“The air in my house tastes like sugar and the floors are sticky,” said Amnandi Khumalo. “Amnandi…” “Unina, you say I should be honest!” She wanted to cry, for she was lonely, yet she refused to allow a single tear to form, no matter how painful a witch’s sharp recollection made things. “What did they […]
When Jess died, Amy gave over her body without a second thought. They were lucky, the doctor said. He showed Amy how close the steering wheel had come to denting Jess’s cranium, shattering the bridge of her nose, pushing bone fragments into her fragile frontal lobe, bruising the precious neural tissue that let Jess talk […]
PRIMARY Rage, if it could be called that, crackled in the interstices between Azimuth’s aluminum alloy and her false skin. Below the balcony where she stood, her siblings moved in time with Mother’s orders as if they had no more soul than tools she’d used to build them. The pull of Mother’s commands pulsed […]
Countdown: Because in a universe of infinite possibilities unlikely coincidences happen constantly, the end of the world and the Devil Squid pre-show staging start at the same time. 5: The pirate battle cruiser Eminence of Yatii-et and Their Infinite Mercy of Blood enters high Earth orbit, completely undetected due to its advanced spectral reflectance field. […]
The protestors are the same crew as yesterday and the day before. Ava doesn’t know any of their names, of course. She doesn’t know what happened in their pasts to make them so energized about keeping people from eating the food at Mythique, so wound up with vengeance as to embarrass people every single morning […]
I remember when Jessie Martin came down the mountain. She was two years younger than me, only twelve. But she’d been called by the touchstone. Her whole life was set out for her now, one long straight line. And mine was still spinning around in tight, little circles. Mama handed me the plates to pass […]
Quillen crouched at the cliff’s edge, the barrel of his rifle protruding over the remnants of a jagged stone slab. His elbow rested upon the flesh above one knee, stock pressed into the crook of his opposite shoulder. It was almost time. Three horse-drawn wagons rushed along the dirt road across an endless expanse of […]
1. “Hey sexy! Give us a smile!” Danyor had a handful of seconds to decide: a close-mouthed smile, and feel dirty all day; flash pearly white, hope against citizen arrest, and feel dirty all day; ignore, and feel dirty all day. She tongued her broken eye tooth, pressed her lips together, set eyes forward, and […]
Most days, I love being a troll. Most days I love dancing. Most days I love being me. Today is not one of those days. Having to wear a troll costume for the spring ballet recital when you actually are a troll is pretty bad, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of […]
“And I’m tellin’ you, leave him alone.” The gun pointed at the gang was from a different world: an antique, short-barrelled shotgun, the stock worked in bronze. The bearer of the gun didn’t match the delicate filigree either—a short, stocky woman, hair tied back under a wide-brimmed fishing hat of dubious age, and a filthy […]