Fictional Worlds

A well-dressed woman flung the office door open and collapsed onto the sofa across from me. I pretended not to stare at the woman whose body appeared completely artificial. She had cosmetic work done to accentuate what I supposed were her good featu…

It could make her invisible. Untouchable. The thought came back years later like the distant melody of church bells, familiar and comforting. The moment she found the thing, she knew it was indescribable. Remote from parents, lovers and friends alik…

My younger sister, Julie, sits on my bed cross-legged, watching me pack. Even though it’s only April my ten-year-old sister wears beige shorts, a pink T-shirt over a one-piece bathing suit. The purple pansies on the bathing suit can be seen through …

She’d felt like it was her tree since she was a child. It was right at the edge of the forest, quite close to the back of the house she shared with her parents. She watched it grow as she grew. A shy little girl, she spent a lot of time playing in t…

I remember everyone being lit up in colors when I was a little kid. They wore vivid blues and pinks and greens and yellows. Everyone dripped in thoughts and feelings. They were painted with sky blue happy or scarlet red mad, thunderhead gray sad and…

Silas was the son of a watchmaker, but although he dutifully followed his father’s craft, he dreamed of becoming a musician instead. via Pocket

The snow is so fine it sometimes drifts about for hours before finally settling. The result is a mist that makes everything vague before fallen snow obscures it completely. This being acid snow, obscuring may become erasure when thawing drenches eve…

I am a tree. A crepe myrtle. I was planted into the ground over a year ago. So I've lived in this corner of the garden and grown with other trees for a while now, enough to have had a large bloom and I'm now up to my second spring. via Pocket

These bite marks on my forearm. Just below the crease of my elbow. They’ve always been there, even as a child growing up on the colonies of Ganymede. via Pocket

On a day outside the reservation, the old girl told me when she was small she was given charge over a large flock of sheep. She frowned to herself over that for a moment. I sipped my coffee, keeping a pen in hand, the yellow legal pad near. My mothe…

She sits at the console, the warm glow of beading sex sits at her lip and the sleeping monster it shifts and turns in her bed. Silently her fingers glide, swirling across the holographic keyboard that projects from sensors embedded into their tips. …

Through my early years on West Taylor Avenue, I remember spending many lazy afternoons resting my elbows on the windowsill of my upstairs bedroom window and watching the comings and goings at Bernie’s Bar across the street, naming the pigeons and no…

Didn’t want to be here but knew I had to be. Ovarian cancer. Stuart, who had been my doc forever, it seemed, convinced me to get the kind of care I needed by going to a big medical center. He spent quite a while on the phone making the referral. via…

I’ll readily admit that I was drunk the first time I saw my wife’s ghost. My friends had taken me to O’Shaughnessy’s after Karen’s funeral, and yes, I was planning on getting solid, blackout drunk. What I wasn’t planning on, however, was taking a st…

She kept coming back as a dog. Her eyes would open, her tail would wag, and she’d immediately think— She returned as big dogs, small ones, fancy and mutt-like ones. Each time, each incarnation, she came back like a boomerang with a furry tail. A boo…

The wind is my lover. I feel its warm breath on my wings, pulling them taut and moving me across the face of the sea. I taste the salty water and remember it. Once I knew the taste of every day, every drop of ocean. Now I forget things and have no-o…

Some say it was bound to happen. But people no longer talk about it. After years of governmental and military alien cover-ups, who could be shocked at all? We saw something, that’s for sure. But what? via Pocket

We scrabble over river rocks and gray pocked stones in the dry creek bed. I pick up a pine branch and throw it. Jessie races off, scoops it up and prances back. She pauses a yard from me, just out of reach. “Good girl. Bring it here,” I say. via Poc…

The first time God spoke to Akiko, she was a passenger aboard a container ship with no memory of how she got there. She was in the Pacific, headed for California. The ship was two weeks into its journey, but Akiko had only two days’ worth of memory.…

By the time he returned home after all his years of wandering, Magnus Diarisso had come to prefer a fire burning on cold days rather than the elaborate hypocaust system that heated the mage house. The sound of wood settling, sparks popping, and ashe…

“Excuse me,” Cash tried again, “you’re not a doctor, are you?” Another bemused look and shake of the head. “Oh, okay, thanks anyway,” he said to their backs. The warm bundle in his arms groaned uncomfortably. It was the first Cash had heard from him…

PodCastle 536: The Threadbare Magician — Part 2

“P-put me d-wn – put me d-wn a minute–” X9 likes to pull the wings off butterflies. They flutter in through cracks far above, bringing with them the promise of the world out…

A short story by Jackson, from 2014.

You had to fall into mine. Lord, but you are a sight for jaded eyes. Hair like liquid night, eyes a man could drown in, lips that form a bow Robin Hood would kill for. via Pocket

Doctor Jessup is terribly polite. We’re stirring our coffees before he asks his first question. “You asked what started it. That question is the answer. I can’t remember when it became an actual question, though. via Pocket

2 tablespoons wheat flourYes, Admiral, I know we have developed superior, genetically enriched starches on the New Worlds, but when I found this crumbling recipe card in the archives and r via Pocket

Is it an invasion if it’s only one alien? Some media did call it so, even if this alien didn’t come with guns a-blazing. Was he even male? No one could tell, but from the start the media defaulted to their perceived gender of an assumed conqueror. v…