By Michael Schaper

I, alone, saw the tree kill the boy.

The little guy was just standing there, leaning up against the trunk, out of breath. They were all playing hide and seek on the school oval, and he'd dashed over into the bush as soon as the counting started.

I don't know much about trees, but it was just right for hiding behind. A bit like a gum tree, but still different. Massive trunk.

By David Scholes

Earth
Some Time in the Future

It is a quiet area now.

The motorcycle gang that once hung around is gone, and the street kids have moved over about eight blocks or more to safety. The brothel isn't there any more, either. Nor are the drug dealers, or the several corrupt cops that had made life so easy for them.

By Paulette Smythe

You don't want to stare too long into that curtain or gaze too intently at the pattern printed upon it, for you may fall into its weave and find yourself lost in an undulating sea of coloured thread, a place where hidden things are animated in the gaps between the seams.

By Tonia Marlowe

Once upon a space-time there was a bloke called ?&*$?#@. Well, he wasn't exactly a bloke, more an entity. Sort of an ephemeral thing, not at all human.

By Giorgio Montanari

The men had worked all morning. On the eastern side, the once-thick shadow cast by a mossy stone-wall had receded and disappeared.

By Gaines Post

Ani had started with plans for a redberry tree, but the resulting runty bush and the shrivelled black things hanging from it were nothing like the beautiful explosion of red lush berriness she had envisioned. That was her first lesson about design-your-own genome kits; since then she had tried a couple of other brands, but none of them was as "fool proof" as it advertised.