The Hourglass Academy. First Place in New Worlds Challenge. Top Story - September 2022.
Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.
It was the opening line in one of Burton's erotic sci-fi novellas, the ones he thinks are cleverly hidden. (Hallway bookcase, top shelf, behind the encyclopedias.) I’d read it in a day; eyes scrunched, nose wrinkled in horrible fascination. But in the end it wasn’t the extraterrestrial orgy that most disturbed me, it was the thought of dying in space. Floating away, alone and untethered, into a vast nothing.
