Fictional Worlds

There is a number on my screen so small it’s just a line of zeroes too long for the ship’s console to display.

Lily swelled and shrank with slow breaths, on the brink of sleep. Her dark curls were frazzled from play and her dress was disheveled, wrinkled with undone r...

Last winter, my veins held only blood and not an army of nanobots. You were four, and I thought my fatigue was a normal side effect of parenthood. Surely the...

I hunched forward against the whipping wind, my climate hood blowing back over and over, face coated by spitting rain. It slithered down my neck as I walked ...

It’s happened. Your worst nightmare. A younger, prettier, differently gendered, or completely simpleminded younger sibling has entered your life, right at th...

The back door is tinged purple when I go out to throw my morning coffee grounds onto the compost heap. A faint rainbow tints the yard in concentric circles, ...

The mudroom got darn hot in the summer, but he couldn’t risk doing magic inside the house. It got into the air conditioning and caused all kinds of trouble. ...

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement descended on our nook of suburban Houston, we knew one of us would be taken—we were all brown. They drove up in pack...

I knew you were an impostor long before I ever had little enough to lose to ask. I never expected you would admit to it, your small face unblinking and unsur...

The only thing I hate more than group assignments is group assignments with Kelly Francis. I can’t even imagine there’s a more unreliable person on the plane...

A shark tooth washes up on shore. Lustrous, polychromatic, it shines in rainbow whorls, like liquid coconut oil on water. I pick it up, careful of the tapered end. In the hut, I bore a hole through one end and tie it to my neck. via Pocket

“Did you hear that?” Abby asked her neighbor, Vivienne. The two of them had been chatting over the fence that separated their front yards. Vivienne had cornered her to talk about school fundraising while Abby uprooted the dandelions that had appeare…

Section 5. via Pocket

Diwali, the Festival of Lights is a magical time of the year, even on the Indian Battle Station. via Pocket

Ella Jane’s question breaks the customary dinner table silence. But Dr. Williams doesn’t hear his fourth-grader as he watches his two-year-old boy bob up and down on the stacked phone books, reaching futilely for the large ceramic centerpiece. Just …

The girls line up, one by one, for the kiss. Some have dressed up for the occasion. True, the kiss has not worked for at least a century, if not more, so dressing up is not, strictly speaking, necessary—but as those girls and their parents will tell…

Adora felt it move beneath her fingers. She did. And she heard the voice clearly, the sound sharp and smooth. via Pocket

Honored guests, thank you for attending this seminar on the Tucabal-Gor, colloquially known as alien sharks. I am Dr. William Smithson, the foremost expert on these xenoforms. Ever since the infestation in the Atlantic Ocean last July, world leaders…

The bones of the earth are close to the surface here, all knobby elbows and wrinkled knees. In my childhood home, the land’s skeleton is well-fleshed with deep, rich soil, and the people are sleek and lush. via Pocket

Penthos var. sturnus vulgaris I’m in the outer avenues, the ocean-most edge of San Francisco, where the wind drags knives across the skin. via Pocket

“Sandra,” my house told me, as our subdivision’s street lights blinked on, “you have a message I am unable to read aloud.” My phone was on the other side of my bed. “Who’s it from?” “Letitia Richardson.” I rolled across the bed to my phone. via Pock…

There is a cat sitting on her kitchen table when she wakes up. She does not own a cat. She has never even seen a cat near her building. But still, there it i...

When she got to Yume’s room, the first thing Ruriko did was slip off her mask and remove her prosthetic jaw. There was an ache in her fake bottom teeth. It w...

1. THE BRIEF

Editor’s note: This is the second story we’re publishing in Nino’s “It Happened To Me” series. You can read the first one here.

She’ll bring out the best and the worst you can be

Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript of Black Like Them, a Dilemma Magazine special report by senior reporter Matt Disher. To listen to the full audi...

What makes a god a monster?

Gran never did like it when I used the Winchester to deal with dragons — so I went and did a damn fool thing and set out to hunt them in the dead of night. I...

“If you’re darker than warm beige we don’t recommend using this unit to visit the past prior to 2150. Only go into the recent past, or into the future.” The ...