Table of Contents:
Jumper on the Troll Bridge
by Shannon Cross
*Content warning: suicide attempt*
***
Few bridges have trolls these days, but Rankin had lived beneath his for decades. Slinking over a busy Midwest river, cars flew along it too fast for Rankin to catch and demand his payment. But that was ok.
He only asked for a toll from the jumpers.
A woman named Susan turned on her car’s hazard lights and parked on the thin shoulder of the southbound side. She pulled herself up the concrete barrier of the bridge and sat with her back towards the air. The wind whipped her hair around her face. There was a tension at the corner of her mouth, as though she knew a storm raged a step behind her and a step beyond. She leaned back.
Rankin’s trap caught her before she had a chance to scream. The air thickened and slowed her fall to a gentle halt. Rankin perked up. No one had tried to cross his bridge this way in some time.
Susan looked around wildly, eyes widening. She knelt on a block of solid air, the river below a dark wound across the earth. The wind, normally ever present at this height, had stilled. The whir of traffic from the bridge was gone, and the air smelled like salt. She glanced at Rankin who squatted on a support beam. The troll had a flattened face surrounded by coarse gray fur. His arms were overly long for his squat body and dangled casually over the abyss. Tears appeared in Susan’s eyes.
“Well, that’s not very nice,” Rankin said. “I’m a handsome troll, for your information.” Susan didn’t acknowledge him.
“Why did I do that,” she cried into her hands. “I didn’t need to do that.” She began to hyperventilate, breath moving quick and shallow. She glanced towards the river below and moaned, rocking back and forth. Her hands gripped her shoulders as though trying to hold a piece of her chest in.
Rankin waited. This wasn’t an unusual reaction.
Susan’s wracking sobs softened into hiccups. Rankin cleared his throat.
“There’s a toll for passing along my bridge,” he said. “If you want to cross, you owe me a silver coin, a lock of your hair, or an answer to my riddle.”
Susan looked up, eyes focusing on Rankin as though she only just noticed him. “What?”
“You’re crossing my bridge,” Rankin explained slowly. “To get to the other side, you owe me a toll.”
“The other side? You mean…” She looked down.
“I’m not interested in your destination,” Rankin said. “I just want my toll.”
Susan was quiet for a time. Her face was turned towards Rankin, but her eyes were unfocused. She took a deep breath and released it, the only source of wind beneath the bridge.
“I thought I came to terms with this,” Susan said. She ran her hands through her hair, grasping at the roots, as though she could dig out the source of her pain if she only pulled hard enough. “I thought things would never get better. I felt trapped by the stupid thoughts in my head. How pathetic is that?” She made a sound between a harsh laugh and a groan.
“Uh-huh,” Rankin grunted.
“I did try to fight it,” Susan said. Her eyes blazed at Rankin, daring him to contradict her. “I could ignore the thoughts when I was surrounded by people. And when I was alone, I endured them. I endured them for years.”
“Look, I just need a toll and then you can–”
“I should have asked for help,” Susan said. “But I didn’t want to worry anyone. And then I didn’t want them to stop me.”
She glanced down. Without the bridge for perspective, the river consumed the world until the horizon.
“This is going to hurt, huh?” she said.
“You can’t pass until you pay the toll,” Rankin reminded her.
“Toll? I don’t have any–” Susan paused. “What happens if I don’t pay?”
“Then you turn back. No payment, no passage.”
Susan scrambled to her feet, heedless of the fact that she ran on empty air. She grabbed Rankin’s overlong arm. He pulled away, bristling at the touch.
“Please send me back,” Susan pleaded, tears forming, snot dripping from her nose. “I don’t have any payment. You’ll send me back, right?” Her brows were furrowed in pain, her eyes alight with a newfound spark.
“The toll isn’t that much,” Rankin grumbled. “You have plenty of hair you could give up.”
“You can’t have it.”
“At least attempt the riddle.”
“No. I don’t know why I’m getting a second chance,” Susan said. She grabbed at his arm again. Her hands shook, loosening tufts of Rankin’s fur. They floated in slow arcs to the river below. “But I’m going to keep living, even when it hurts so much that I dream of returning here.”
