• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

M. Darusha Wehm

Explorer of Worlds Real and Imagined

  • News
  • Buy Books
    • Digital Download Store
    • Get Paperbacks
  • Podcasts
  • About
    • Bio
    • Demographic Info
    • Bibliography
    • Press Kit
    • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
  • Short Stories
    • Bodies at Rest, Bodies in Motion
    • Fire. Escape. – Sample
    • The Foreigner
    • Major Tom and the Lucky Lady
    • The Interview
    • Lucidity
    • Fame
    • Chekhov’s Phaser
    • Career Opportunities
  • Science Fiction
    • Beautiful Red
    • Children of Arkadia
    • Andersson Dexter
      • Self Made
      • Act of Will
      • The Beauty of Our Weapons
      • Pixels and Flesh
    • Modern Love and other stories
    • The Voyage of the White Cloud
    • Retaking Elysium
    • The Qubit Zirconium
  • Mainstream Fiction
    • Devi Jones’ Locker
      • Packet Trade
      • Sea Change
      • Storm Cloud
      • Floating Point
    • The Home for Wayward Parrots
  • Anthologies
    • KeyForge: Tales From the Crucible
    • Trans-Galactic Bike Ride
    • Fireweed: Stories from the Revolution
    • Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume I
    • The Dame Was Trouble
    • Dystopia Utopia Short Stories
    • Science Fiction Short Stories
    • Procyon Press Science Fiction Anthology 2016
    • Use Only As Directed
  • Games/Interactive
    • The Martian Job
    • Alexander Systems
    • You Do You
    • if ink could flow backward
  • Books

Beautiful Red – Sample

Chapter One

The figure stood beside Jack’s bed and looked down at her sleeping form. Maybe she sensed his presence because she turned ever so slightly.

He leaned toward her, his 5 o’clock shadow nearly scratching against her chin. “Good morning, Jack,” he said, his voice low and gravelly.

“What the fuck!” Jack woke up immediately, terrified and energized by the unexpected presence in her bedroom. She sprang toward the figure, jumping through his body and punching a button on the console sitting on the table at the side of her bed. The image of the intruder flickered once, twice, then disappeared.

Jack sat on the side of her bed, panting with exertion and adrenaline. “This alarm clock sucks,” she said aloud, even though she was alone in the room. “That was no ‘seductive stranger’,” she said, reading the currently selected setting on the holographic Personal Wake-Me-Up unit by her bed. She punched a few buttons and selected ‘chirping birds’ from the scrolling menu of options charmingly titled “Who do you want to wake you up?”.

“With my luck it’s a fucking swarm of vultures.” Jack hit save, blinked a few times and around her room.

The sun, such as it was, peeked through the window as the ’glass automatically turned from opaque to translucent. There hadn’t been a decently bright day in years; it had been so long that Jack wondered if it were one of those nostalgic false memories that old people were notorious for sharing with anyone who would listen. “Back in my day,” they would say, “the sky was blue and so was the ocean and everyone was happy and healthy and beautiful.”

Bullshit, Jack thought. The air was always full of crap, even when she was a kid. Sure, it might have been bright, but it still stank and made people sick. At least no one got sick anymore. The vaccines took care of that.

Jack stood up and walked the ten paces to her tiny bathroom. She did what she needed to do then stripped off her underpants and turned on the shower. After washing the night’s grime off both her body and the bathroom, she dried off under the blower and wandered over the eating area.

Calling it a kitchen would be an insult to the concept. She grabbed a breakfast bar out of the economy sized box near the fridge and slopped coffee into her cup. She pulled her uniform out of her autoclave and got dressed. Fucking blue daisy, she thought, distastefully, looking at the logo of her employer embossed on the back pocket of her regulation trousers. She wondered, not for the first time, if anyone at Bellis International had ever even seen a real daisy — blue, green or any other colour.

Read on a single page

Pages: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7

Primary Sidebar

Retaking Elysium cover

Retaking Elysium

Mars is good place to reinvent yourself, isn’t it?

Jules Morales’s life has always been a state of contact change. When the opportunity comes up, why not take a trip to Mars to work on the platinum mining operation—and make a load of money? But what if there is more to Mars than just a payday and an adventure?

The woman now calling herself Lisa Marie has spent her whole life trapped by the struggle to make ends meet, and sometimes held hostage by her own memories. On Mars she might finally find financial security, but will she also find something to care about today, and maybe even for the future?

Learn More

Free Stories

Lucidity

last night I had the most wonderful dream Carly moaned softly in her sleep, and rolled over. She dreamed and dreamed, and when she woke, she found that she still had the lingering shadow of a … Read More... about Lucidity

Major Tom and the Lucky Lady

I was balancing a cup of tea in one hand, while hanging on to the side of the companionway hatch with the other. I climbed into the cockpit sideways, compensating for the roll of the boat. I was only … Read More... about Major Tom and the Lucky Lady

Fame

"Pupusas?" The woman's nasal voice reached Randall at the back of the bus before he saw her pushing her way down the aisle. He could smell the warm, raw meat smell of his own sweaty body, and his … Read More... about Fame

Publications

  • . ….. ..story .. time
  • A Most Elegant Solution
  • A Most Elegant Solution (audio)
  • A Wish and a Hope and a Dream
  • Alexander Systems
  • Fear of Lying
  • Force Nine
  • Good Hunting
  • Home Sick
  • Home Sick (audio)
  • Homecoming
  • I Open My Eyes
  • if ink could flow backward
  • Microfiction @Thaumatrope
  • Modern Love
  • Modern Love (audio)
  • Preventative Maintenance
  • recursion
  • Reflections on a Life Story
  • Showing the Colours (audio)
  • The Care and Feeding of Mammalian Bipeds, v. 2.1
  • The Interview
  • War Profiteering
  • War Profiteering (audio)
  • we are all energy

Footer

Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Connect

  • Email
  • RSS

Other Writing

Poetry

  • . ….. ..story .. time
  • 140 and Counting
  • creation myth
  • Force Nine
  • if ink could flow backward
  • recursion
  • we are all energy

Non-fiction

  • 90ways.com

Copyright © 2021 M. Darusha Wehm