Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

Modified animals, Frankensteined by home-lab kid enthusiasts with a gene kit and an incubator. Ismail’s pet dragon, a sad creature adapted from a Canary Islands Lagarto Gigante de la Gomera, part-meched with fire-breathing apparatus; the poor thing, coughing fire, had been nicknamed "Chamudi" by the boy, despite all evidence to the contrary, for there was nothing cute about it.

Space was full of questions, life was a sentence always ending in an ellipsis or a question mark. You couldn’t answer everything. You could only believe there were answers at all.

wealthy enough to travel, poor enough to care, the world’s middle class revolutionaries,

But he knew, too, that there is more than one story in the world at a time; and that her story was not his. Their stories had entwined, but they had different trajectories, different conclusions. He could only hope the two stories would not separate.