Tonya R. Moore's Blog: Tonya R. Moore, page 23

Wrestling with Self-Doubt

For the past month or two, I’d been struggling with crushing self-doubt where my writing is concerned. I’m not really sure what triggered this downward spiral. Every writer has thoughts like “jeez, my writing sucks” from time to time, but for one reason or another, I wasn’t quite able to get that particular voice out of my head. I’m realistic enough to know that my writing isn’t all that stellar but I also know that it isn’t totally abysmal. Even so, insecurities about whether anyone will ever read, much less like my work kept building up to the point where I wasn’t able to bring myself to work on a single piece of fiction for the eight whole weeks. The thing is, I’ve gone through phases like this before. I think every writer does, but this time, the malaise was lingering and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do about it until someone suggested the obvious to me. Write about it, that self-doubt.

First of all, I needed to figure out where the anxiety at the root of that self-doubt was coming from. My guess is it was the pressure to succeed. I had neither written enough nor been published enough in 2017 to allow myself to consider it a successful year, writing-wise. Plus, I placed sixth in the first writing contest that I’ve entered and was pretty disappointed because my story wasn’t good enough to at least make the top five. Later, a single rejection letter became my undoing. The funny thing is, the rejection letter wasn’t scathing or anything like that. My story was good, but too short. It felt, though, as if I’d once again fallen hopelessly short of something crucial.

Last year, I made a couple of monumental decisions about my writing. For one thing, I decided to take writing seriously enough to pursue it as a career. For another, I even changed my university major from Communications to Creative Writing with this new career path in mind but by the end of the year, it felt as if I wasn’t accomplishing enough fast enough. I really had to take a step back and remind myself that none of this is going to happen overnight. I’m still learning and trying to juggle school and a full time job with writing. For the time being, it’s an uphill journey but I am making progress every day, slowly but surely.

Now I’m sure my anxiety won’t simply dissipate. I’ll probably continue to wrestle with my self-doubt and having to remind myself that it takes time to accomplish the type of goals that I’ve set for myself. For the time being, it’s enough to simply remember why I write. Writing is something that I simply love to do. Whether I excel or suck at it is beside the point. Like Ray Bradbury said:

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

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 and has knobby nodes that 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. Sulily’s mouth and nose are covered by a breathing apparatus with a serpentine root that coils and stretches down to the base of the cylinder.

From time to time, her eyelids flicker and her fingers and toes twitch. Otherwise, she simply floats in suspended animation, unaware of even the small, robotic jellyfish that swim around her, monitoring her vitals and the state of the life-preserving fluid. Her unconscious body has already been floating inside the cylinder for three years. She will sleep like this for two more years, awaken for three then sleep again for two more years. When she awakens for the second time, this space age mermaid and her companions will be orbiting a whole new world. At least, that’s the plan.

Sulily dreams in hypersleep.

She doesn’t dream of the friends and family she left behind on Ceres or of the vast distances between stars. The dauntless pioneer doesn’t dream of the new life she will begin on a new planet or of the many adventures and hardships to come.

She doesn’t dream of the starship’s photon sails, fluttering on cosmic currents like the wings of a butterfly as it breaches the solar system’s heliopause. She doesn’t dream of Barnard’s Star or of their target planet’s seven mysterious sisters. She doesn’t dream of the unknown continents waiting to be discovered or the icy moon Gog, circling the planet Magog–an ominous pair of names to which Sulily had stridently objected but was outvoted. She doesn’t dream of the past, the future, or even the present.

Sulily dreams of water, Big Water, abundant enough to swallow their massive spaceship whole. It is with longing that she dreams of Earth’s mighty ocean, that vast liquid body thrashing and throwing its weight around with abandon. She dreams of the gentle shushing of froth against the shorelines, of rip-roaring, thunderous waves cresting on the high seas and crashing against jagged cliffs. She dreams of awkward sea cows, humpty-dumpty sunfish, snaky oarfish, and the sightless monstrosities living below the photic zone, like she’d once seen at an exhibit at the virtual zoo on Ceres. She dreams of shoals of mackerel twisting and folding into dense bait balls and ruthless sharks culling the frenetic herds.

