via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Her father said at breakfast, "Drowned men can't have kids." He said it as if teaching Katy a lesson, or maybe as if she had asked. He kept looking at her, his fingers twitching on the Sunday newspaper like dropped lizards' tails. via Pocket

STORY: EP538: The Starsmith AUTHOR: Jonathan Edelstein NARRATOR: James Odcombe HOST: Tina Connolly This story has not been previously published, but is set in the same universe as “First Do No Harm,” which appeared in Strange Horizons. Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our sortable Wikipedia page Thank you …

Here are the friends who have left or fallen out of contact in the last few years, and we thank them for their gifts, kindnesses, and dedication.

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Strange Horizons has had many faces since we began in 2000, and those faces are always changing. I often refer to us as the collective—or composite, Yoon Ha Lee style—which at any given time involves 50+ creative volunteers, committed to voices new,… Strange Horizons - Fond Farewells By Vanessa Rose Phin via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2HwR0kc

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io By Divine providence, we captured the mermaid with neither loss of life nor injury to any seaman, nor any harm done to the specimen. So easily we might have passed her by without even noticing her; but the sharp young eyes of Small Jack espied her a… Strange Horizons - A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, D.Phil, MSc.; or, A Lullaby (Part 1 of 2) By H… https://ift.tt/2UyjfSg

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 …

Tonight they were princelings. Tomorrow they’d return to hiding in sea caves and under the floorboards of rotting inns. They’d return to their true forms, too. I’ve always thought that skinwalkers …

Tonight they were princelings. Tomorrow they’d return to hiding in sea caves and under the floorboards of rotting inns. They’d return to their true forms, too. I’ve always thought that skinwalkers …

Tonight they were princelings. Tomorrow they’d return to hiding in sea caves and under the floorboards of rotting inns. They’d return to their true forms, too. I’ve always thought that skinwalkers …

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io The first contestant worth mentioning wore manticore fur. The fibers, a deep shade of gunmetal, tapered to points of polished basalt. Ruffs of black cockatrice feathers bounced at his collar and cuffs as he swaggered down an aisle lined with twisted… Strange Horizons - The Skinwalkers Ball By Hammond Diehl, Art by Helen Mask via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2ITWze9

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 …

The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft s…

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 …