Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight

There has been no daylight in Brisbane for five years, a hundred and twenty-three days, and fifteen hours. People have learned to adapt.Mika makes his living hustling blackmarket daylight to Brisbane's rich and powerful, but he'd prefer to spend his days hanging out at his favourite cafe. When he gets his latest delivery of product, all he wants is enough cash to buy cup of real coffee and coast through the next few months of darkness. Then his little sister makes a request for half his product, because Pavio has built a machine that might be able to replace the long-vanished sun. All she needs is a little fuel to get things started, and the good sense to avoid the authorities who monitor the daylight trade.Caught between profit, love for his sister, and fear for her safety, Mika needs to make a decision about how to use his stash...and then accept the consequences for what happens next.Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight is the second short story in the Short Fiction Lab series from Brain Jar Press—home to stand-alone short story experiments in fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fabulist literature. This experiment has been filed under: weird dystopias; strange science; and mismatched siblings.