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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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. […]

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Content warning: sexual content, brief torture For years, rumors of past illusionists drifted in these planes of silt and gravel like faint breezes; tales of tricksters summoning spirits with shiny wands, of hags trapping ghosts into slabs of dark glass, of shamans conjuring images of an antiquity unknown through the tips of their metallic staves; […]

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I – TOMATO DISTRICT Mezie adjusted the glasses on the bridge of his nose and tried to look inconspicuous as he stalked the back alleys of Tomato District. This side of town, apartment blocks were squeezed so tightly together they were often misconstrued for large living complexes. The congestion meant everybody knew everybody, and his […]

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1. The Voru Throughout the four years I had photographed the Voru shapeshifter, Cuzwast, I never knew that he had another family across the galaxy or how they got word of his death. But they came looking for answers while I, on the other hand, had been looking for a way out of the rain. […]

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“They are so handsome, these soldiers, it’s hard to keep away from them.” “Well, see that you take precautions next time,” George Morris washed his hands as his patient buttoned up their shirt. “You don’t need a lecture on sexual health. At your age, no less!”       “Perhaps I might need a remedial course. The […]

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When the ship restarts my newly thawed brain, the first thing I do is panic. I open my eyes and see the star-spattered void, and I pinwheel and tumble, trying to swim in microgravity like an idiot. I drift out of the open lid of the stasis bed, dizzy and nauseated. I finally manage to […]

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