She dreams of dark, green forests of sargassum, the baby seahorses and leafy seadragons taking shelter within their hairy embrace. She dreams of the many-tentacled octopuses, caught up in their furtive mating rituals and jittery war dances deeper down. In her dream, Sulily hears the shrieks of hungry seabirds, the boisterous chatter of dolphins, and the sad, beautiful singing of whales. In her dream, the jellyfish swimming around her are puffy giants with long, curly tendrils trailing along the ocean floor. Surrounded by the bioluminescent denizens of the great Deep, she is Captain Nemo ensconced within her rusty submarine, delving deep down into the starlit trenches of an Earth to which Sulily has never been.

Sulily doesn’t dream of jolly Roger Hartman, slumped at the pilot controls, all skeletonized and bone white. She doesn’t dream of Lady Diana Bergman–Sulily has secretly nicknamed her Princess of Mars–inside her fractured shell, all desiccated and deathly dark. She doesn’t dream of Torey Brown, the taciturn medical technician who died, plunging face first into a plate of scrambled egg whites; beside him on the counter, a worn paperback copy of The Integral Trees, earmarked at page three hundred and eighty-six. Sulily doesn’t dream of Miko Takano, the mechanical engineer with a penchant for reciting poetry aloud, curled up in her bunk, in the throes of a nightmare from which she will never awaken. She doesn’t dream of Mike Tully in the hydroponics bay, done in alongside his crop, dirt still clinging to the tips of his fingernails.

Sulily doesn’t know.

She doesn’t know that one year ago, along had come a wayward piece of cosmic debris, punching a hole into the spaceship’s hull and ripping through the quarters where she and her crewmates sleep. She doesn’t know that three of the seven watery wombs have cracked open like eggs, fluid spewing out, leaving inside only the devastated bodies of their unfortunate occupants. Sulily doesn’t know that the pilot and the rest of the on-duty shift are dead. She sleeps, unaware of the flickering lights and shrill alarms going off all over the ship. She doesn’t hear the intermittent crackle of the radio or the repetitive pleas for a response to mission control. She doesn’t know that the program designed to awaken her at the appointed time or in the event of an emergency has become corrupt and ceased to function.

Lost in her endless dreaming, Sulily will keep sleeping for another seven years.

The phantasmal Nautilus will continue plumbing the depths of the watery abyss for wonders and riches untold.

Sulily will continue to float, suspended inside her high-tech tomb. Solar winds will continue to bluster against the bow of the great ship. Barnard’s star will continue to lie in wait, expelling fairy dust and fire. Gog will continue to circle Magog—fourteen hundred and thirty-two more times. The ship’s engines will keep humming. The alarms will keep blaring. The desperate voices on the radio will keep calling. The bodies that haven’t rotted down to bone will become eternally mummified. Sole survivor oblivious, the corpse-laden spaceship will sail unerringly to her destined cosmic shore.

At the end of Sulily’s ten-year journey, the hole in the hull will have widened into a gaping maw. The doomed ship will wobble, spin, and burn up as it is sucked into Magog’s magnetic embrace. As if to dream the inevitable away, Sulily will still be dreaming inside her watery grave.

Sulily will never have an inkling of her gruesome fate.

Cat Skin

“Say, Doc,” Chloe asked lowly. “You know why I’m in here?”

The doctor was a young one, fresh out of university. She wore round glasses and her hair in a serious bun. It was nearly the end of their session, six going on seven in the evening. She eyed Chloe sagely.

“You know why you’re here, Chloe.” Dr. Finley said softly. “This is a safe place, where we can talk about the things on your mind.”

Despite her cajoling words, the doctor was well aware that the girl sitting on the loveseat across from her wasn’t talking about this room, all Zen-like and bursting at the seams with soft colors and warmth. Beyond the soft love-seats and fluffy cushions was a sterile hallway, leading to rows and rows of titanium-reinforced, padded cells.

“Beckley Place is a facility for the criminally insane,” Chloe said, nodding.

“Yes,” Dr. Finley nodded. “Yes, it is.”

Chloe’s hazel eyes darted from side to side as if to make sure no one else was listening. She leaned forward and whispered. “But I ain’t neither criminal nor insane.”

“You’ve killed sixteen people.”

Chloe continued as if Dr. Finley hadn’t spoken. “I’m cursed,” She said, leaning back in the loveseat. “Doc, it ain’t my fault that I’m cursed.”

Chloe was twenty-seven, rail thin and petite. With her over large eyes and knotty mass of hair, she looked more like a frail, urban waif than a vicious killer. Killed she had, though, torn bodies to shreds in violent ways that Dr. Finley had never even imagined possible.

“Why do you think you’re cursed, Chloe?” Dr. Finley probed.

“Oh, come on!” Chloe answered harshly.

