Strange Horizons - Hide Me in the Shadow of Your Wings By Christopher Caldwell via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2K6NObS

I believe that every child in the city should learn to climb trees. City folk train their children to swim and to dance, to run and play games, to cross the horizontal plane in every possible motion, but they always ignore the vertical. via Pocket

Strange Horizons - The Metal Eater of Luminous Smoke By Minsoo Kang via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2K1a8rm

Allpa received the magic sword from his grandmother, as she lay dying. “No, nor do you deserve it,” she snapped at him. She was a fierce old woman with a nose like a hawk’s beak and skin falling away in folds from her cheekbones. “You’re a farmer, n…

No one will sleep until the Princess learns the Stranger’s name. Liù the slave girl, who has loved the Stranger since before his exile, when he was a Prince, when he smiled at her—Liù alone knows who he really is. via Pocket

Look at what we woke. We feed them lies and watch them burn for it. via Pocket

Three months after the two men had pushed a needle into his thigh, Sheru learned something new about being sad. It happened just after the last of the strange dreams. They were not the kind of dreams that you’d expect a dog to have. The dreams he’d …

For as long as I can remember, Mythili has said she was going to leave. Even when we were children, she would tell Kumar and me that she was leaving the next day and we would never see her again. via Pocket

The interpreter’s voice is weak like a little bird’s, coming from a child’s lungs, but her diction is strong and certain like an adult’s. The Envoy speaks in his Earthian language and Henon words flow from Sam-Sa-Ee’s mouth. Across the table sits th…

There, quick—the blue sky bleeds. A runner in red tumbles across it, unstoppable, the sun itself shattering against her armor. One leg outstretched, the other flung behind her, vaulting from one moment to the next, and between them suspended in flig…

The last song and dance number that Izzie Valdes performs in the Elegance Retreat Resort and Spa's Weekly Michael Jackson Tribute Spectacular is "Thriller," copyright 1982 MJJ Records. Usually, this works out well. via Pocket

The harvest moon. The blue moon. The tropical moon. Flat moon—the moon you find in puddles. Strong moon—this is the moon of dogs, and I don’t know why they call it that. Dogs howl at a moon for not being the strong moon. Kite moon, that rides over y…

Somewhere between suicide and another episode of Hoarder Wars, I stumble on a ghost season of Princess Mine. Only two seasons were ever produced; the lead actress passed away before filming started on the third, but there it is, all six episodes, re…

It is dawn. In 1997, in Brigham City, Utah, Alexis Tromble is already awake. via Pocket

Read Before Use - Uncanny Magazine via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2OSbwLG

Ghost malls are even sadder than living people malls, even though malls of the living are already pretty damned sad places to be. And let me get this out of the way right now, before we go any farther; I’m dead, okay? I’m fucking dead. via Pocket

The spring she was thirteen, Annie taught herself to see dragons. She sat by the window in the hospital and looked out at the soft, strange Smoky Mountains, and the spreading gossamer haze that rose off them, and the white rucked clouds above. “I thought the old dragon was too mean to die,” her father …

“Goodbye!” “Bye, Miss Ninah!” “Goodbye, goodbye!” Ninah stood at the door, watching the kids head off to their parents in other parts of the ship. When the last one had vanished, she wheeled back into the classroom, ready for the bittersweet weekly ritual of taking down the art projects. The preschool classroom was small, carved …

There are people who await their ending, in their own beds, ready for the dust to sneak into their rooms and pantries, bedrooms and basements, to lie upon the old blankets, to fill their nostrils, …

Out there, in the darkness, a huge invisible animal stretched, expanding, taking possession of the air, the water, the fragile rock structure. A sudden blow, like the breath that extinguishes a can…

Scarlett accidentally wakes the dead in the bottom of a coat closet, with a half-naked boy pressed against her and a bottle of tequila she’s too drunk to drink.

They say they want you to catch the man in the moon, So they have you lay back and unravel your braid And look up.

Papi has joked before about buying a gun and shooting down the vultures: “una escopeta,” he says as he holds an imaginary gun aimed at the birds whose feathers adorn my bedroom window, “y PUM! desa…

The first thing I noticed about the boys was their eyes. Not their dark-skinned chests, arms glistening with moisture in the beach sun. Not the gold or silver teeth that winked in their smiles. Not…

This is a story about the myths built into our spines. You and I are chatting about work one evening in early September, the conversation of friends who, two decades after meeting in high school, still can’t quite grasp how to shoulder the weight of our world. Perhaps we both would rather talk about the …

With thanks to Stephanie Burgis, Fran Wilde and Kate Elliott It was a large, magnificent room with intricate patterns of ivy branches on the tiles, and a large mirror above a marble fireplace, the mantlepiece crammed with curios from delicate silver bowls to Chinese blue-and-white porcelain figures: a clear statement of casual power, to leave …

Computron feels no emotion towards the animated television show titled Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード). After all, Computron does not have any emotion circuits installed, and is thus constitutionally incapable of experiencing “excitement,” “hatred,” or “frustration.” It is completely impossible for Computron to experience emotions such as “excitement about the seventh episode of HyperWarp,” …

1. October 31, 11:57 p.m. McKenzie shows up at the Spruce Street Guest House a few minutes before midnight, dressed all in black as if she’s some kind of ninja. She’s even got a black stocking cap pulled over her blond hair, which is sticking out from the bottom in a luminous sheet and ruining …

Vivian’s late grandmother was a witch—which is just a way of saying she was a woman of unusual insight. Vivian, in contrast, had a mind like a hi-tech blender. She was sharp and purposeful, but she did not understand magic. This used to be a problem. Magic ran in the family. Even her mother’s second …

Fifty-three percent: Water. Tasteless, odorless, almost colorless blue. A single oxygen atom with open arms, clasping hydrogen twins. The universal solvent, creating the specific you. Eighteen-and-a-half percent: Carbon. As graphite, soft enough to mark paper. In diamond, hard enough to withstand the pressure of six million atmospheres. In your body, the respiration of thirty-seven trillion …