The cross is bigger than he remembers. Its tumescent beams stand atop the church’s peaked steeple, their size symbolic of great sacrifice, the ruptured cement below roasting in the fire of a four o’clock sun. Carlos sits in the crumbling Chevy, windows rolled up, desperate to feel every inch of the heat. Blood-warm apprehension pools in the […]

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On April 10, 1893, a Monday, Beth Leather shot the moon. The moon came down like a medicine cabinet. It came down with broken hinges and the bottles spilling miracle tonic. The corks popped out and the cherry cough syrup sloshed into the laudanum and only the thick-glass bottoms were left unbroken. When the moon […]

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The thin gray webs stretching across Aunt Melissa’s hand hadn’t been there the night before. Her condition wasn’t supposed to be contagious, but I went to the kitchen for some latex gloves anyway. If these webs were a new stage, all the procedures might change. There was still so much we didn’t know about the […]

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“They’re calling it Valles Fever.” The words came from the nursing station, on the other side of Abe’s curtained-off area. “Five more admitted today.” Kala shifted in the hard chair, rotating the discomfort to a new part of her body. Abe’s breathing hitched. Kala’s feet hit the floor, and she scooted towards him. Her fingers […]

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If it hadn’t been for the camel, Mithun might never have noticed the old balloon seller at all. He almost didn’t notice the camel either. If he’d been looking for it, he probably wouldn’t have. Like so many other parts of Northern India, Qaisarbagh Bazaar wasn’t so much a place that time forgot as much […]

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1. John stood and gunned up his courage. “We need to talk.” Colophinanoc’s manipulator digits didn’t stop their movement, their rhythmic squirming in and out and around the small basket he made. The eyes, the two at the top, swiveled toward John, the antennae dropped back—something John had learned was one of a dozen shows […]

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1. The child’s ayah said it was high spirits, a paroxysm of affection, but the truth was simple: the envoy’s daughter killed my dog. She wanted Ìsho the moment she saw him, his flat nose and panting pink tongue and goggle eyes poking out of my sleeve. I was deliberately too dense to take the […]

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by Vanessa Fogg   It was an old network of intelligences, one of the first, and the bulk of its physical embodiment was housed on a ship orbiting a planet of perpetual windstorms and violet lightning. Some of the network’s intelligences busied themselves on this world, drifting through sulfur-tinged clouds and sampling a rich stew […]

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There are only two ways to leave the mistress’s menagerie. One is through death, the other is love. Both are tricks. All of us prisoners buried within the menagerie’s pristine fractals are here by virtue of our skills. Fire keeps me alive, and the guests entertained. If the mistress knew my real skill, well. How […]

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Mr. Electrico had once believed he was going to live forever. And as he sat on one corner of a spare bed at his grandson’s house–a bed which his pained lower back signaled was somehow far harder than the string of cots which to his far younger self had seemed so soft–he looked down at […]

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