Strange Horizons - Orphan Tsunami Heathens By Tiera Greene
Klein Kelly’s body fell from the ninth-story window and plummeted into the flooded mega-campus below, puncturing the water’s glasslike surface with a sickening thunk. Foul water grabbed at the weight of her sneakers and her thick denim jacket. She w…
Strange Horizons - As Tender Feet of Cretan Girls Danced Once Around an Altar of Love By Julian K. Jarboe, Art by Sarah Webb
I am undressed but it won’t matter soon enough, and besides, this era has retained its wise and founded fear of nude women appearing beside bodies of water, even ones as ancient and ugly as myself.…
He stood with his back to us in his black trousers and white shirt, washing his hands. Flies crawled over the worktop and flitted into the pot of rice and peas on his stove. Mum and I exchanged a g…
The directives for this were in our/my banks before our/my consciousness was. Simple instinct to unfurl the durable panels, like old sails, we/i always remind ourselves/myself. Simple instinct to g…
Strange Horizons - Strange Waters By Samantha Mills, Art by Julia Griffin
Fisherwoman Mika Sandrigal was lost at sea. She knew where she was in relation to the Candorrean coastline and how to navigate back to her home city, Maelstrom. She knew the time of day. She knew t…
Strange Horizons - The Killing of a Sacred Deer By Maggie Clark
In The Killing of a Sacred Deer, one clockwork universe is instead pitted against another clockwork universe, in the context of a brutally prolonged trolley problem.
After that announcement, she pulled all the government brochures about the teleportation devices out of the mail, leaving the rest for Má and Ba to sort after they came home from work. She spent h…
Strange Horizons - A Snow, A Flood, A Fire By Jamie Berrout
The camera high up in the opposite corner of the room was watching, I knew, its clever algorithms ready to alert my supervisor the second its analysis of my bearing caught me going “inattentive, di…
Strange Horizons - Artifice and Intelligence By Mack Sztaba, Tim Pratt
"I think I do not believe in ghosts. But if someone had asked me, three months ago, if I believed in spontaneously bootstrapping artificial intelligence, I would have said no to that as well. The w…
Strange Horizons - On the Occasion of A Burial of Ernest Zach Ulrich By Mary Kuryla, Art by Daniel Rempel
E.Z. came to me. Not the man in the flesh, I reckon he has had enough of flesh, but his words came pouring into me until they had nowhere to go but pour out on the page.
Just ahead of The Incredibles 2, there is a groundbreaking short film, Bao: the first computer-animated Pixar short directed by a woman, Chinese-Canadian Domee Shi. via Pocket
Strange Horizons - Salt Lines By Ian Muneshwar, Art by Gabriella Eriksson
The jumbie finds him swilling the dregs of a wasted evening out behind the club, rum on his breath, the beat of the bassline still shuddering through his body. The streets at the end of November shine with the slick of rain and the club’s neon glow …
She takes the usual accoutrements of a resurrection from a drawer in the night-stand: two damp cloths to go over Frances’s eyes, and a C# tuning fork to sound the life back into her.
Strange Horizons - The Witch's Knives By Margaret Ronald, Art by Aud Koch
I am here to rescue my husband, she rehearsed in her head, trying to ignore how the red sap trickled through her hair and how the railroad ties sank and splintered underfoot. I am here to break you…
How convenient, this loose-fitting thing called a kimono. When the sky was not light enough to see me properly, not dark enough for people to feel too alarmed, that was the time of day I'd walk around among humans. I loved the thrill. Just waiting f…
Strange Horizons - Tessellations, In A Greater Hand By Artyv K
Smaran lingers here in this old home, gnawing on names and the stories that go with them. She is as I left her, which is more than I can say about myself. Her long dark hair coiled around her in sw…
A skeleton woman was supposed to look beautiful only to those whom she had enchanted. Scaring people was only a recreation at best. What we wanted was a human's strength, and a little money to make…
For five years in the city I worked as a receptionist at an English language school, where I had to deal with countless, groundless complaints and had developed a Noh-mask on my face devoid of any …
Strange Horizons - Snow and Salt By Genevieve Cogman
She came up out of the ground even more beautiful than when she had gone down into it. Her face was as white as snow, and her hair as black as ink, and her lips as red as the blood on her graveston…
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 Helen Keeble
Strange Horizons - Only Calculate the Motion of Heavenly Bodies By Marcia Richards
The goddesses are so suicidal anymore. We lost Jemma and Iwahana in one day last week, Jemma to poison and Iwahana to self-flagellation. None of us were trained in seeing the signs of self-flagella…
Strange Horizons - How to Hide Your Heart By Deborah Coates
People call him. People he doesn't know. People who don't want anything to do with him or the things he hunts. They leave him messages—skeptical, frightened, defiant, crazy. They don't believ…