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I'm Alive, I Love You, I'll See You in Reno - Lightspeed Magazine
I'm Alive, I Love You, I'll See You in Reno - Lightspeed Magazine
We have a history of missed connections, you and I. Years ago, when you called goodbye from the shuttle launch, my flight was landing in Zurich. I’d changed planes, been re-routed from Frankfurt. That’s why you got my voicemail. I’d have answered if I could, and would’ve wished you luck, even if you wanted a life without me. I never managed to see Europa, like you did—just Europe, where I met my first husband. The one I wished was you.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
I'm Alive, I Love You, I'll See You in Reno - Lightspeed Magazine
The Death of Paul Bunyan - Lightspeed Magazine
The Death of Paul Bunyan - Lightspeed Magazine
Paul Bunyan has died. Paul Bunyan has died and Johnny Appleseed is heading north. Not for vengeance, like Paul would have wanted. Not to beat the hills red or divert a river over those responsible for killing the legend, but because it finally seems time to revisit old scars, old pains. “We were the fire in the night,” Johnny remembers Paul saying one night, so long ago.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
The Death of Paul Bunyan - Lightspeed Magazine
This Is as I Wish to Be Restored - Lightspeed Magazine
This Is as I Wish to Be Restored - Lightspeed Magazine
Every night I come home and I drink. I trade away the hope, the guilt, the fear, even the love---I think it’s love, crazy as it seems. I trade them for oblivion, because otherwise I won’t sleep at all. I drink until there’s no life left in me, until I’m able to forget for just a little while the chrome vessel in the corner and what’s at stake. Sometimes I hope that I’ll dream of her.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
This Is as I Wish to Be Restored - Lightspeed Magazine
Daya and Dharma - Lightspeed Magazine
Daya and Dharma - Lightspeed Magazine
Daya opens her eyes to the colors of dusk, though she smells and hears midday. Soft light picks out yellow and turquoise stones and the bright fire of Gul-Mohar flowers; but the heat is Surya at his fiercest, making all else pale before his glory. She turns over, dazed and sluggish, listening to the distant clash of copper pots, breathing in spices cooked in coconut oil.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
Daya and Dharma - Lightspeed Magazine
The Venus Effect - Lightspeed Magazine
The Venus Effect - Lightspeed Magazine
This is 2015. A party on a westside roof, just before midnight. Some Mia or Mina or throwing it, the white girl with the jean jacket and the headband and the two-bumps-of-molly grin, flitting from friend circle to friend circle, laughing loudly and refilling any empty cup in her eyeline from a bottomless jug of sangria, Maenad Sicagi. There are three kegs, a table of wines and liquor, cake and nachos inside.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
The Venus Effect - Lightspeed Magazine
The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross - Lightspeed Magazine
The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross - Lightspeed Magazine
I had bought half an hour with Malka and I was making the most of it. Lots of Off girls, there’s not much goes on, but these Polar City ones, especially if they’re fresh off the migration station, they seem to, almost, enjoy it? I don’t know if they really do. They don’t pitch and moan and fake it up or anything, but they seem to be there under you. They’re with you, you know?
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross - Lightspeed Magazine
Mother of All Russiya - Lightspeed Magazine
Mother of All Russiya - Lightspeed Magazine
She paced the stones, her feet separated from the chill by sable-lined slippers. She was cold despite them, cold from her toes to her crown. Perhaps it was the vengeance of the fire, that she had not joined her husband in its embrace. Long ago, he had decided that he wished to be immolated in the manner of their ancestors.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
Mother of All Russiya - Lightspeed Magazine
Seven Permutations of My Daughter - Lightspeed Magazine
Seven Permutations of My Daughter - Lightspeed Magazine
I’ve sought a world with a higher-than-average ratio of sunny days and a pharmaceutical industry that developed a decade before my own. Sun, of course, improves mental health. And a more developed pharmaceutical industry implies a more liberal outlook towards chemical intervention, a more specific range of treatment plans. It isn’t easy to write equations for these variables.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
Seven Permutations of My Daughter - Lightspeed Magazine
Bookkeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger - Lightspeed Magazine
Bookkeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger - Lightspeed Magazine
It starts as a twitch. Or that’s what I thought it was. At first. A jitter in my thumb. Then it’s in my wrist, a jolt of energy running up my arm. All at once, too fast to know exactly where it had come from. There it is, I would start to think, but it was over before I had finished the thought, and there I was, gun in hand, smoke weeping from the barrel.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
Bookkeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger - Lightspeed Magazine
Fifty Shades of Grays - Lightspeed Magazine
Fifty Shades of Grays - Lightspeed Magazine
Terrorist. That’s what they call me, but I am something worse: both successful traitor and failed saboteur. I want to die, for all of this to be over. For my last request, I asked to have paper and pen to write my last will and testament. They won’t let me have it, forcing me to use the mindsynch. Damned Traveler tech. Maybe they’re scared I’ll ram the pen up my nose, scribble on my brain, and cheat the hangman.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
Fifty Shades of Grays - Lightspeed Magazine
Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead - Lightspeed Magazine
Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead - Lightspeed Magazine
This is the thing about my sister and I: we’ve never gotten along, even when we’ve gotten along. This is what happens when you have parents who fetishize family, and the viscosity of their blood relative to water: you resent the force with which they push you together with this person who is, genetics aside, a stranger. And that’s what my sister is: a stranger.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead - Lightspeed Magazine
Ratcatcher - Lightspeed Magazine
Ratcatcher - Lightspeed Magazine
Pepper’s vision fades slowly away in the empty midnight as he tumbles end over end. His eyes frost over, moisture crackling and icing over pupils, hardening against his eyelids. The pinpoint stars fracture behind the fractal cold of the ice, then shatter into a multitude of glittering refractions. Unseeing, he still stares wide-eyed into the vacuum.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
Ratcatcher - Lightspeed Magazine
James, In the Golden Sunlight of the Hereafter - Lightspeed Magazine
James, In the Golden Sunlight of the Hereafter - Lightspeed Magazine
It took James Washington forever, almost literally forever, to remember that his wife and children were as dead as he was. For a while, he barely even realized that he was dead himself. Heaven, for lack of a better word, is bliss, and as anybody who has known euphoria can tell you, bliss doesn’t always allow room for rational thought.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
James, In the Golden Sunlight of the Hereafter - Lightspeed Magazine
This Is for You - Lightspeed Magazine
This Is for You - Lightspeed Magazine
There was one girl I really liked in school when I returned to Earth, but it took me three months to say hello. I wasn’t good with human beings. We’d just gotten back from Pitipek (a red-dwarf star system “just left” of Tau Ceti, as the joke goes). My father had been stationed there for two years with the TU’s Planetary Safety Agency, and living with the slow, enigmatic, bipedal Pitipeki---especially in one of their villages, and under those endless clouds---tends to make you lose your people skills.
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
This Is for You - Lightspeed Magazine
Paternity - Lightspeed Magazine
Paternity - Lightspeed Magazine
You have been trying to start a family. And failing. The problem, it will turn out, is with you. This is what they tell you at the fertility clinic at the medical center. The first thing, discovered during a physical exam, is that your testicles are smaller and softer than average. At the time of this revelation, your wife actually says to the urologist, in a tone of maternal defensiveness: “That’s strange, because I would say his penis is a little too big.”
·lightspeedmagazine.com·
Paternity - Lightspeed Magazine