Futurismic has relaunched its original fiction section with a fantastic short story by Eliot Fintushel, a brilliantly funny and deeply weird sf writer. The story's called "Uxo, Bomb Dog."
It was a comical sight, if not for the stakes: Volkovoy, dull gray heap, like a breaching whale, trundled and pivoted, roared and smoked, extruding claws and spades and hammers. It plowed up the sod. Now and then, if it couldn't defuse a dinger, Volkovoy flashed and shook, encasing and detonating the thing, then dropping it out the back, busted metal dung. Meanwhile, Uxo, sweetie, his tail curled back like the tongue of a letter "Q," walked and sniffed and walked. His smart flat face was matted and dirty, but when he yipped and looked back at me and the kids – "A bomb here, boss!" he seemed to say. "Look how good I am!" – his eyes were full of light. Then I'd tiptoe out to fetch the dinger and disable it. He knew not to lick me then.
The bombs in Sheep's Meadow were easy and few. That's the great thing about your Neo-Luddites: their effectiveness as terrorists is limited by their disdain for the machine. (We share that.) Of course, it only takes one mine – or the rumor of one – to put forty acres off limits. They'd done a neat job of quarantining Central Park, you'll have to grant, with a little TNT and a lot of tongue wag.
