In honor of Violet Lichen's upcoming collection, ECO24: The Year's Best Speculative Ecofiction, out on November 18th, we hosted a microfiction contest inviting you to draw inspiration from our natural world. We got some amazing submissions, and after much trial and tribulation, narrowed it down to a top three. In third place was "One Last Resort on Station Ciel-13" by Nadine Aurora Tabing. You can read the piece and learn more about Nadine below! Congratulations to Nadine!
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"One Last Resort on Station Ciel-13"
By Nadine Aurora Tabing
She'd run the gauntlet of pills, herbs, diets, therapies physical and emotional and electric. Finally, eighty-four studies later, Patient S—the only first-gen individual still cited in post-Earth human growth studies—had one experimental treatment left.
"It's painful," the researcher warned. "Maybe more than what you feel all the time."
"That's the point, right?" She gazed out the station window. Earth was floating by again, an endless spray of brown debris barnacled by skyscrapers, cratered by asteroid rubble.
"I hated these as a kid," he continued. "Always on my lola's gardenias. Can't believe this is one of the insects we saved."
The researched uncupped a gloved hand to reveal: a caterpillar, crowned with spikes. It crept, unbothered by the artificial gravity that was supposedly to blame for her muscles developing no stronger than a breakfast wafer. A bug could handle what her body couldn't; she needed a world that didn't exist anymore, a world she only knew from books.
Time to get this venom therapy or whatever over with. Cringing, she raised her forearm one... Three... Five inches, to meet the caterpillar's spikes.
She screamed. The researcher yanked the caterpillar back.
"No!" She cried. "Wait—"
The—pain—
She expected simple torment: stinging, stabbing. Instead, pain gnashed like fire, overwhelmed her paltry muscular agonies. An archipelago of welts bloomed. To show the researcher, she raised her forearm, one...
Five...
Ten inches.
And held it, steady.
"Serena," the researcher gasped.
She wasn't listening. The pain surged, throbbing, to her head. Eyes shut, she saw—not the station's beiges and blue lights—but an afternoon green and gold. Sunlit insects hummed past, not on dusty air, but flower-fragrant breezes.
It hurt.
That's how it would have been—wouldn't it? Crouched in soil—reaching for a gardenia, easy—grasping a rich palmful of venom.
Serena opened her eyes. With her other hand, she reached.
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Nadine Aurora Tabing is a writer, artist, and shiba inu enthusiast whose short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Reckoning, Flash Fiction Online, Worlds of Possibility, and others. Her writing has been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She can be found online at suchnadine.com.