Dr. Finley flinched.

“You think I don’t know what’s up?” Chloe demanded, eyes over-bright and limpid. “I know what’s up.”

Dr. Finley’s pen hovered over her notepad. “What do you mean?”

“Things happen to me at night.” Chloe’s voice trembled. “Awful, awful things, Doc.”

Dr. Finley set her notepad and pen aside. She leaned forward, emphatic. “Chloe, if there’s something happening to you in this place, you need to tell me about—”

There was a rapping on the door.

“Dr. Finley,” said a male voice. “It’s time.”

Dr. Finley’s eyes swung back to her patient. “Chloe, tell me.”

The chains on Chloe’s shackles rattled as she gripped the doctor’s hands in her own. “It comes at night!” She hissed, trembling violently. “Please! Please don’t let them take me back to that room.”

The door opened. A pair of burly male guards barged in.

“It’s time, Doctor,” the one who’d spoken before said. “We have to take her. Now.”

Chloe backed away, cowered in the corner of the room.

“Please, Doc!” She cried.

The guards crossed the room, dragged Chloe to her feet.

“Wait!” Dr. Finley protested. “I’m treating this patient right now. You have no right to interfere here.”

The guard who hadn’t spoken yet turned his head to look at Dr. Finley. He was the taller of the two, dark and attractive but the frosty look in his eyes made Dr. Finley shiver. “You’re new so you don’t understand how things work around here. I’ll give you that. Don’t push it, Doc. This is for your sake too.”

Concerned, Dr. Finley hurried after them.

They dragged Chloe out of the room. She was crying, clawing, and making sounds Dr. Finely didn’t even recognize as human.

“Shit! Is that a fang?” Dr. Finley heard one of the guards say. “She’s changing now. Use the tranquilizer!”

The dark one reached into his pouch and produced an injection cartridge with a big needle and jammed it into Chloe’s arm. The effect was immediate. She stopped fighting the other guard. The two guards backed away as she fell to her knees. They pulled their guns from their holsters and aimed at Chloe. The shorter guard got on his radio, asking for a facility lock-down.

“Dr. Finley, go back to your office and lock the door,” said the taller guard. His words barely registered.

Dr. Finely couldn’t take her eyes off Chloe.

Chloe crouched low, growling like an animal. She was down on all fours, back flexing and undulating. She shuddered. Her muscles rippled. Dr. Finley looked on in speechless horror as the skin on Chloe’s fingers and toes broke apart and sharp claws appeared. There was blood, so much blood. Hairs popped up on Chloe’s skin.

She grew until her clothes burst apart at the seams and fell to the ground in tattered bits. Her shackles broke apart. Right before Dr. Finley’s eyes, she transformed into a massive jaguar, a hirsute killing machine. The two guards backed up a few more paces, guns still trained on the feline beast that Chloe had become.

The beast pawed at the ground, shook its head from side to side. Its glazed eyes fixed on the spot where Dr. Finley stood. It took a step forward. Dr. Finley heard a gun trigger cock. Dr. Finley’s breath caught in her throat. Fear, bitter and raw, filled her mouth. She wanted to run but she couldn’t. Her feet were rooted to the spot. The beast lumbered forward, swaying from side to side. It stumbled and crumpled to the ground, the tranquilizer finally taking effect. One of the guards stepped in closer. He kicked at the jaguar with a booted foot. It didn’t budge.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s get her back in her cell.”

Dr. Finley sank to the ground.

“Cursed,” she mouthed shakily, watching in stunned silence as the two guards dragged the bloody jaguar down the corridor.

Mermaid

Say the only dream you ever had was blue, a cool brilliance that engulfs everything in the universe. All you know of your place in the monochromatic Everything is webbed feet, jewel fingers and a certain unnameable longing. You reach upward and out, straining to grasp the hazy glow of a distant light in your palms.

You begin to swim faster and farther from the deep and dark. It’s warm near the surface but you don’t know what warmth is. There had never been anyone to teach you that word. It’s a different kind of feeling. It tickles your skin. It makes your blood blaze and your heart leap.

You soar, soar, and soar toward the brilliance above and beyond until one night; the ghostly light looms directly overhead. You’re amazed because before, you had only your heart to see with but now you have eyes, ears and everything everywhere is amplified.

Suddenly, you’re no longer floating in that vast and lonely silence. The world you know has been set on its ear. It tilts over like a clumsy crab, unsettling you. You breathe in the air but you don’t know what air is. It whips around you and it roars.

