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There's no way into the quarantine zone
on foot, so from my wall-screened apartment
I pilot a makeshift drone to you.
A grainy screen links up with its
end-heavy camera while I steer
with an Atari controller
an uncertain hovercraft, black market bought.
Its whirring racket surely wakes your neighbors
as it hangs like an unsettled chandelier
beyond your open window.

A metal claw extends
my own addition. Hours
spent in a shelled-out workshop,
more a surgeon than an engineer,
a vital organ transplant;
exchanging air-to-surface missiles
and precision laser guidance for steel fingers,
sure and strong and harmless.
(Satellite bombardments and tactical plagues
nobody needs flying robots anymore,
not to kill.) The claw presents a twine-wrapped
package with oat bread and honey and a jug of fresh
water and pain pills in an unmarked bottle
so they will not be stolen and
rose-colored stationary with a letter
from me.

I cannot fit the machine through your window
and the grayscale video displays only pale fingers
grasping these gifts. The drone autopilots home,
while I zoom and optimize and refresh
this captured image. I need to know
the hand is yours and not some dying stranger
who takes the food
and leaves my letter
unopened.




Peter Medeiros teaches composition at Emerson College, practices Kung
Fu in Davis Square, and writes fiction and poetry over copious amounts
of coffee at Diesel Café in Somerville, Massachusetts. His work was
recently featured in Bastion Magazine, Outposts of Beyond, and Spark
IV: A Creative Anthology.
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
Issue 18 Mar 2024
Strange Horizons
Issue 11 Mar 2024
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