Lewis was poking at his tablet, trying yet again to open the training module from Station Commerce, when the sensor above his shop door chimed. “Not now!” he snapped without looking up. “But… but I….”…

A Jar of Malice By Gregory Marlow 1982 The morning light woke me as Mamaw slid in through the front door carrying a small flour sack. Mamaw’s couch was made of Brillo pads that left crinkle imprints on my cheeks as I peeled away from the cushion. I had kicked my quilt and pillow onto […]

Continued from Part 1) Jenna gave herself a few moments to seethe in silence before she spoke, to make sure her voice was calm. “I can’t move.” “Did you hear that?” Daron took a swig of his water…

Amma’s Kitchen by Rati Mehrotra   I can always tell what dish my customers will order. Knowing what the dead crave is my gift. Or my curse. It’s hard to know which. This girl, for instance. Brown, like me, but pale, as if the color’s been leeched out of her skin. Dark, staring eyes, weeds […]

When people stay in hotel rooms, they suddenly turn into toddlers. Weird, creative, screwed-up toddlers. Let’s smear jam on the wall! Let’s leave apple cores in the drawers! Let’s hide used nappies…

Jaxon was not a connoisseur of art, but he could identify a work’s salient features. And the salient features of these particular works were that they were valuable, lacking any obvious security…

A bookshop on a hill. Two front doors, two walkways lined with blank slates and grass, two identical signs welcoming customers to the First and Last Page, and a great blue building in the middle…

Against All Odds By Anna Mikhalevskaya Translated by Elvira Rizaeva   Time is slipping away drop by drop, along with sweat on deceptively calm faces. He runs through the shafts of stairs, through abandoned tunnels. Seeps through the ceilings into echoing hangars, stumbles upon crooked figures, shakes oilcloth curtains, rolls empty mugs, beats metal on […]

The Golem Lover by J.H. Siegal     I have learned of a lace that runs through my little village. Geilevska, nestled within the bosom of nearby hills, rests upon these strands, sewn around the fertile patchwork of letters learned in the men’s yeshiva, through the words traded by merchants, beneath the whispers of the […]

On Snowflake-veined Wings by Chip Houser   Amalia runs her finger around the inside of her Tupperware, wiping up the last of her leftover poutine. Her fall allergies kicked in a few days ago, so she doesn’t really taste the gravy. But she’d rather finger-clean her Tupperware at her table than go wash it because […]

Their progress through the woods had slowed to a stagger, but they kept going. They had to. Jane shoved one booted foot through the layers of fallen leaves, then the other. Imagination kept her fear…

The Sound of Children Screaming by Rachael K. Jones     THE GUN   You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or […]

Pirates by E.F. Benson     For many years this project of sometime buying back the house had simmered in Peter Graham’s mind, but whenever he actually went into the idea with practical intention, stubborn reasons had presented themselves to deter him. In the first place it was very far off from his work, down […]

While Marya was usually excellent at imagining the worst, opening a portal to another world while crocheting had never really crossed her mind. She’d been determined to learn how to crochet once she…

The Game of Mao has only one rule: don’t explain the rules to the game of Mao. It’s the only rule we may be told — the rest are clouded in secrecy and it is up to us to figure them out through trial…

The Aunties Return the Ocean By Chris Kuriata Auntie Roberta landed badly on the roof of her escarpment house, scraping her knees across the flagstone shingles and splitting her pantyhose. Her arms were too full of black water to keep her balance so she nearly slid off the edge. She carried so much ocean she […]

The Mountain and the Vulture by Nick Douglas   “High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been […]