Rankin sighed and waved a hand. “Then back you go.”
Susan smiled. She leapt to embrace Rankin and—
A woman named Susan turned on her car’s hazard lights and parked on the thin shoulder of the southbound side. She pulled herself up the concrete barrier of the bridge and sat with her back towards the air. She hesitated, gripping the cold concrete so tightly her fingers turned numb.
“Why am I doing this?” she asked herself. The winds whipped around her face, brushing away hot tears. She raised her hand to her face and the tears clung to her fingertips. She stared at them, a dazed look in her eyes. “I don’t need to do this.”
Her face fell like a sudden storm. She let out a painful keen and slid back onto the bridge, falling like a ragdoll into a fetal position, sobs shaking her body. A car pulled over and a man dashed out to kneel beside the would-be jumper, placing a hand on her quivering shoulder.
Rankin sighed below on the support beam of his bridge, in the place where the wind didn’t reach. Maybe he’d get payment from the next one.
About the author:
Shannon Cross is a biologist by day and a fantasy writer by night. When she isn’t writing or working, she can be found wandering the woods of Pennsylvania with her dog. Her short fiction has appeared in Triangulation: Hospitium.
Find Shannon:
BlueSky
One Red Branch
by Joanna Berry
Filed to: Disciplinary Committee
UC Berkeley, Xenobiological Faculty
Transcript of recording in Waiting Room 02 (single occupant)
12 February 2104, 0811
Come on, come on, stop doing this to yourself. You know it’s not going to be that bad. The most they can do is pull your funding. Or—give you more funding. Right? Because if you think about it, if you think about it, this is actually an amazing discovery. It’s not my fault. And if it is, then my thesis supervisor would need to be here too, and she’s not, so…
[Sounds of pacing]
And in the end, it’s just a tree! Or a… a coral, or a fungus or… But that’s the point, isn’t it? Nobody knew what it was! Some deep space probe passes over some barren rock, sees some white branches standing out on the regolith, the gas spectrometer says it’s something growing, no one’s ever seen life off Earth, so of course, of course someone had to look at the thing! We needed to know what we were looking at!
So they give it to the grad student to make sure it wasn’t ice or chalk or… or… fairy dust on the lens…
It’s not my fault my supervisor never reads her messages.
“No interference with alien life forms.” “Shklovsky protocol applies.” Yeah, of course the protocol would ‘apply’ if I was out there, boots on the ground. But what kind of ‘interference’ were they expecting? It’s a tree! Millions of light years away!
Not even a real tree. Just some… acroporidae-looking growth. But it was growth. Life. The first we’d seen off Earth.
Beautiful life. A white tree with a million branches. Has to be feeding off something geothermal. All alone out there, but alive, somehow. It was… perfect.
And now… one red branch. And maybe more. Because of…
[Long pause]
I knew it. Knew I should have taken that quantum physics course instead of being wall-to-wall xenobiology. Five minutes in and someone would’ve said ‘observer effect’ and I would have known.
[Long pause]
Visible light. That’s all seeing really is—light bouncing into your eye. You have to shine a light to see. It was only a second. One particle transmission from the probe, that was all!
The next transmission was just for comparison. You can’t see if you only look once.
[Long pause]
Look, whatever they said, it needed a full study. I couldn’t just leave it out there…
I couldn’t have known. That rock’s got no magnetosphere; that tree must’ve been bombarded by ten billion kinds of radiation. But my bitty little particle beam affects it that much it triggers a mutation?
Wonder if it’s beneficial. Or—heck, maybe it’s a hello. The tree detected a change and put on its best show. Life sees life. When we’re really seen, we see ourselves…
No, no, enough, philosophy’s down the hall. You’re in trouble. Focus.
Maybe—oh, maybe that’s the argument. Coincidental mutation from cosmic radiation. It’s not like they can prove it, right? They’d have to look themselves, and that makes them just as bad as me. Right? They’re scientists, they have to be curious about what t—
…Whoa. Is that a camera?
Are they watching me in here?
Hello?
Hey!
Look, can you—kind of—ignore all of that? If I’d known I was being watched, I…
[Long pause]
…I’d have done things differently.
