Fictional Worlds

I let Cameron take me to him, but I already knew where he was. I smelled him as clearly as I smelled old Barty’s woodsmoke. He had a bad scent. Sweet and sick, like rotting flowers. “Did you touch …

The sun is just bellying up above the skyline and light filters through the world. I turn Star away from the Deadlands, where there aren’t any trees or shrubs and the sun has scorched the ground in…

Deiderick raced down the cobblestone street, the hollow sound of his footsteps barely audible over the singing around him. It wouldn’t take long for his mother and father to notice him missing. He …

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 blu…

Deiderick raced down the cobblestone street, the hollow sound of his footsteps barely audible over the singing around him. It wouldn’t take long for his mother and father to notice him missing. He …

I’m getting a note from my doctor that will keep me out of the pool for gym. It’s not that I can’t swim. Last year I came in third place for breast stroke. This is different. I’m uncomfortable with…

“Can I get five for fifteen?” an old man said. Jerome looked up from the sidewalk and into the old man’s eyes. Junior was a local; he’d grown up two houses down the street, though he didn’t live th…

Despair and Ecstasy are the simplest. Ecstasy is the small and cozy room of a cottage that looks out on a broad meadow in the forest. In the spring, elk come to posture and to mate, and the wildflo…

Jareth eased into a parking spot, turning off the rock ‘n’ roll screaming from the radio. The wind nipped at his skin, so he zipped up his jacket a little tighter. His silver necklace winked at him…

The white stone buildings of the city gleam like scattered pearls, their peaks and towers reaching for the vertiginous blue of the sky. Atop the spires and turrets and minarets, domes and curlicues…

I extended my hand out the window, reaching as my mother had taught me since I was old enough to understand her words. Palm up, an invitation to the distant skies. The steppe ended in the distance,…

The new word seemed somehow old-fashioned. Halfsies. Like how Tariq’s sun-shrunken, onetime surfer grandfather would say “rad” when he deemed some event or circumstance especially good. Halfsies, a…

By the time her husband came downstairs, Miranda was nearly frantic trying to find a kill switch for the nanny. “Katie got herself eaten over the weekend,” she said without looking up, her fingers …

“Thank you for registering with NamMo.com, America’s #1 personalized munitions retailer…” The message arrived at 8:46 a.m. Andy was fixing his coffee for the drive to work when the alert dinged. He…

“Do you remember the first time we met?” she asked, her voice thick and opium-drowsy, the slight thaw of early spring making her as lazy as the white-hot sun of high summer makes the old cows in th…

“After just one year, undrafted rookie Moses Abebe has taken the league by storm, becoming the first player in NBA history to make every shot in a single season…” “Moses Abebe continues to dominate…

I let Cameron take me to him, but I already knew where he was. I smelled him as clearly as I smelled old Barty’s woodsmoke. He had a bad scent. Sweet and sick, like rotting flowers. “Did you touch …

“Chancellor, it’s Zend, at the University. One of your research students. I think you should come and see something.” The voice on the other end of the line was groggy. The Chancellor didn’t bother…

The oven door creaks open, revealing the grimy, sweat-tracked face of a girl just past her seventh birthday. Opening an oven from the inside is difficult for a child, but Drea Kane has had practice. She crawls into the unfamiliar house and dusts off…

The arrival of delegates from the Planetary Migration Program raised false hope in my district. Not only has the maximum age for entry to the off-world colony been lowered, we were given less than a week to prepare a concept to prove worth of passag…

Peter Carlson held the gurgling two-month-old infant with one hand, while the other dug through a dresser drawer. “Bwa! Bah!” gurgled the baby. “Right as usual, Cassie,” Peter said, pulling out a b…

It moved forward in a crawl, jagged angles flowing over soil and stone alike, dawn shaping shadow and sun into beaks and talons that moved relentless toward her boot and over it. With a touch of he…

I guess it started with the robot talking to me at the front of Perfect Pizza. It was the check-out clerk, one of the humanoid ones, vaguely male with his square features, bald head and glass eyes. via Pocket

It seemed impossible that the war had left a single thing untouched. And yet, here she was, familiar boards creaking under her bare feet, familiar smell of hotcakes and burnt coffee wafting from the kitchen. And in front of her, corn swayed in the s…

Circe knelt in front of the pig, holding its face so that its eyes looked into hers. “You are not really a pig,” she said to it. “You know that. Think. Remember who you are, what you are, and you will return to that form.” The pig’s eyes blinked. vi…

HOPper shut off the light as his mistress left the kitchen, scrubbing at her eyes while she made her way down the hallway to the bedrooms. Just as Vanessa reached the girls’ door, he dimmed the hall light from the standard eight hundred lumens to th…

On Sunday, Janie’s com pinged with a message from her cousin who worked for Visage, one of the big city body-mod firms. via Pocket

Among the infinite forms which the natural world delivers us, none is more fascinating, more truly wonderful, than that incomprehensibly complicated movement referred to, in its entirety, as ‘human…

My happiest ending would be if Offie moved in here and I weren’t alone all the time. It doesn’t shut me out. Offie knows how afraid I am of being alone so it leaves the channel open. I could contact it without reestablishing network protocol. via Po…