Magazine
Issue #1
“You know about the uncanny valley?” he asks. It’s one of those questions where your answer doesn’t matter, he’s going to explain it to you anyway. He’s already mansplained a number of things to you tonight, including the end of Inception, which is the reddest of flags, as far as things men can mansplain go.…
(Originally published in Weird Tales #363.) 1 I’m going to start with the pregnant woman because she survived. 79 other Amtrak passengers weren’t so lucky. 243 people boarded the Lake Shore Limited at Penn Station; we left at 3:40 PM. I had an appointment in Syracuse; me and a couple of lawyers in a windowless…
(Originally published at the Ploughshares blog.) When the arms of the larkspur dial openit’s only natural to want to dissolve. In the glinting hazeyou have nothing to do but keep moving inward. Here’s your realm of green sepals, tallas knights. Your calyx sharpens over a dominion of seeds.When the arms of the larkspur dial open…
Estival
Until the day she died, George Forster’s wife wanted to live with him. Instead, she lived with her mother; George rented a room in a boarding house. Of their four children, one had died, one was a babe in arms, and two lived in a work house. You know the sort of place—Dickens would later…
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Date Night
Jan StinchcombNobody thinks of the mother, given the babysitter’s ordeal. The mother, still young, is counting on dinner and a movie with her husband. It is the best time of her life—the children aren’t babies anymore, but they still need her. They’re good at school. They have interesting things to say, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant. …Anne Gare’s Rare and Import Video Catalogue, October 2022
Jonathan Raab(Originally published in Hymns of Abomination: Secret Songs of Leeds) “Elephant Subjected to the Predations of a Mentalist” – Dir. B.S. Stockton, 1921 A harrowing 47 seconds of early black and white motion photography, this film appears, at first, to be a derivation of the popular 1903 silent film short Electrocuting an Elephant, but is…Eight Vases of Njideka
KasimmaI am tucked in like an ovary, en route to Kentucky, in the belly of the bird; my mind is a vase of Njideka. Maka mberede nyiri dike. Njideka is my mother’s name, but its meaning is what I say like prayer: what I have is more. And what do I have with me? Nothing.…Persistent
AGA WilmotYou smile when you tell them your name. Wide but not too wide—show your teeth without being creepy, without them thinking that you’d like to eat their eyelids. Can you spell that please? The woman—you’re not sure if she’s a receptionist or a nurse, if the uniform is the same or different—has a kind voice.…
Maria
Kiki Petrosino(Originally published in Witch Wife.) She’d appear in the break before sleep.Her face a glass zero. Her dark buzzing.I was twelve. I sweated & begged to live. Back then, I believed she couldspike me with faith, a silverweed stolon—she’d appear in the break before sleep pronouncing my name in her languageof radial burn. Name, name,…To a Puppet, From a Dummy
Jon Padgett(Originally published in Mannequin: Tales of Wood Made Flesh.) First I feared them. Then I pitied them. Then I envied them. Popular culture presents us with the “killer doll,” either as a supernatural hobgoblin or as a psychological delusion born from a ventriloquist’s psychotic split personality. As a child, fear of this demon—born of The…
The Techwork Horse
The day the horses came to her town, Bola could think of nothing else. She stood in the shade of the acacia tree while her little brothers clutched at her legs and pointed. Lord Kami rode at the head of the procession of nobles, standing high in the stirrups of his own horse. Three thousand…
The Six Most Genre-Breaking Fantasy Novels of All Time
“It is an irony, and not entirely a pleasant one, that what should be, by definition, the most imaginative of all types of literature has become so staid, and, too often, downright unimaginative.” These words from Neil Gaiman, in his Foreword to the 1998 reprint of Lord Dunsany’s novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter,…
The Practicalities of An Alien Invasion
Originally published in Aurealis. You haven't seen your parents since the beginning of COVID, so you're driving to their house for Christmas. Your one-year-old daughter is secure in the child's seat in the back. This will be the first time she meets her grandparents. She has been crying for the first hour of the two-hour…
The Mind of the Unbound Prometheus
Originally published in Dark Moon Digest. 1. Doctor Carl Howell rushed down the sedate hallways of Green Building 1 with a freshly severed pig head in his arms. Students gawped and laughed in his wake; a few must have assumed he was preparing for the university’s annual Prank Week, scheduled to begin the next day.…
The Colour of the Ninth Wave
Author’s Note: The practice of ‘setting adrift’ was a legal form of execution in Early Medieval Ireland, thought to have been introduced with Christianity, and often used as a penalty for convicted women. The mythological elements of the story are drawn from the medieval texts Togail Bruidne Dá Derga and Tochmarc Étaíne. The language is…
The Clones That Make You
There is a clone of you when you are born. It grows alongside you, breath by breath. Embryonic stem cells conceived in vitro, ready for the harvesting: bone marrow, organ transplant, and skin graft whenever, however, you are hurt. You all learn this as children. It’s why no twin births are allowed anymore. It would…
Mycelium
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I only travel to the golden head when the dragonflies are in season. It's Piack and me this year, rafting up the river past the lilies and arched trees. While I steer us through the river's gentle snarls, he sings about lost keys to pass…Dog’s Way
Dog struggled at the portal. It wasn’t a matter of physicality. The portal was flexible enough. Every time Dog went through, the rim stretched easily over his snout, opening wider to accommodate his fat belly. No, the problem wasn’t that Dog didn’t fit. It was that he didn’t want to go through. Returning to The…
Between the Flickers
I’m careful not to be seen as I leave the cable tower. The lights in the station’s atria flicker in and out. The blackouts are a constant headache for the people who live on Vestra Station, but they’re useful for avoiding Mirror’s eyes. Thelonius keeps an apartment across from the clocktower. He likes that his…
The Things We Burned
Originally published in Keeping Track. Johnny didn’t smoke. But like all the boys who lived darkly, who wore black and let their hair grow long and straggling into their knowing eyes, he always carried matches and a Zippo lighter, its silver case engraved with serpents. We sat in the quad after school while he did…
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