Plasma Frequency Magazine: Issue 14 by Jes Read Free Book Online

grip.  She looked into her mother's clear eyes.  "I love you, too." 
    "It's okay to let go," her mother said.  "You can throw out anything that you don't want to keep, and I really won't mind." 
    Betty sniffled and wiped her eyes.  "Thanks." 
    She felt warm fingers on her cheek, then the puzzle was nothing but a confusing mishmash of colors. 
    She took the puzzle apart, piece by piece.  Then she put the last piece from the spring puzzle in its place and took a picture.  "Goodbye, Mom."  She looked around the empty room, then slid the pieces into the box and closed the lid.  "Goodbye." 
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
    Jamie Lackey lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and cat. Her fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the Stoker Award-winning After Death... She's a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her short story collection, OneRevolution, is available on  Amazon.com . Find her online at  www.jamielackey.com .

At Twenty-Two Hundred Hours
    By Sylvia Anna Hivén
    I whisper the same summons into the microphone every night. It's a silly thing, that whisper, but Tinder won’t show without it. She's too fond of the ritual—to old fashioned, too romantic.
    “Girl in the moon, come on down.”
    I imagine the words transmitting into the blackness of space outside Exterra, slicing through the icy dark, bouncing against starlight, embraced by the black hole where they'll tumble and twist through time and space before bursting out into another solar system and find its way to Tinder.
    The summons always works. In my dim quarters, fractured only by razor-thin shards of moonlight that cuts through the triple-paned window, the girl from the other side of space flickers to life.
    “Hi, Tinder,” I say.
    “Hi back,” Tinder says.
    Even though Tinder's holographic self is just an illusion of light and the real her is as far away as some of the stars twinkling outside the space station, I feel like it's actually she who looks straight at me. There's a sharpness to her blue eyes, a magnetic draw in her gaze.
    “How’s your side of the universe?” I ask.
    “Rainy. I cross-bred a few new seeds, but it was too wet to plant anything. How about you?”
    “Good. I checked EmiSix’s course. It's ahead of schedule and will be here in just twenty-eight days. So, I'll see you in four weeks.”
    “Four weeks to you. Four years to me.” Tinder pouts, tiny crinkles lining her forehead. “It's not fair that I have to wait and you don't.”
    She looks so child-like: she keeps her hair in twisty pony tails and beneath her bright dresses she always sports dirt smudges on her bare knees. Because on Luna they still have dirt, flowers, grass. Her beauty is earthen: rounded, warm features, tanned skin, Caribbean-blue eyes. She looks like a poster child for Earth, but she hasn't even seen the place.
    Me, I'm the one twirling inside a steel city above the broken planet, and I'm the one still referring to myself as an earthling. Not so much because it fits me—I'm a pasty, skinny twig of a guy, and I've never seen anything sprout out of the ground—but because I have no other home to claim.
    “Be glad we're close enough to reach each other at all,” I say. “Or perhaps you wanna revisit the plan and find the love of your life over there, in Alpha Centauri?”
    “Never on your life, Cory! You're stuck with your moon girl.”
    “I can think of worse things to be stuck with.”
    It's been a year since our voices tangled into each other. I came across the trails of Tinder's transmission crackling out of a wormhole. She had found it by accident. She hadn't known where it would lead—if it lead anywhere at all—but when I answered her and she realized I was on Exterra, the questions tumbled out of her. After all, it wasn't every night you came across a voice from another solar system that distance didn't make into a mere echo.
    Nights turned to weeks; weeks have turned to