Publication news! My short story “The Living Land” is now available to Amazing Stories Patreon members! It should appear on the Amazing Stories website on Monday for everyone else to read.
Here’s a sneak peek:
The Living Land
by Karl El-Koura
If she could only talk to her mother, Kris thought, she could figure out what to do, what to say, what to think even. How to handle this situation like her mother, Captain Donna Lynd, would.
The situation: having long ago negotiated the exchange of fifty viable near-term embryos for a half acre on New Haven, Donna Lynd had been on the cusp of making her delivery when the ship carrying her, her daughter, and their precious cargo had crashed. Kris’s mother lay in a hospital bed, and the embryos acquired at tremendous expense and effort had perished.
And Mayor Kirchip wouldn’t let Kris see her mother, claiming she was too ill to be disturbed—or at least not until Kris signed off on voiding the deal.
He sat across from her, the mayor in his large home office with the intimidating dark wooden furniture, large bookcases displaying wooden figurines but devoid of books, and, opposite the French doors, a beautiful bay window overlooking lush green grass stretching out until the horizon.
“Kris,” he said again, sighing, no doubt his gaze passing pointedly across the large wooden desk to rest on the tablet he desperately wanted her to pick up.
He could say her name all day long. She’d keep staring out the window, at those dark brown cows grazing contentedly on the verdant hills, until she was ready to respond. That much her mother would tell her to do. “Anyone tries to change the deal, kiddo, it’s going to be on your timeline, not theirs.” And how many times had her mother said: “If someone ever tries to pressure you—yes or no, right now—the answer is always, always, always no.”
A new, chilling thought froze her body. Was she being lied to? Had her mother died in the accident, and the mayor decided to keep that knowledge from Kris until after she’d signed?
Keep reading on Amazing Stories (Patreon members).
