A Late Appearance by Death
Reading Time: 5 minutesI decided to go find Death myself. It was 2023, and a lady could do that. I didn’t need to wait around for someone to fetch me. I could do the fetching.
Fiction
Um
Reading Time: 4 minutesShe wondered if she should even say it. She didn’t even want to think it. But Wyx definitely had to know, had a right to know probably. “There’s someone else on board.”
Counterfeit
Reading Time: 4 minutesA quick collision of rich space junk collectors, and an expert counterfeiter.
Thumbing to Sugar Daddy Oberon
Reading Time: 10 minutesIn spite of interfering adults, a spoiled child is determined to claim her birthright in the court of Oberon and Titania.
Hungry for Love
Reading Time: 3 minutesHe used to have choices; now, he has a hunger. He needs to find his fiancée.
The Visitation
Reading Time: 8 minutesA secret government organization is fighting an unknown, but strange enemy.
Swimming in the Late Hereafter
Reading Time: 4 minutesKen’ichi’s white hazmat suit shines like a beacon as he breaks over the ridge, even through all the rain. His gait is slow and uneven. I never expected to see him again.
What You Will Find at a Memory Auction
Reading Time: 4 minutesA young man can no longer afford to keep all his memories. How will he decide which ones to keep? And he’s running out of time.
Mudpot
Reading Time: 4 minutesNo magic in it. She didn’t need any. She just turned around looking some kind of way, and bung he went. Sometimes, a person sees their future in stark clarity and chooses to roll off the coil while the going’s good, and that’s the best thing that could be said about Amajane’s father.
Dream Planet
Reading Time: 5 minutesIdyllic was the only word Brody could think to describe it. How had he missed this bit of paradise so close to camp?
“—ody?!” The static hiss of Control cut sharply through his helmet, killing the serenity settling upon him. Brody sighed. His last check-in couldn’t have been, what? Fifteen minutes ago?
Robin’s Last Song
Reading Time: 21 minutesAfter her technological tool failed to warn the world of the sudden loss of birds on the planet, a self-exiled blind elder who has Aspergers and suffers from dysphonia, finds new hope in the field of soundscape ecology.
Take Away The Tears
Reading Time: 4 minutesConscripted Lieutenant Lovemore Vulgaris has been instructed to design the people of the future, and he’s not messing around.
Papa’s (Not) Gone
Reading Time: 4 minutes“What’s mechanical, Papa?” I asked.
“What you said. The neurons,” he replied.
Neurons? Then I remembered.
Harvesting Souls
Reading Time: 10 minutesA young woman faces her vengeful parents returning from the dead.
Bed Bugs
Reading Time: 10 minutesA couple unknowingly house a blood-sucking parasite under their bed.
The Largest Pub in London
Reading Time: 4 minutesMarco backs away until he hits a door. He reaches behind him, turns the handle, and falls into the room. The door swings shut. He backs away, waiting for Big Bob to come through it, running through the best next words to choose.
Her Night Off
Reading Time: 4 minutesAfter a chance encounter and a night of passion in Manhattan, a woman must choose between her responsibility and her heart.
Eight Legs Under Moonlight
Reading Time: 12 minutesIn a Victorian town plagued by werespiders, a curious spinster takes in a mysterious woman.
The Umbrellas We Brought to the Future
Reading Time: 4 minutes“Sorry it’s not sunny.” Amar shrugs. “Rainy days are the best for time travel.”
One Winter Night
Reading Time: 5 minutesA young girl, determined to catch Santa in the act, waits impatiently with a list of her own.
And the Fires Burned
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe town of Boyerville is covered in smoke from a nearby fire. Officially, the fire was started by accident, but the townspeople suspect otherwise.
Young Buck
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe real crook is the Company and always has been. It’s them that got reaction drives outlawed when water’s free, dammit. They only done it so we’d have to buy fusion fuel at a thousand percent markup. Most of us so-called pirates were just freelance miners that couldn’t afford the new engines.
What We Hold On To
Reading Time: 13 minutesA mother and her young daughter fight to survive in a world ravaged by an ongoing world war between megacorporations.
Forever 51
Reading Time: 12 minutesNovel excerpt: Veronica is eternally fifty-one years old with a proclivity for problematic drinking. Like most hormonally-challenged women negotiating the change of life, she is a hot mess. To retain her sanity, she attends weekly AA meetings and adheres to a strict diet of organic, locally-sourced, (mostly) cruelty-free human blood from the hospice facility where she works.
Matchsticks
Reading Time: 3 minutesShe has plenty of matchsticks at home and she is clever with crafts. She really thinks they should be more expensive—matchsticks—considering how versatile and sturdy they are. She’s thinking of the fine wooden ones with fire-red tips. This is not the first time, of course. She must be half matchsticks by now.
The Nocturnality of Dorian Salva
Reading Time: 17 minutesDorian Salva is an artist with a consuming passion for birds. One night, his work-in-progress takes on an eerie life of its own, and the relationship between artist and subject, painter and painted, undergoes an uncanny reversal.
Goulash for a Ghoul
Reading Time: 5 minutesA fractured fable and a meal served up in a haunted castle.
Nothing About Owls
Reading Time: 2 minutesThis has to be the year the bodies crest the top of the structure, because her parents are selling the cabin. They keep saying, It’s changed, it’s changed, it’s not the same. Even when she says she doesn’t care how it used to be, that she likes it now.
Table 19
Reading Time: 17 minutesA woman tries to intervene with the fate of a young barista, but fate will not be cheated.
A Gift in Ink
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhen a mysterious letter written in strange disappearing ink arrives from the daughter he banished long ago for dabbling in sorcery, a father must decipher her cryptic confession before the words and his memories fade into oblivion.
Clowns In The Woods
Reading Time: 31 minutesAn anxious young man gets more than he bargained for when he accompanies his fiance’s family on a hunting trip.
333 Years
Reading Time: 4 minutesHere we have an unexpected intersection of past and present when Fate takes a hand to switch things up.
The Wellington Methodology
Reading Time: 10 minutesScience fiction meets gothic in this story of a groundbreaking discovery gone wrong, and the horrifying fall of the titular scientist.
Betty And The Demon
Reading Time: 17 minutesWhen Irish-born Father Donahey retires to Winterset, he finds the community is awash with supernatural creatures, some friendly, many decidedly not.
Come the Waters High
Reading Time: 4 minutesA flash fantasy story about a High Priestess who must deal with rising tides that threaten to drown her people.
Control Alt Delete
Reading Time: 21 minutesBen is reveling in his tragically achieved freedom. He thinks he has it made, except for an elusive partner. Then an unknown woman first DMs then stands him up. His troubles have only begun when he realizes how thoroughly someone has infiltrated his technological fortress.
She Kept the House
Reading Time: 3 minutesIn this spooky flash story, a woman haunts her own house after a messy breakup.
From Below
Reading Time: 15 minutesIn the aftermath of a climate apocalypse, Jeremy and Alex survive by supplying food to the wealthy people living above the water, in the penthouses of Old Manhattan. But the wealthy aren’t the only ones that are hungry.
My Brain Through Your Brain
Reading Time: 5 minutesWhen Katie’s brain seems to jump out of sync she discovers another, almost identical, mind living inside her own. This duplicate mind gradually is not what she seems but instead something far more dangerous.
A Possession of Magpies
Reading Time: 5 minutesWhen old Ms. Linton rescues a wounded magpie, memories of her past come winging back.
Compost
Reading Time: 4 minutesA mother, desperate to feed her young son, takes a risk that doesn’t pay off.