My short story is also in print in the first issue of Sci Phi Journal
Sci Phi Journal is a combination of science fiction short stories and philosophical articles. My story is Abandoned River, Dry Water, and here’s the opening.
She shifted a purple-leafed frond to reach the stream, but instead she found an arm.
Sandra scrambled backward, her water-sampling equipment clattering against the rocks. Heart racing, she stared at the plants that had snapped back into place, as if hiding a secret. Maybe it was an illusion, an unfortunate arrangement of sun-bleached sticks that resembled something familiar in an otherwise unfamiliar world. Right? After all, this was Carinae 3, a planet being explored for human habitation for the first time. After weeks of seeing nothing familiar, Sandra told herself, it was only normal – only normal – for her brain to crave anything that made her feel at home. Even if it was something horrible, like a skeletal arm.
She inched forward. With her probe, she moved the frond again, and she waited for the optical illusion to clear.
Except it didn’t. Wedged between two rocks was a bleached tibia, and stretching forward were a scaphoid, carpals, metacarpals, phalanges.
Bones as human as her own, on this uncolonized world.
And worse, with a spike driven right through the wrist.
You can read the rest at Sci Phi Journal.
