. There ain’t nowhere else to go for us that’s running from the ocean.
[Read more…] about ‘Listen to the Birds’‘The Last Dream’
by achrilock
The curtained cubicle around me is bright and blue, and as my vision begins to blur and my thoughts begin to slow and turn toward a dreamlike cadence, the surgical light above the table begins to resemble the sun, hanging in the center of an azure pleated cloth sky.
I’m slowing down. I’m not dying, though. I’m not even injured. The combination of drugs and a modified Delta wave state controlled by an artificial intelligence synched with the simulation control system, and with the subject I’m going to visit, is doing its work, pulling me under into something like deep sleep, where I will dream.
[Read more…] about ‘The Last Dream’