Issue 2 of PJ Holden's A4 - a free micro fiction 'zine. This issue contains the stories: Death Awaits, Love at its Core, Body-Fu, Tok Tik, A Reflection of You, The Shimmering Tower and Command

Download the PDF Here

Thoughts on the stories:

Death Awaits

Simple really, sitting waiting and thinking Death will be the last to go, right?

Love At Its Core

I think this was an early candidate for issue 1, thinking about lifeforms that might live in a lava (not laval) form, swarming through the heat and what happens when the leave that.

Body-Fu

Came out of a tweet/x/skeet (one of them things) that was better than this story if I'm entirely honest by David Ayo. It did make me laugh though to think of how deadly serious someone could exclaim how they'd kill you with a look.

Tok Tik

Feel like this is a hoary old chestnut, but you know, the theme of this entire thing is hoary old scifi chestnuts told with a minimum of words, so that's fine.

A Reflection of You

Honestly not sure this one works, I was trying to get across that someone was strangling their own clone, while also talking about how much it resembled their reflection in the water, in the end I couldn't pull the words together without really making it seem like a suicide note or something, so I went explicit with it. And added the illustration which might make it clearer (or less clear? who knows)

The Shimmering Tower

This is a deeply condensed version of a much longer comic I was toying with, a conan the barbarian who it turns out is actually the medic from a dimension hopping ship but he's somehow forgot until he returns to the tower. Who knows, I may come back to it.

Command

Two stories which heavily imply self extinction was a bit much, but this was the one that I changed the least. Who knows what the commander did. Just simply go mad? We may never know...