Predator

by Chris White

High above the terracotta earth, adrift on the rolling cloud-seas, a dragon waits.

High on gossamer wings it waits, invisible.

Scatter your protective talismans, your pretty trinkets of glass, hide in the shadows. Burn your votive offerings unto him – a mountain of rubber set aflame, a pillar of midnight.

High above the clouds it waits, an Angel of Death, with wings of steel.

With talons of blazing metal to rend the flesh.

Thirsting, unquenchable.

Target acquired.

In a world of serene unknowable silence a Predator lurks, watching its prey.

In an eruption of violence, the Predator drone strikes, spitting fire.



Author bio: Chris White is an author living in Brisbane, Australia. His words have been published both as ones and zeros and as ink on dead wood. More of them can be found on his blog: http://chriswhitewrites.com.

Predator is part of 101 Fiction issue 4.

Dreams

by Chris White

Grey storm clouds gather, a black armada that promises no rain. Helicopters grasshopper-leap above the searching fingers of flame, their red and gold carapaces glittering like jewelled bugs; their belly loads of water will never quench the fire’s thirst.

Summer rages, unchecked, while we dream of winter.

A dream, a prayer, a memory.

We dream: winter rains falling, frost blanketing the forest, now burnt black.

Ash.

Black and grey.

An alien world beneath the sunrise, the trees blackened stumps, skeletons.

An eerie silence falls.

Then we hear the whisper of flames, burning beneath the bark.

We dream of winter’s rain.



Author bio: Chris White is an author living in Brisbane, Australia. His words have been published both as ones and zeros and as ink on dead wood. More of them can be found on his blog: http://chriswhitewrites.com.

Dreams is part of 101 Fiction issue 4.

Famine

by Chris White

She rose, engulfed in the swarm, eyes ablaze, copper discs behind the crush of black bodies, devouring those scraps that remained.

You have summoned me. Her voice was like birdsong, like the droning of bees, like the howl of hunting wolves. Desperate times, desperate measures. Different seasons, different pleasures. Her chitin-flesh crawled, a living-dead mockery of a smile. The burghers pressed back, away from this dead thing they had impregnated with power.

Her price was too high, always too high.

In the end they paid it, with the flesh and blood and bones of another child.

Winter ended. Spring began.




Author bio: Chris White is a freelance writer of many styles (but mostly magic realism and science fiction.) He lives in Brisbane, Australia, on the other side of the world. An emerging writer, he pours out a flurry of flash fiction and short stories, mostly here: http://chriswhitewrites.com

Famine is part of 101 Fiction issue 3.

Shadows & Leviathan

by Chris White


Shadows

Dawn broke, crumbling through the shadows, reflected from the shattered mirror-faces of temples erected to the illusion of civilisation, to a pantheon long forgotten.

Dawn broke, eclipsing the night, illuminating only the darkness.

She woke, still curled against his chest, still crying, broken.

She woke to her nightmare.

He lay against the cracked concrete, the rust-red hole in his chest no longer bleeding.

They came and pushed her aside, pushed her into the dust.

They came and stripped him – took his shoes, his heavy winter coat, his grandfather’s pocket watch.

They left her his body.

They left her the shadows.

Leviathan

Down, down in the deep, the Leviathan wakes. The seafloor buckles, tears.

Down in the eternal darkness his giant, sightless eyes struggle to open against the mud of uncountable aeons.

Aeons of loneliness.

Down in the deep the Leviathan wakes, an ancient, blasphemous monstrosity.

Unleashed once more into restless hunger.

The last of his kind.

Slowly, slowly rising. Out of the darkness.

The Leviathan rises, awakened into suffering. He pierces the surface, a serpent, writhing. A nightmare, forgotten.

Leviathan, reborn, dying.

The oxygen content is a fifth of what it was during the Jurassic.

The Leviathan surfaces, belly up.

Asphyxiated.

Author bio: Chris White is a freelance writer of many styles (but mostly magic realism and science fiction.) He lives in Brisbane, Australia, on the other side of the world. An emerging writer, he pours out a flurry of flash fiction and short stories, mostly here: http://chriswhitewrites.com

Cobblestones

by Chris White


I don't watch the news anymore, the same flickering images of riot shields and snarling police dogs, of explosions in cafés - the lightning strikes of revolution.

The world captured in moments of violence, the voice of civilisation drowned out by the screams of the people as flames lick at their feet.

It started with people marching in the streets, demanding to be heard.

It ended when our governments stopped pretending, when Trafalgar Square became Tiananmen, revisited.

I don't watch the news anymore, pretending to be surprised.

I watch the streets outside and all I see are cobblestones, slick with blood.





Author bio: Chris White is an author living in Brisbane, Australia, which he realises is on the other side of the world. He writes mainly dystopian SciFi and speculative fiction. More of his words can be found (almost) daily at http://chriswhitewrites.wordpress.com