About the author:
Joanna Berry is a Senior Game Writer at Motive Studios. She has been working in the video game industry since 2008, contributing to science fiction, fantasy, and horror franchises such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dead Space, and Star Wars, while creating her own short stories and novellas. She currently lives in Montreal.
Find Joanna:
BlueSky
No Fuel and Millions of Miles from Home
by Victoria Brun
(Drabble Contest 2025 Co-Winner)
It was the absolute worst thing that could happen on a long-haul spaceflight, and there was nothing they could do about it. They were millions of miles from their destination and even further from home.
Things were about to get bad.
Chewing her lip, Alice weighed her options. The only decision that remained was whether to tell Kat now or give her co-pilot a few extra hours of ignorant bliss.
And it would only be a few hours. Kat would certainly figure it out come morning.
After a tumultuous internal debate, Alice decided to tell her.
“We’re out of coffee.”
About the author:
Victoria Brun is a writer and project manager at a national laboratory. When not bugging hardworking scientists about budget reports and service agreements, she’s writing stories and nonfiction pieces you can find at Clarkesworld Magazine, Nature Futures, Factor Four Magazine, and beyond. She’s also the editor of the drabble magazine 100-Foot Crow. Find her at victoriabrun.com.
Find Victoria:
Instagram
BlueSky
Liqueur Literacy
by Gabrielle Bleu
(Drabble Contest 2025 Co-Winner)
The dragon is still holed up inside my wine cellar.
It’s technically an alien, but it’s made of my Crémant a hoard to rival any wyrm’s. I’ve bartered some Pinot noir for my Rieslings back; what I really want is my schnapps.
Mirabelle plums are hard to come by on Alpha Centauri; my great-grandmother distilled that schnapps back on Earth. The value is high. My champagne offers are refused.
I have one more card to play: I show the alien dragon two empty glasses.
It accepts the trade. The schnapps bottle rolls towards me.
I pour us each a glass.
About the author:
Gabrielle Bleu writes luminous science fiction and fantasy. When not writing, she watches birds and admires lichens. Their work has appeared in Solstitia, Astral, Alien Fiction, and in the Gargantua anthology by Air and Nothingness Press, among others. Find more of Bleu’s work at gabriellebleu.com, or @gabriellebleu.bsky.social.
Intervention
by Patrick B. Hall
(Drabble Contest 2025 Runner-Up)
One night ghost children started appearing, shrieking, reenacting their deaths. You could smell the smoke, the stagnant floodwaters.
They haunted the past because there was nobody left to haunt in the future.
They wouldn’t let you sleep unless you did whatever they demanded: bought an electric car, went vegan, invested in solar.
Some called it an organized attack. Well, it succeeded. Hard to argue with the ghosts of your children or grandchildren who died young because you helped trash the planet.
We weren’t visited; we hadn’t wanted kids. But afterwards, an old woman appeared to us. Smiling, she whispered: “Reconsider?”
About the author:
Patrick B. Hall is a professor of astronomy at York University in Toronto, Canada, where he lives with his wife. He grew up reading SF&F novels and stories and is now enjoying writing some speculative fiction stories of his own.
Find Patrick:
BlueSky
What’s in a Name
by Greg Schwartz
(Drabble Contest 2025 Runner-Up)
“Coffee for Steben?” The X49 BaristaBot held up a steaming cup.
A man approached the counter. “I think that’s mine,” he said, hand out.
The robot scanned his face. “You are Steven. This coffee is for Steben.” It turned toward the other patrons. “Coffee for Steben?”
Steven recognized this model from his military days—great at following orders, not so great at independent thinking. “You must’ve heard me wrong when I ordered.” He reached for the cup again. “Steben isn’t even a real n—”
The robot’s laser perforated his heart. Steven crumpled to the floor.
“Last call for Steben…?”
About the author:
Greg Schwartz lives in Maryland with his wife and children. He’s been lucky enough to have some of his stories appear in Scifantastic, Writers’ Journal, and OG’s Speculative Fiction. In a pre-fatherhood life, he was the staff cartoonist for SP Quill Magazine and a book reviewer for Whispers of Wickedness.
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