Fictional Worlds

Look at what we woke. We feed them lies and watch them burn for it. via Pocket

Three months after the two men had pushed a needle into his thigh, Sheru learned something new about being sad. It happened just after the last of the strange dreams. They were not the kind of dreams that you’d expect a dog to have. The dreams he’d …

For as long as I can remember, Mythili has said she was going to leave. Even when we were children, she would tell Kumar and me that she was leaving the next day and we would never see her again. via Pocket

The interpreter’s voice is weak like a little bird’s, coming from a child’s lungs, but her diction is strong and certain like an adult’s. The Envoy speaks in his Earthian language and Henon words flow from Sam-Sa-Ee’s mouth. Across the table sits th…

There, quick—the blue sky bleeds. A runner in red tumbles across it, unstoppable, the sun itself shattering against her armor. One leg outstretched, the other flung behind her, vaulting from one moment to the next, and between them suspended in flig…

The last song and dance number that Izzie Valdes performs in the Elegance Retreat Resort and Spa's Weekly Michael Jackson Tribute Spectacular is "Thriller," copyright 1982 MJJ Records. Usually, this works out well. via Pocket

The harvest moon. The blue moon. The tropical moon. Flat moon—the moon you find in puddles. Strong moon—this is the moon of dogs, and I don’t know why they call it that. Dogs howl at a moon for not being the strong moon. Kite moon, that rides over y…

Somewhere between suicide and another episode of Hoarder Wars, I stumble on a ghost season of Princess Mine. Only two seasons were ever produced; the lead actress passed away before filming started on the third, but there it is, all six episodes, re…

It is dawn. In 1997, in Brigham City, Utah, Alexis Tromble is already awake. via Pocket

In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, one clockwork universe is instead pitted against another clockwork universe, in the context of a brutally prolonged trolley problem.

Fisherwoman Mika Sandrigal was lost at sea. She knew where she was in relation to the Candorrean coastline and how to navigate back to her home city, Maelstrom. She knew the time of day. She knew t…

Mom's house didn't look like a murderer's.

I am darkness. I am the musk of matted fur. I am the scrape of claw on bark, of tooth on bone.

“Marriage is like an offer. It compels one to exist in two different worlds. Can you really handle that much trouble?”

E.Z. came to me. Not the man in the flesh, I reckon he has had enough of flesh, but his words came pouring into me until they had nowhere to go but pour out on the page.

"I think I do not believe in ghosts. But if someone had asked me, three months ago, if I believed in spontaneously bootstrapping artificial intelligence, I would have said no to that as well. The w…

She winked. “I think I have something for you,” she said.

Over time, her beautiful body will wear away back into nothingness, and this is all to be expected. There is no reason for you to be alarmed.

"Hey," I blurted out. "I think your camera's broken."

The camera high up in the opposite corner of the room was watching, I knew, its clever algorithms ready to alert my supervisor the second its analysis of my bearing caught me going “inattentive, di…

The oldest boy, closest to my age, was obsessed with catching snakehead, although he had never caught any.

Before it was stolen, the skin of Auzh-Aravik had been inscribed with all the laws of heaven.

The sticky horror in our throats is not just for what we see, but for ourselves. We long to be there, in the heat of it. It is spiteful to leave us here, wasting away. We feel in ourselves a nuclea…

The city of salt is a trap. In the daylight, it reflects the desert sky so brightly it blinds travelers. At night it is worse: at night it reflects travelers back upon themselves.

I've read the women's magazine articles. I've listened to Mom's and Amy's advice. Acting snarky to your boyfriend's ex can only make you look bad. Especially when she's a three-thousand-year-old go…

The bell, the lantern, the witching hour. Undone shirt cuffs, unkempt hair. A refugee from the republic of conscience.

When Coco told her the truth, she found it easy to believe. She demanded no proof. Jia Qi had already known that there was something magical about lion dance.

There are people who await their ending, in their own beds, ready for the dust to sneak into their rooms and pantries, bedrooms and basements, to lie upon the old blankets, to fill their nostrils, …

Out there, in the darkness, a huge invisible animal stretched, expanding, taking possession of the air, the water, the fragile rock structure. A sudden blow, like the breath that extinguishes a can…