Fictional Worlds

There were fourteen clean steps from any path, manmade and peeling the shrubbery of the mountain, to the spots where the Virgin Marys would remain. via Pocket

I hope you’ll forgive the whimsy of this report. I’ve held my silence my entire life, and there are many things I deserve to say to you. I know it’s a breach of protocol, but in a sense, so was I. And there may not be another chance. via Pocket

Almost everyone I entertain over a frosted fifth of vodka—bottle balanced precariously on a foldout tray, half my attention on keeping it upright—wants to know how I became a competitive eater. Also, how I found myself living on the Dbovotav Coastal…

The atheist awoke in the machine. Body had he none. Merely a consciousness, who even dead, yet hath his mind entire. A good line, that. Where did it come from? Around him was a sort of prison of flat light, was it light? Prison, because he could not…

Meychezhek is big, even among badhar-krithkinee, a circumstance exacerbated by the fact that I’m both already nervous and kneeling in anticipation of her entrance. Her skin is purple-black, more textured than human skin. Her head crest, flattened no…

Jiang Xiaoyu didn’t move. “Time to ratchet things up a notch.” Max didn’t seem to have noticed Xiaoyu’s trepidation. “We can’t let your trip be in vain. Now then, down on Earth, you might try to jump the last three steps of a staircase. via Pocket

Alls I want is a goddamn tampon. Is that so much to ask at the end of the world? Yo. Name’s Enfys. This is, uh, my channel as I wander in search of tampons and the meaning of life in what’s left of Western Europe. Seems, I’m, um, immune to the phage…

Ostap is putting the finishing touches on a cartoon tardigrade when Alyce calls him. The render is blown up to the size of a sumo, its butcher-paper skin creased and wrinkled around chubby tendril-tipped legs, its eyeless head dominated by a lamprey…

Luciole. I dreamed I was swimming in the seas of my homeland again. My hair turned into seaweed thick with petrol; my mouth tasted like radiation and uranium. via Pocket

Grand-Daddy would start thrumming at twenty hours, even if it could be the middle of the night, or of the morning. The vibrations filled the heads of everyone within a twenty-five kilometer radius with harmonics. The world became a giant MRI chamber…

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: The Rains on Mars by Natalia Theodoridou

Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Crossing LaSalle by Lettie Prell

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