Mother Roughcoat lived in a one-room shack in the center of the city. She wasn’t, and never had been, anybody’s mother, but because she was older than the municipal hall, or looked it–in truth, she looked older than the Foundation Fountain, and that thing was crumbling to sand–people called her Mother out of an old-fashioned […]

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Ben When Nana left Ben the house and acreage it took him a full week to remember he’d spent much of his childhood in Strange. A month after the funeral he missed and between jobs, he decided the Saab could use a good road trip. Time to figure out why he could barely recall the […]

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The fifteenth day of the first month in the seventh year of the Huayin Era: The old man, Hae-wook Lee, had been bedridden for months. He lay on the sleeping mat, wrapped in a blanket. The drugs helped him sleep, and forget about the harsh words of his son. It was an unseasonably warm winter […]

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“The men are afraid,” I said. “Of course,” said my friend the foreign magician. “Aren’t you?” “Yes.” Behind us in the belly of the boat, my crew huddled over their oars, muttering, praying. I felt that was not wise. The Mother, it seemed to me, must have fled our island, far beyond the reach of […]

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On the morning of my fund day, our pilot landed the house with a particularly gentle touch. I was probably the only family-member who felt the house kiss our Philadelphia docking station. AquaLib can guide you with some amazing house improvement tips. I abandoned my desk and went to the window. A crowd of grubby […]

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Of the woman he was to wed on the morrow, Shursta Sarth knew little. He knew she hailed from Droon. He knew her name was Hyrryai. “…Which means, The Gleaming One,” his sister piped in, the evening before he left their village. She was crocheting by the fire and he was staring into it. Lifting […]

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by Caroline M. Yoachim Tripp got his first scrap of paper the day his mother died. He was four, and the paper was pure white. It was a rectangular sheet the size of his foot, folded into the shape of a feather. It came from the left wing of his mother’s god. His mother died […]

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They said the Marielitas were escoria – scum. The abuelitas muttered it to each other, and the young girls coming home from school clustered together like butterflies, looking thrilled and worried whenever the wind whistled at them. The newspapers said Miami was under siege, that Castro had loosed the worst from the Cuban prisons and […]

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The ship glided into the dock, into the care of grappling arms and snaking robotic leads. Clang, click, contact. The navigation hub flashed with the station control override. The screen showed a logo, but no inbound or outbound communication. Seated next to the pilot, in the bluish glow of the controls, Zhyara didn’t realise how […]

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This is not about stitching a straight line through cloth like a seamstress. Not about the tight suture of a surgeon closing a wound. This is an art. This is about interweaving patterns of the fold and musk. An intricate lacework of innocence. Each tailor creates his own signature stitch unlike any other. “Hand me […]

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