Tonya R. Moore's Blog: Tonya R. Moore, page 2

In the Making

St. John didn’t know why she was there, in that brightly lit place. She was naked, laid out flat on her back on the freezing exam table like a corpse prepped for an autopsy.

Her vision blurred and brightened, and blurred again. She blinked furiously trying to clear the fog. Her right side throbbed, matching the cadence of her hammering heart. She tried moving her right arm, seeking out the place where it hurt.

Pain lanced through her as her fingers stumbled upon a crudely stitched wound. She tried...

Devious Machines

Ginger conjured a river. A cool, dark river. The bottoms of her feet tingled, slipping over smooth rock in the virtual riverbed. She lowered her body into the wetness. Frightened river fish darted between her legs. The chaotic chirping of birds resonated through the boughs of the trees blanketing her insular sanctum. She closed her eyes and listened, carefully, until she heard the furtive fluttering of fragile wings. 

Everything echoed, even her breath.

The air became heavier and heavier. Anxiety ...

Space Age Mermaid

Sulily sleeps suspended inside a transparent, cylindrical womb filled with luminous blue fluid. Her suit sticks to her body like a second skin. Knobby nodes run up the length of her spine and end at the soft helmet’s base at the back of her neck.

From the center of the helmet, wires fan outward and upward, gathering at the control center at the top of the container. Her mouth and nose are covered by a breathing apparatus with a serpentine root that coils and stretches down to the base of the cyli...

Witch and Spider

Whips of lightning cracked the dreary night’s fragile shell. The sea was a harridan, driving away what little warmth was left in the wind. The beastly sky rumbled. The earth trembled. The explosive boom of a starship taking off ripped a hole into the distant horizon.

The earth had long become another backwater industrial throw away. Most ships only stopped here long enough to fill up on fuel and necessities on the way to someplace else. Even the meanest weather couldn’t convince a pilot to del...

Shelter

Twilla’s Beast was hollow-bellied. The lumbering juggernaut, a comfy shelter custom-built for her. Light years away from home, they were fighting a war waged in outer space.

An enemy warhead blew a gaping hole into the back of Beast’s head. The mecha was now a gnarled mess of scorched metal, wires, and exposed tubes. The damage prompted a critical system failure.

The massive humanoid robot and its pilot veered off course. They plummeted down into planet E42-ALPHA’s atmosphere. On the windward shor...

Memento Mori

Ivy arrived on the ragged edge of a storm. It was wet, wild, and humid in the Myakka boonies. At first, she simply sat there in the borrowed red Corolla, watching the windshield wipers dance back and forth. After a few minutes, she killed the car’s headlights, then the engine.

She pushed the driver’s door open and stepped out into the rain. The raging sky at her back was a beast in agony, swirling with bubbly clouds of ash and electric blue.

The house was painted white, a century-old wooden affair...

The Short Story That Changed Me Irrevocably

One of my favorite stories of all time is The Foghorn, a short story written by Ray Bradbury.

Abbreviated Summary

Bradbury's sea monster, perhaps the last of its kind, inhabits the depths of the ocean surfacing only to respond to the nostalgic call of the foghorn. It cries out in futility, trying to communicate with the foghorn which it has mistaken for another of its kind. Eventually—perhaps disappointed—the monster sinks back down into the deep and swims away all alone.

Excerpt

A cry came across a...

The Lore of Hegira: Episode 4, Slumfairy

Was it her or Sumida who screamed? Bex couldn't tell. 

A massive beak with teeth clamped on to her arm, flung her sideways, sending them careening into the wall. Bex tried to shield Sumida. They hit the metal surface hard. Sumida crumpled to the ground.

Bex’s gut clamped in terror at the sight of the advancing metalhead. The operator of the hulking, cylindrical monstrosity equipped with multiple extensible arms was a Tollan. Beady-eyed and malevolent. Bex's childhood nightmare come to life. 

Tollan...

Reckoning

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