Movie Star

Sunglasses don't make the movie star, but any screen icon worthy of the name looks damn good in them. Rutherford Love knew this for a fact and was no exception.

He glided through the airport hidden from prying eyes. All the ordinary people passed by never realizing how close to greatness they were, stroked by the soft brush of fame. As long as the polycarbonate lenses covered his piercing blue eyes, he could travel completely incognito.

He didn't understand the physics behind their power, but there was no denying he was completely invisible.

"Mr. Love, can I get a selfie?"

Whodunnit

Elementary knowledge of physics and chemistry saved the life of Lord Sherlock.

This was a case of national security, something to do with secrecy about canons. All the evidence had shown that state secrets were sold to a foreign power.

Judge Lestrade certainly would have found him guilty and would have sentenced him to the firing squad if it hadn’t been for the world famous detective Moriarty and his brilliant assistant Mrs Hudson. They countered all the incriminating material which now acquitted the accused and finally they revealed what no one could have ever suspected: Watson, the butler, did it.

From Guest Contributor Hervé Suys

Hervé Suys (°1968 – Ronse, Belgium) started writing short stories whilst recovering from a sports injury and he hasn’t stopped since. Generally he writes them hatless and barefooted.

Moon Shot

You can open your eyes now. The walls are covered in scribbled physics equations. Nothing wrong with that, but someone has to get on that rocket and get blown up, maybe. Take it from me, you don’t want to overlook product warnings (“Do not insert in rectum or vagina using fingers or mechanical device.”). Awareness is just so important. Everything happens too fast, as if hurled in irrational anger by the hand of God, though it’s really fluid dynamics. Even a momentary lapse in concentration can result in the sky cracking, dripping, burning, and the blue of night remaining unsolved.From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.

Infinity

Duncan had considered trying out an infinity mirror experiment, but taking even a box camera into a photo booth had always seemed so...uncouth.

He’d shelved the whole idea down into a little dark corner of his timidity.

Only the recent spate of high risk narcissistic selfies had managed to prise open that dungeon of shyness and resuscitate the notion.

Smartphone ideal for purpose – persuading himself that he was so much more cerebral than sneering losers – he climbed into the photo booth and popped a coin into the slot.

He timed everything perfectly and vanished up the orifice of physics.

From Guest Contributor Perry McDaid

Coursework

"Professor, here's my coursework."

"I see. Have you been hitting the bars in the Kuiper belt again."

"Well, maybe."

"And you traveled at what fraction of the speed of light?"

"Zero point nine nine seven."

"Applying the Lorenz factor, how much extra time passed in the Earthframe of reference compared to your personal frame of reference?"

"Erm, maybe three days."

"Did you travel out to the Kuiper belt at the same speed?"

"Yes."

"That's six days more that time progressed on Earth compared to yourpersonal frame of reference. When was the coursework deadline, Mr.Physics Student?"

"Oh shit."

From Guest Contributor Ross Clement

My Grandfather's Pocket Knife

When he asked me to guess what he had in his pocket, I had no idea he was carrying a star. An honest-to goodness star, not some chunk of comet or a bit of dust.

I didn't believe him. When he opened his pocket, all I could see was a determined blackness threatening to pull me into its bleakness and never let go. He said this was a black hole, and after he explained the physics of it all, it seemed he was telling the truth.

I realized just how woefully unprepared I was for show and tell.

The Grandfather Paradox

They had told Christopher that time travel was impossible, that it violated the laws of physics. It took twenty years of obsession, but he proved them wrong.

Christopher had always been that way. Whatever walls surrounded him, he knocked them down. He remembered what Grandfather Warren had said, that he would never amount to anything. The insult burned at him every day, spurring him on.

So it was with great regret he discovered there was one law of physics he would never be able to break. No matter how hard he tried, Christopher was never able to kill Grandfather Warren.

Palimpsest

They are faint echoes coloring every moment of my continued existence. You can't call them memories, not exactly, because they never actually occurred. They are more like dreams. Or possibilities.

Either way, I am haunted.

They say--and by they, I mean the quantum physicists--that prior to its observation, a particle exists in superposition, in every possible quantum state simultaneously. I know this to be true. My world, ever since the moment of the accident, has become superpositioned. There is the world in which she died, or the world in which she's still alive, and they exist in parallel.