(Content Note for emotional abuse and mentions of sexual abuse.) For Shirley Jackson and Charles Dickens “This is a true-crime tale?” Two reporters sharing the shuttle with us, and of course I got the one who hadn’t done her homework. I suppose I should have been flattered that they were there—a Broadway musical spun off the …

After the memorial service, Phoebe Morris returned to the beachfront townhouse where her mother had lived for the last twenty years, and prepared to cope. There was nothing of Mother’s that she partic…

(Content Note for use of racist slur.) John Wood boarded the Gracie-Ella ahead of the crew. He carried his sea chest on his shoulder. In a satchel slung low on his hip were his tools and the three thi…

I believe in stars. I may be alone, my body a minefield and my life a fucking farce, but at least I have that. The night is humid and warm, sticks to our skin like a wet T-shirt. Luz pokes the fire wi…

Static. Startle. Wait. You’re—wait. You? via Pocket

It was a nice enough cabin, if Zanna ignored the dead wasps. Their bodies were in the bedroom, all over the quilt and the floor, so she’d sleep in the living room until they ascertained whether there was a live wasp problem as well as a dead one. If…

The Magician Takes a Bow How many people can say they were there the night the trick went wrong and the Magician died on stage? Certainly, that first morning on the strip—dazed gamblers blinking in the rising light, the ambulance come and gone, with…

Before I begin, I feel that I should mention the people who made it possible for me to stand before you now. Unfortunately neither my mother nor my father can be here with me today, but my Uncle Matthew and Aunt Bess are, and I thank them both for a…

Ordinary fathers lead ordinary lives. They go to work, they raise the kid, they open their homes for the weekly mahjong and meal that rotates from one family to the next in their circle of Chinese immigrants. When they text their daughters, the cell phone vibrates discreetly. If the phone is buried in a backpack, …

The Masters file into the high-vaulted chamber with its ceiling of clear, faceted crystal. The rainbow light cast by the sun finds its echo in their robes, fine silks in all the shades of their titles: sky-blue, steel-grey, rose-red, blood-red. The thrones upon which they seat themselves are carved from impossibly large blocks of the …

His condition was quickly deteriorating and thus it was deemed best that he journey to Saltwater House. The ocean air, the murmur of the waves, they would soothe him. Balthazar had a fortune and a name. Judith had neither. Her father had been a friend to Balthazar’s father. She was now an orphan, though she …

The lakeside painter is lying, but no one seems to care. It’s a beautiful lie, even Elodie will admit that. There are two lovers on the pier with the painter, sitting for their portrait, and she’s honest about the way the light of the setting sun catches their hair, the way the breeze ripples their …

You are two on the day you see your first personal bird. It is the sort of thing you barely remember later, at six, seven, twenty. And yet you cling to it as your first memory: a sleek black penguin waddling through your nursery, it in black, you in white lace, mended and re-mended because …

Only idiots go back to the haunted houses of their childhood. And yet. Here you are. Standing on the sagging, weed-strangled front porch that hasn’t changed in twenty years. Every dip in the floorboards, every peeling strip of paint is exactly as you remember it. Time seems to have ricocheted off this place. Except not …

“I want to know the fires your hands bring—” “Having Been Cast, Eve Implores” by Barbara Jane Reyes Tonight, as in every night, she smiles when the door opens. Her arms loop over your neck; she leans in and rests her head against your cheek. She looks down at the basket between you. “Is this …

My apocalypse doesn’t ride on horseback or raise the dead or add suns to the sky. It arrives by tank and drone, the strict report of automatic weapons, the spying eyes of neighbors. It seeks my spouse’s life. Mine, too. I don’t expect to survive. Chula has better odds. She is a four-time triathlete, perfect …

“Grace,” the drunk fairy said, “is by far the best of the blessings.” She was drunk because her hostess, who herself had been blessed with hospitality—and a reasonably wealthy husband—had spent the months before her first child’s birth in a fever of preparations, determined to obtain at least one blessing for her own offspring. She …

Liverpool, Midsummer, 1763 When Satan himself came to Lolly, she didn’t recognize him. She wasn’t on her guard—hadn’t been for years. Why should she be? Her immortal soul had long since drowned in rum and rotted under gobs of treacle toffee. If any scrap was left, it was too dry and leathery to tempt evil. …

Your boyfriend is lying on the bed, flushed, with his shirt unbuttoned and his skirt pushed up over his thighs when he asks, “Do you want to pick, tonight?” The question knocks you off balance like a strong wind blowing so quickly by, you can’t breathe—and, for a moment, you can’t. Deep yearning lingers in …

Once upon a time, long, long, long, long, long, long, ago, there were three raptor sisters, hatched beneath a lucky star. They lived in a wood together, they stole sheep and cattle together, and all in all, there was no tighter-knit hunting pride of matriarchal dromaeosauridae between the mountains and the sea. The oldest was …

There was a land of elven halls and hollows, of fairy mounds and great cathedrals underground. Hapless mortals went in and danced until their feet gave out, and sometimes they came out again. But far beyond the merriment and the music and the trapped mortals, there was a campfire, and around it sat a half-dozen …

The most interesting thing about ghost stories is that almost everyone has one. The other really interesting thing, to me, is that they’re nearly all terrible stories if you try to take them as stories. A good story has a beginning, some buildup, and then a resolution or a twist or something at the end. …

She still loves the dragon that set her on fire. The knight-errant who came seeking you prepared so carefully. She made herself whole for you. To be worthy of you. To be strong enough to reach you, where you live, so very high. She found the old wounds of her earlier errantry and of her …

The Hydraulic Emperor is nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds long. It was filmed on an eighteen-quadcopter neocamera rig back when neocameras were the only way to make immersive film: an early effort by Aglaé Skemety, whose Bellfalling Ascension is still the critical darling of the immersion-culture literati. The Hydraulic Emperor falls sometime between her earliest …

Currently listening: “Everything” by Ben Howard When Florence and her husband Asher had first moved into their house, Asher hung a hummingbird feeder from the roof overhang. Now Florence listened to the buzz of hummingbird wings as they sucked red from plastic white petals as false as the picture of calm in Florence’s backyard: Florence …

Here’s a story Lan was told, when she was a child—when she lay in the snugness of her sleep-cradle, listening to the distant noises of station life—the thrum of the recycling filters, the soft gurgle of water reconstituted from its base components, the distant noises of the station’s Mind in the Inner Rings, a vast …

I hear them outside my office before I see them: footsteps, then voices, two at minimum, but sometimes more. I lean in closer to my desk, listening to their feet shuffle. They always travel in packs. When they start talking three feet short of the threshold, it goes something like this: “I think she’s in …

The funeral is nearly over when the dead captain explodes. Roses turn to shrapnel. The cathedral is lost in fire. I am drenched in blood. Bone buries itself in the wall next to my head, my arm, my howling, open mouth. I am standing at the back of the room where a sin-eater’s child belongs, …

The wind’s moving fast again. The weathermen lean into it, letting it wear away at them until they turn to rain and cloud. “Look there, Sila.” Mumma points as she grips my shoulder. Her arthritis-crooked hand shakes. Her cuticles are pale red from washwater. Her finger makes an arc against the sky that ends at …

Imagine a piece of flat, perfect, origami paper. White on one side, vibrantly purple on the other. This is the representation of my emotions before Life happened. I remember the first time that I was ever truly, rightfully, angry. My father was dying. He was dying from a disease riddled with social stigma. When the …