Alexander Burns lives in Denton, Texas, and writes because he doesn’t have a basement in which to build robots or time machines. His work has appeared at Every Day Fiction, The Future Fire, Big Pulp, and other fine online journals.
AR-D6 was first on the scene, bursting through the door to find a little girl and a corpse smeared with blood. The girl looked up with a tear-streaked face and asked if mommy was okay. Her name was Tallulah, age… Continue Reading
Iona, on duty at ten minutes to midnight, smiled over her cup of coffee. Everything was running smoothly. She closed her eyes and listened to the machine hum. Encased in rows of transparent tubes, volunteers slept while verisimilitude engines pumped… Continue Reading
Antideuterium tablets flashed as they tumbled from Yuri’s shovel into the Theresa’s furnace. Exhausted, he staggered to the water bucket. Water poured down his chest and splashed to the floor, curling into steam around his boots. On a viewscreen he… Continue Reading
The knights wore the finest steel, forged in dragon flame, cooled by the tears of the war priests. It did them no good. Hundreds lay dead in this nameless field, fifty leagues from the beloved Imperial capitol. Their horses lay… Continue Reading
Angela sat across from him, beautiful in her weird, skinny, features-all-too-long way. Comedian beautiful. He thought about her hips and spun his coffee cup in a little ring of its own guts. She hadn’t touched her plate of breakfast tacos.… Continue Reading
The prisoner possessed an incredible capacity for anguish. We crushed entire galaxies, literally crushed them beneath our boots (BOOTS device of course but who can remember what the acronym stands for?), and he would not give up his associates. So… Continue Reading
December, 1963 The Etch A Sketch nearly passed through Martin’s hands without a second glance, but his neighbor jabbed him with an elbow. Martin froze at the image of the starburst drawn in grey plastic. “It’s Aaron,” his neighbor, Sanjeet,… Continue Reading
Play this podcast now: Podcast EDF012 — “Aftershocks” by Alexander Burns, read by M.Sherlock “Aftershocks” was originally published in EDF on May 22, 2008, and is included in The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008. Alexander Burns is hoping someone… Continue Reading
Ike Garrison staggered from his bunk to the small sink on the opposite wall of his cabin, awoken from a fitful sleep by an abrupt jerk of the ship. He grasped the sink to steady himself and felt the unmistakable… Continue Reading
It is, I believe, day seven of my time here. Every part of me aches. My captor, ever cheerful despite my agony, has no end of ways to inflict pain. I was caught just outside that little deli on 4th.… Continue Reading