Welcome to Week 3 of our weekly community drabble! This week’s theme was “reinvention.”

Thank you and bravo to everyone who submitted a drabble!

Hard Reboot, Soft Core

by Gideon P. Smith

New planet, new species, new middle school. It was meant to be a new life.

Marcus tapped his wrist and Ectron flickered to life. His holo-pet’s soft glow lit up the inside of the locker they’d stuffed him into. Toilet water trickled down his neck from the latest swirlie.

“This time it was meant to be different,” Marcus whispered.

Ectron glowed a comforting green. “Self-reinvention is hard. You can’t escape your true core self.”

“I have to.”

“But why?”

“So life is not…” Marcus gestured. “This!”

Ectron’s holo-gears whirrred. “Maybe, it’s not you that must change. Maybe it’s the world.”

Offscript

by Léon Othenin-Girard

I bared my heart on stage and it was never enough. Those dead eyes in the big money booths don’t want the truth, they want reassurance; that what they believe is true, that the actors they’ve paid for will bring them more money.

No more.

New agent, new name, new face—I’ve changed it all. None of it’s mine, of course—I found a picture in a magazine and got handy, with some help: back alley surgeons are masters of their crafts, and they love new trainees.

I’ll never bare my own heart on stage again—I’ll show them someone else’s.

Fresh.

Public Transport Strategy

by Cathy de Buitleir

We sculpted and extracted, bent the stuff of the world to our will. We explored beyond our bodies’ capacity, taking more and more to sustain ourselves. Our imagination knew no restraint. Balance was a nice idea. Limits we did away with. But we could not unclog our living places. Snarled in traffic, our work impeded, progress delayed.

We made a map of the city out of sugar, laid it out in a glass dish. We dropped in fungal spores. We can no longer be trusted, we said. We must let the mould decide. Let it find us the best path.

A drabble is a story comprised of exactly 100 words.