It makes your bones sing, sing, sing.

The light you were chasing is still way up above and out of reach. The darkness overhead is blanketed by jittery dots of light.

You remember, with stark clarity that you’ve seen it all before; that you once stood on two feet on this shore and lamented over the alien yet strangely familiar jewels that you could neither grasp with your own two hands, nor wish upon fast enough when they fell from the heavens like tears.

You remember being human, what the poet said about death and the narwhal’s horn. You look to the stars. You look to the sea.

You remember why you once cast the earth and the heavens away.

Is this the first time it occurs to you, that the glitter-spotted darkness you’d left behind in the wet was the same as the seething mass in that place where you cannot fly?

Your body bends. You sink back down into the sea. Burying your heart and your longing once again, you dive all the way back down into the dark, into the deep.

Trance

Woman, you see. The sensi. It’s a funny thing.

Niara inhaled just the right amount of the mystic herb and her brain went straight to mush. It sent her whooshing and spinning down some deep, dark dimensional hole. She saw things. Things that weren’t there. Things that happened. Things that hadn’t happened yet. Things that might have happened centuries before she was born. Hordes of okapi running circles around her. The slow procession of villagers ushering her into the priesthood. The rush of white water carrying her across a wild river. Falling from a place far beyond the sky.

Amid the whirlwind, she remembered. She was a hunter. She was hunting. So, she fought to focus, to tune the madness out. She heard a rumble. Indistinct at first but it grew louder and louder until she was floundering amid the thundering hooves of an okapi herd. Their black bellies glistened and their white-banded thighs blazed in the firelight. Her nostrils flared, filled with their furtive, animal scent. The frantic okapi ran circles around her like mad children on a merry-go-round. The herd shifted. The spectral beasts scattered, scampering one by one, west-south-west and into the dark. Her arm went up, pointed in the direction of the invisible animal trail.

“There,” she heard herself say. “That way.”

But the sensi, you see. It was a funny thing. It wasn’t done with her.

Niara squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, vertigo swooped down. She lost her balance and landed on her ass beside the fire. There was no wind but the edges of her tunic began to flap and flutter. The crocodile-teeth of her bangles clicked and clattered. The fabric of her leggings crawled across her thighs like centipede legs. It felt as if she’d grown eyes all over her skin. She tilted her head sideways but no matter what, the trees wouldn’t go right side up. The curved bowl of the earth undulated. Her belly churned and sensi flavored bile tickled the back of her throat.

Hunters came running. At first, Niara mistook them for her companions. She heard their footsteps drum-drum-drumming in her head. The hunters they came running, pale skins and dark skins covered in the red mud of the wilderness so that they were all one skin. They prostrated themselves before her. First, they offered up a bloody armband, then a freshly de-fleshed finger bone.

“Your mother,” the tallest and oldest hunter said, “was eaten by a lion.”

Before Niara could grieve again, before she could wallow, the memory was swept away. The trees were where the night sky was supposed to be, so she twisted her body to look backwards. The sky was spinning, spinning and she could hear it, the universe singing. It sang the same song as the cicadas and the breath of night. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She began to hum in tune with the strange night song.

Silence fell so abruptly Niara’s breath caught in her throat.

 

Baba Gen, the village’s elder priestess, appeared before the young priestess, her face lit up like the broken-toothed full moon. She was no longer the wrinkled old woman Niara knew. She was young and she was beautiful. Her dark skin glistened in the moonlight. Her dark eyes shimmered with unshed tears. Adorned like a blushing bride on her honeymoon night, Baba Gen wore a white, gold-lined veil. Niara watched the rising and falling of Baba Gen’s breath, the subtle shuddering of her heart in her chest. Baba Gen nodded solemnly.

Though she looked young, she sounded old when she spoke.

“I am dead, my daughter.”

Lying flat on her back, baking on the flat rock still hot from the afternoon sun, Niara stared up at the trees until her eyes filled up with tears. The tears. They kept coming in a stream, then a deluge, pooling into a river around her. The salty river swallowed her up and she was drowning. Drowning.

“What is it, Niara?”

A guttural male voice yanked the young priestess back to present, to the place and time where the stars looked down from above and the world was right side up. Chest heaving, she sat upright. Across from her, faces lit up by the firelight were the other members of her hunting party. They were waiting, she realized. They were patiently waiting for her to rattle the bag and tell them what the bones had to say.

Baba Gen’s voice bounced around in the young priestess’s head.

