From her perch in her ship quarters, Vis took stock of the six dark-robed viziers on her hologlass. They swept the agitated young emperor into his audience hall, their gestures staccato, their voices pitched urgent. She pulled a knee up to her chin; her anxiety sharpened as the image on the hologlass came into crystal […]

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A midsummer night, full moon overhead. Its golden light is ancient and worn. A breeze sighs through forest and over stone, bringing the echo of laughter. The song of a zither seems threaded in the wind. A boy stands outside a crumbling gate, and his face is of one lost in a dream. Slowly, he […]

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Content Advisory: murder, themes of death The apartment is near enough to the river that the walls are stained from an old flood. The murderer—I can’t remember his name, but it doesn’t matter—unlocks the front door, throwing a glance toward the neighbor’s windows. It’s mid-afternoon on a Tuesday. No one is home. “I don’t know […]

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Content advisory – attempted suicide, self-harm, emotional abuse, and homophobia. Uniform and her sisters sat in a circle. They had altered their customary cinema-style Space to a much smaller room. With its drab light-green walls, all they needed to do was trade their chairs for a bed, a TV, two foldable chairs and a drawer […]

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I’m not here to tell you lilac-scented stories of the Fair Folk; do not ask such things of me. Though it is true that I know more of them than any other mortal here, I can promise you that they are not fair in any sense of the word, and many of them are barely […]

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“This is the worst night of my life, but I’m only fifteen.” Dad regards me indecipherably from the couch, his sweet potato chip pausing in midair. “I’m being optimistic, actually,” I tell him. “Today is the worst night of my life, but in a decade it won’t even be top ten.” He flicks the chip […]

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I met up with Manny Valez at Rocco’s Irish Tavern in Somerville, a bar that had been a hangout for our group of mutual friends back when we were in college, mostly due to the bar’s lax policies on carding. It had been a rancid, skanky dive back then, but it had since gone into […]

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With so few schools for uninfected children left, that meant I was out of a job—until the government passed the No Infected Left Behind Act. Teaching a class of forty teenagers who are developmentally-disabled cannibals isn’t as bad as it sounds. Really, they act out less than the average high school student. And the job […]

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At first, the calls from the dead helped out a lot—parents decades lost to cancer finally able to cry to their kids, you made me so proud. Sure, closure is mostly a bullshit torture device. But tell that to someone who just got their first night’s sleep in months after a sister who died of […]

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