RJ Astruc

RJ lives half way around the world. In fact, as I write this, it's already tomorrow where she lives. Her contribution to Resistance Front is a short called "Ghosts of Los Hellas" based on her Harmonica + Gig book series.

Harmonica & Gig is available
on Amazon.com now!

Five Stars

The neighbour’s new car

was a dream in chrome.

I saw it first in motion,

this bright blade of sunlight slicing through suburbia,

our dullness,

our indolence,

our dreary lives,

reflected and refracted in its mirrored grill.

At once I knew I wanted my own,

needed it, craved it,

but it was too expensive,

prohibitively so;

in the catalogues they called the car

the machine of millionaires

and quoted its worth in six-zero instalments.

So I printed my own,

downloading the design,

and feeding it into the copier

piece by piece,

first the wheels

then the chassis

then the fat plugs and ports of the engine.

For the finish I used enamel paints.

My model was so convincing -

you could hardly tell which was

the copy and which the copied,

the print versus the printed –

that I gave the torrent site five stars

and praised the quality in a short comment.

RJ Astruc is the author of Harmonica + Gig, A Festival of Skeletons, and an independent release, Clockworld. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, Abyss & Apex, Daily Science Fiction, and many other magazines. She lives in New Zealand.

Visit R.J.'s website:  www.rachelastruc.com