‘Projections’ by Kim Harbridge

In ‘Projections’, Kim Harbridge takes us under the dome and shines a light on a not-too-difficult-to-imagine future. Watch as two generations make use of two very different technologies to find meaning and connection, fresh from the pages of Pulp Literature Issue 27, Summer 2020.

Projections 

by Kim Harbridge

The projector wouldn’t turn on, no matter what Grant tried. He kicked the machine, more out of frustration than a sincere attempt to get the thing working. This was not what he needed tonight.  

It had been a hard week. The latest predictions from the climate summit, the news of the floods in the city. He came home rattled each night, unsure how to discuss the day’s new horrors with his granddaughter, or if he should even try. The girl seemed unfazed, and why shouldn’t she be? She had spent her young life preparing for this world, toting emergency kits in her backpack, ducking under desks for weekly drills. She had grown up under a dark sky, was accustomed to it. She couldn’t be nostalgic for something she’d never experienced.

He told himself he did it for her, the Friday night backyard ritual with the projector. But while he was out there that evening, heading into the second hour of trying to get the projector working, she was in the kitchen, eyes fixed on her phone. She hadn’t even noticed this disruption of their normal routine. What little consolation the projector offered, Grant realized, it offered to him alone. He fell into the lawn chair next to the silent projector, rubbed his sore left shoulder, and looked up. The plastic sheeting over the dome’s frame fluttered loose at one seam, and between the flaps he could make out a sliver of the dark, smoggy sky overhead. 

He’d seen advertisements for places you could go to see the real thing. A two-day drive up north, where there were no lights, no phones, no smokestacks, no fires. Where you could breathe clean air, sleep under a sky that resembled the one he had grown up gazing at. A sky that was impossible to see in the city. 

To find out what happens next, pick up your copy of Pulp Literature Issue 27, Summer 2020 here!

Kim Harbridge writes strange little stories from her home in Surrey, British Columbia. Her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Accenti Magazine, AE Micro, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and has been awarded a Burnaby Writers’ Society Prize and a Chester Macnaghten Prize. You can find her on twitter as @kimharbridge.