It is the aftermath of the world’s end, and nine birds–nine suns–lie dead while Houyi cradles the curve of her bow, her fingers locking around the taut hardness of its string. The tenth sun, the last, has fled. Chastise them, Dijun said, a father’s plea. But there is the land and the horror and the […]
The drums in the street called the Escola out and led them, pied-piper-like, down the hill to where the buses waited. Letícia looked up from her book–paper, ancient, but all she could afford–and felt a single tear roll down her cheek, cool in the February heat. Her sister Flavia poked her head into the room. […]
The dragon painter came to Jvir and drank the sea, sang with the sands, swallowed the sun and breathed it out on Rowanhill – Song from Jvir Gabrielle’s face had always needed improvement. In the mornings, she worked face cream into her skin, smoothing over bumps and cracks, over the too-dry and too-moist places. She […]
I admonish you, for the love you bear me and I for the three of you. Let the following pages be seen by no eyes but yours. The first thing Annie Sheridan said when she regained consciousness was, ‘You bitches again!’ She was still in the process of dying—or at least it must have felt […]
When my daughter was born, her eyes were blue. Sometimes I wonder whether they would have stayed blue, or turned brown, like her mother’s. ~~~ If I were to write a guide to many-worlds travel (which is about the last thing I’d ever do), it would start, and end, with: “Don’t.” But if you would […]
I met Ms. Adrienne E. Jackstar on a warm summer day of 2020. I was about a third of the way through my route delivering supplies to the elderly and other pandemic-homebound for our local mutual aid society when I came to a dark-blue shingle house made small by large ones all around. Behind a […]
Content warning: War PTSD, suicide ideation The fingers of the dead scraped along the bottom of the skiff: brittle, dull taps that could’ve almost—almost—been sticks were this any other lake. Behind Teiz’s spot near the prow, water splished in time with Gapo’s oar-strokes. A fat-bellied glass lantern lit their course, the light glinting off the […]
The sacred duty of every door spirit is to let in what must be let in, to keep out what must be kept out, and faithfully guard the threshold of all things. How well they uphold the integrity of the passage will be reflected in their next life. One The door spirit first came into […]
For Jari — the adaptor and tester of these recipes, here’s to many more cooking-writing adventures together ~~~ A POTFUL OF LAKESIDE TALES Containing Twelve Recipes both Sweet and Savoury Said Recipes being paired with Strange Tales from the Northern Lakes by Mistress Ember of-Alder-House. Imprinted at Fairdon-town, by Marcus Scriven, for Cloudberry of-Alder-House. 1664. […]
Content warning: sexual content, drug use Lydia’s heat-swollen and sweat-sticky legs prickled under Creepy Clerk’s green-eyed gaze. Ignoring them, she filled her empty bottle from the water cooler, then chugged its contents until the aftertaste of vomit was gone. She knew what she must look like. Her eyes felt gritty, and the green-colored contacts she’d […]