I am dead, my daughter.

Niara clutched the cloth bag tied to her waist and dutifully listened to the way the bones shook. Like her fellow hunters’ blind belief, she could still feel her necklace of wood and stone coiling around her neck, constricting like a hungry snake. She drew in a deep, shuddering breath before murmuring softly to the huntsmen and women.

“Kill the hunt. We need to go back to the village.”

“Why?” Hati, her foster sister, leaned forward, long, twisty ponytail swinging dangerously close to the fire.

“It’s Baba Gen,” Niara whispered into the swollen night air. “She’s dead.”

 

Listen

 

Shelter

Twilla’s Beast was hollow-bellied. The lumbering juggernaut was a comfy shelter built just for her. Light years away, in the midst of a war waged in space, an enemy warhead had blown a gaping hole into the back of its head, leaving a gnarly mess of scorched metal, wires and tubes exposed. The damage had prompted the critical system failure that had sent the massive, humanoid robot and its pilot off course and plummeting down into the planet’s atmosphere. Now, on the windward shore of planet E42-Alpha’s western continent, the metal giant knelt as if in prayer, head tilted at an odd angle, blind eyes fixed on the rising sun.

On the seventeenth morning after the crash, the young pilot awoke aboard the metal giant, hunger clawing at her gut. She reached for one of her dwindling rations but what speared in through the cracks of her faulty brain was the memory of honey, sweet and pure. Doing her damnedest to ignore the jackhammer drilling into the left side of her head, Twilla punched the green release button and thanked her lucky stars for that fact that the robot’s basic functions and AI were still intact. The hatch flew open. She tossed her boots out first then out she scrambled. She plopped down onto the pebbly ground and hauled her boots on.

She briefly contemplated her predicament. Beast was still broadcasting a distress beacon. Twilla didn’t have family to miss her, or even friends. She’d been a soldier for as long as she could remember, from the moment she was big enough to reach the controls to pilot her robot. She was simply an asset, a valuable asset. Controllers of her caliber were few and far in between so she could trust in the knowledge that someone would eventually come looking for her. All she had to do in the meantime was survive. Easy enough, she supposed, though it was the waiting that was murder.

The sky blushed. The boisterous sea was vermilion, spitting bloody froth onto the spiky teeth of the shore.

Twilla stood, woebegone morning wind tossing her messy dreadlocks about. She shucked off the sleeves of her jumper, letting the top hang loose around her waist. Her sleeveless tank top which stuck to her torso like a second skin, had seen far better days. Days of fruitless toiling under the glare of the aged sun had given her nutmeg colored face, neck, and arms an almost coppery tinge. Blood had seeped through the thick bandage wrapped around her head and dried. Hunger and the pain in her head made her unsteady on her feet.

“Watch your step.” Beast’s mechanical voice was much like the air forced out of a rusty loudspeaker.

Twilla glared up at the bossy appliance. “What are you, my mother?”

She promptly spun, tripped, and landed on her butt with a pained yelp.

“Ah—” said Beast.

“Not a word!” Twilla growled.

Crow and hunger bitter in her mouth, she sprang back to her feet and dusted off her bruised behind. She stalked over to Beast’s open maw and reached for a gun, the big one because between Twilla and the honey was the garou and his alien wreckage of a juggernaut.

Though, days earlier, the castaways had reached an unspoken agreement to refrain from trying to kill each other, Twilla didn’t trust the alien pilot as far as she could throw him. She hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the reptilian in days and that was just fine by her. She could tolerate being marooned alongside an enemy soldier or two, providing they kept out of each other’s hair. She refused to acknowledge that teeny tiny part of her that was secretly relieved that she wasn’t all alone on this failed terraforming project of a world.

She left Beast behind and headed further inland between two hills overlooking the sea. The knee-high grass was blue and smelled like burned cinnamon. At the edge of the grassy ocean, thickening clusters of spindly trees bent backwards, overburdened by their deceptively cotton candy-like foliage. Puffy clouds hung low. Twilla arched her back and shielded her brows as her gaze swung upward, scanning for maybe a silver lining. The trick was to pretend she wasn’t looking. It was important but she couldn’t quite remember why. Not that it mattered. What mattered right then was the sweet, sweet honey from the mouth of the forest.

Feeling steadier on her feet, Twilla advanced. Nimbly and as resolutely as a tiger, she clambered over jagged rocks and waded through the sea of grass into the lush maw of the hollow.

