Chapter One I drove into Deepcalm, the single small town on the edge of Lake Caill, peering through veils of rain for my hotel. Then my tires left the ground and the world fell away. It was rainy. I had been driving too fast and with no thought for the rain on the road. I […]
To: Her prestige Navaneth Anassa, High Imperatrix & First Keeper of the Institute of Erudition [9th Ring, Inner Order] Your scholarly eminence, Even now this unworthy hand trembles with excitement at your impending arrival to the Telperi flower’s research site. Upon hearing the High Imperatrix herself had accepted my invitation to witness the flora’s deadly […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
When Lyssa the Fair swept into the greenhouse, I knew right away she was bad news. First of all, she’d bypassed my security system at the front of the store which, okay, consisted of a bell on a string and a retired cat-demigod-librarian napping on the job. But the bell should’ve tripped. Instead, the famed […]