The garou’s juggernaut, a twisted and scorched heap of metal was sprawled at the loamy foot of the hill like a stepped-on spider. Twilla gave the wreckage a wide berth, convinced its pilot was lurking close by. She fingered the trigger of her gun, just in case the garou decided to end their uneasy ceasefire. Her nose twitched and she grimaced. Something stank to high heaven.

Days earlier, she’d emerged from her robotic cocoon to find the garou waiting with a filthy water bottle in one hand and a dripping honeycomb in the other. She’d gotten her first close-up look at humankind’s mortal enemy.

The garou had greenish gray, leathery skin. Garbed in a tattered robe, he seemed wild and uncivilized. His reptilian gaze was impenetrable. Trying to get a read on him was like trying to peer into Beast’s microscopic soul. He bared his teeth tentatively, offered the honeycomb and water again, and addressed Twilla in a language she didn’t speak. When she didn’t respond, he gestured purposefully again. Twilla drew her gun, circumventing him warily as she exited Beast.

She eyed the garou’s meager offering, “that supposed to be the carrot or the stick?”

The garou set the water bottle down on the ground and took a few steps back. Twilla clicked her tongue in annoyance and fired her weapon. She watched the water bottle explode.

“You’re my enemy!” she declared hotly, gaze shifting back to the garou. She remembered that one fact clearly. “My enemy. Understand?”

He’d retreated wordlessly and Twilla had seen or heard neither hide nor hair of him ever since.

She was halfway between the garou’s juggernaut and the mouth of the forest when the meaning of that god-awful stench finally registered. The fog clouding her brain instantly cleared. She stopped in her tracks and turned around. She hesitated but only briefly before drawing closer to the alien wreckage. The closer she got, the more the dead smell intensified and the more apparent it became that there was no way that the garou could have walked away from that crash completely unscathed.

She found him still sitting upright before a campfire that had long gone cold. Dried green blood crusted at his nostrils. Parts of his neck and arms were missing. Something wormy writhed in the hollow of his eye sockets. Twilla quickly backed away from the corpse, chest heaving, her mind in turmoil. There were other insects besides honey bees on E42-ALPHA, it seemed. The fearsome, flesh-eating kind.

It wasn’t just that. No, it wasn’t just that. She was alone now. Truly alone. Maybe it was just a matter of time before she succumbed to her injuries just like the garou had. She was probably going to die here, she realized with stark clarity. On this strange world. On this wild alien shore.

She turned and ran full tilt across the field of tall, blue grass. She didn’t stop running until she was back by the shoreline and sheltered under the shadow of Beast’s torso. She leaned against her robot, gasping for breath.

“Twilla,” the giant robot’s voice boomed in her ears, “I’m picking up a signal from an incoming ship.”

She didn’t answer. Tears sprang forth, stinging her eyelids. She sank to her knees and trembling, she wept.

Fiction: “Shelter”

Twilla’s Beast was hollow-bellied. The lumbering juggernaut was a comfy shelter built just for her. Light years away, in the midst of a war waged in space, an enemy warhead had blown a gaping hole into the back of its head, leaving a gnarly mess of scorched metal, wires and tubes exposed. The damage had prompted the critical system failure that had sent the massive, humanoid robot and its pilot off course and plummeting down into the planet’s atmosphere. Now, on the windward shore of planet E42-Alpha’s western continent, the metal giant knelt as if in prayer, head tilted at an odd angle, blind eyes fixed on the rising sun.

On the seventeenth morning after the crash, the young pilot awoke aboard the metal giant, hunger clawing at her gut. She reached for one of her dwindling rations but what speared in through the cracks of her faulty brain was the memory of honey, sweet and pure. Doing her damnedest to ignore the jackhammer drilling into the left side of her head, Twilla punched the green release button and thanked her lucky stars for that fact that the robot’s basic functions and AI were still intact. The hatch flew open. She tossed her boots out first then out she scrambled. She plopped down onto the pebbly ground and hauled her boots on.

She briefly contemplated her predicament. Beast was still broadcasting a distress beacon. Twilla didn’t have family to miss her, or even friends. She’d been a soldier for as long as she could remember, from the moment she was big enough to reach the controls to pilot her robot. She was simply an asset, a valuable asset. Controllers of her caliber were few and far in between so she could trust in the knowledge that someone would eventually come looking for her. All she had to do in the meantime was survive. Easy enough, she supposed, though it was the waiting that was murder.

The sky blushed. The boisterous sea was vermilion, spitting bloody froth onto the spiky teeth of the shore.

Twilla stood, woebegone morning wind tossing her messy dreadlocks about. She shucked off the sleeves of her jumper, letting the top hang loose around her waist. Her sleeveless tank top which stuck to her torso like a second skin, had seen far better days. Days of fruitless toiling under the glare of the aged sun had given her nutmeg colored face, neck, and arms an almost coppery tinge. Blood had seeped through the thick bandage wrapped around her head and dried. Hunger and the pain in her head made her unsteady on her feet.

“Watch your step.” Beast’s mechanical voice was much like the air forced out of a rusty loudspeaker.

Twilla glared up at the bossy appliance. “What are you, my mother?”

She promptly spun, tripped, and landed on her butt with a pained yelp.

“Ah—” said Beast.

“Not a word!” Twilla growled.

Crow and hunger bitter in her mouth, she sprang back to her feet and dusted off her bruised behind. She stalked over to Beast’s open maw and reached for a gun, the big one because between Twilla and the honey was the garou and his alien wreckage of a juggernaut.

Though, days earlier, the castaways had reached an unspoken agreement to refrain from trying to kill each other, Twilla didn’t trust the alien pilot as far as she could throw him. She hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the reptilian in days and that was just fine by her. She could tolerate being marooned alongside an enemy soldier or two, providing they kept out of each other’s hair. She refused to acknowledge that teeny tiny part of her that was secretly relieved that she wasn’t all alone on this failed terraforming project of a world.

She left Beast behind and headed further inland between two hills overlooking the sea. The knee-high grass was blue and smelled like burned cinnamon. At the edge of the grassy ocean, thickening clusters of spindly trees bent backwards, overburdened by their deceptively cotton candy-like foliage. Puffy clouds hung low. Twilla arched her back and shielded her brows as her gaze swung upward, scanning for maybe a silver lining. The trick was to pretend she wasn’t looking. It was important but she couldn’t quite remember why. Not that it mattered. What mattered right then was the sweet, sweet honey from the mouth of the forest.

Feeling steadier on her feet, Twilla advanced. Nimbly and as resolutely as a tiger, she clambered over jagged rocks and waded through the sea of grass into the lush maw of the hollow.

The garou’s juggernaut, a twisted and scorched heap of metal was sprawled at the loamy foot of the hill like a stepped-on spider. Twilla gave the wreckage a wide berth, convinced its pilot was lurking close by. She fingered the trigger of her gun, just in case the garou decided to end their uneasy ceasefire. Her nose twitched and she grimaced. Something stank to high heaven.

Days earlier, she’d emerged from her robotic cocoon to find the garou waiting with a filthy water bottle in one hand and a dripping honeycomb in the other. She’d gotten her first close-up look at humankind’s mortal enemy.

The garou had greenish gray, leathery skin. Garbed in a tattered robe, he seemed wild and uncivilized. His reptilian gaze was impenetrable. Trying to get a read on him was like trying to peer into Beast’s microscopic soul. He bared his teeth tentatively, offered the honeycomb and water again, and addressed Twilla in a language she didn’t speak. When she didn’t respond, he gestured purposefully again. Twilla drew her gun, circumventing him warily as she exited Beast.

She eyed the garou’s meager offering, “that supposed to be the carrot or the stick?”

The garou set the water bottle down on the ground and took a few steps back. Twilla clicked her tongue in annoyance and fired her weapon. She watched the water bottle explode.

“You’re my enemy!” she declared hotly, gaze shifting back to the garou. She remembered that one fact clearly. “My enemy. Understand?”

He’d retreated wordlessly and Twilla had seen or heard neither hide nor hair of him ever since.

She was halfway between the garou’s juggernaut and the mouth of the forest when the meaning of that god-awful stench finally registered. The fog clouding her brain instantly cleared. She stopped in her tracks and turned around. She hesitated but only briefly before drawing closer to the alien wreckage. The closer she got, the more the dead smell intensified and the more apparent it became that there was no way that the garou could have walked away from that crash completely unscathed.

She found him still sitting upright before a campfire that had long gone cold. Dried green blood crusted at his nostrils. Parts of his neck and arms were missing. Something wormy writhed in the hollow of his eye sockets. Twilla quickly backed away from the corpse, chest heaving, her mind in turmoil. There were other insects besides honey bees on E42-ALPHA, it seemed. The fearsome, flesh-eating kind.

It wasn’t just that. No, it wasn’t just that. She was alone now. Truly alone. Maybe it was just a matter of time before she succumbed to her injuries just like the garou had. She was probably going to die here, she realized with stark clarity. On this strange world. On this wild alien shore.

She turned and ran full tilt across the field of tall, blue grass. She didn’t stop running until she was back by the shoreline and sheltered under the shadow of Beast’s torso. She leaned against her robot, gasping for breath.

“Twilla,” the giant robot’s voice boomed in her ears, “I’m picking up a signal from an incoming ship.”

She didn’t answer. Tears sprang forth, stinging her eyelids. She sank to her knees and trembling, she wept.

Interview in Genesis Science Fiction Magazine

I was recently interviewed by Jarvis Sheffield M.Ed, creator and Editor in Chief of Genesis Science Fiction Magazine. The interview was published in the Summer 2017 issue.

Genesis Science Fiction Magazine highlights, celebrates, and develops science fiction, speculative fiction, sword and soul, fantasy, horror, movies, and games, in a print magazine as well as an e-mag.

Published by Jarvis Sheffield M.Ed and by Edited by Valjean Jeffers, the Summer 2017 issue of Genesis Science Fiction Magazine also features Steven Barnes, Roxanne Bland, Aaron Michael Hall, J. Darnell Johnson, Ronald T. Jones, Lin Lucas, Russell Mebane, Bill McCormick, Jessie Sifford and reviews of Darius Key By Adrian “Asia” Petty , and “Gods Of Life” (wonderful cover art) By Ervin Johnson.

Access the digital version of the Summer 2017 Issue of Genesis Science Fiction Magazine at Joomag.com.

Becoming: a Departure

Space-faring vampires and gravediggers colonize the stars while sea monsters, killer gynoids, spy androids, and mad cities inhabit the earth. Sometimes, a bug isn’t just a bug and the loudest voice might be the one you can’t hear. A hapless traveler encounters a devious monster in the backwoods; a primitive monster brings an urban nightmare to life; two mediums wrestle with their gifts and an earthbound deity haunts a distant future witch.

These and other works of fiction (a total of 31 pieces of flash fiction and short stories) have been compiled into an omnibus edition titled Becoming.

These stories are the culmination of over fifteen years of basically bumbling about in the literary world. I’ve had a great time learning, experimenting, and playing around with the craft of writing but it’s time for me to leave that all behind and take a more focused approach to the craft of writing.

That isn’t to say that I’ve learned all there is to know. In fact, I figure I’m only just starting to get into the nitty gritty of learning to write.

I won’t abandon short stories or even flash fiction but from now on, I’m putting more effort into writing (or I should say, learning to write) novels and novellas. You probably won’t see me posting fiction online as much as I used to…

In this sense, Becoming represents a departure and a new beginning for me. Nothing drastic. Just a change in my state of mind, really. I hope this continues to happen as I learn and grow as a writer.

Becoming: a Departure and a Beginning

Space-faring vampires and gravediggers colonize the stars while sea monsters, killer gynoids, spy androids, and mad cities inhabit the earth. Sometimes, a bug isn’t just a bug and the loudest voice might be the one you can’t hear. A hapless traveler encounters a devious monster in the backwoods; a primitive monster brings an urban nightmare to life; two mediums wrestle with their gifts and an earthbound deity haunts a distant future witch.

These and other works of fiction (a total of 31 pieces of flash fiction and short stories) have been compiled into an omnibus edition titled Becoming.

Becoming
$12.99
Author: Tonya R. Moore
Genres: Horror, Romance, Science Fiction, Space Opera
Tags: Futuristic, LGBT, Recommended Books, Steampunk

A 31 piece mashup of short stories and flash fiction. More info →

These stories are the culmination of over fifteen years of basically bumbling about in the literary world. I’ve had a great time learning, experimenting, and playing around with the craft of writing but it’s time for me to leave that all behind and take a more focused approach to the craft of writing.

That isn’t to say that I’ve learned all there is to know. In fact, I figure I’m only just starting to get into the nitty gritty of learning to write.

I won’t abandon short stories or even flash fiction but from now on, I’m putting more effort into writing (or I should say, learning to write) novels and novellas. You probably won’t see me posting fiction online as much as I used to… the ongoing current webserial (What the Bones Say) is an exception.

I this sense, Becoming represents a departure and a new beginning for me. Nothing drastic. Just a change in my state of mind, really. I hope this continues to happen as I learn and grow as a writer.