Paranormal

There isn’t a virus. He’s pretty sure of that. The radio, when the BBC news had come back every day for a week, before ceasing once more, had mentioned rumours of a virus motivating some of the big “refugee trains” that had got stuck in the West Country. But nobody who’d left from round here …

(Content Note for descriptions of sexual violence.) Your sister has too–large hands and too many teeth. Not in a sense that her gums are crowded or her fingers are long and she might have a career as a concert pianist. No, her hands are massive, thick–boned, tipped in wickedly sharp claws that shine like pearls. …

When the Circus Lights Down by Sarah Pinsker

First came the murmurs. Then footsteps above our bedroom, where no feet should have been. Josh guessed we had squirrels in the attic. “I hope not,” I said, lying next to him the first night in our new rental. “Seeing as how we don’t have a key to the top floor. Anyway, it’s just the …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

I met Gyanendra Sahai for the first time in the bowels of the Lunar Geological Institute, in front of a display case containing an old-fashioned, heavy-built moonsuit. There was a large crack along one side of the suit and a rust-coloured discolouration along the opening. I was thinking about the pre-colonization days of moon exploration …

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 …

Would you believe me if I told you that they all live together in a house by the sea? It would only be fair, if they did. via Pocket

Under cover of night, our village moves across the steppe. Aliya leads the way. Her whistle is high and in harmony with the wind, so an untrained ear would ignore the sound. But we, the hushed and listening herd, heed the falconer’s call for what it…

The talk. The sex. Somebody to trust… Before the Grigsby Process my life was like a series of ads being skipped. I blacked out a lot. Had lots of seizures. So many that sometimes my learning software obsolesced before I could complete a semester. vi…

This will not happen to you. They have an antifungal now. They know how to kill all the little spores when they start to creep into your tissues, your lungs, your eyeballs, your liver. via Pocket

Mika only visited Aino Korhonen ahead of time because he was in an upward swing. He had awoken with a longing to see people, talk to them, to be surrounded by life. All the interesting markets and people were up the spokes, so that’s where he went. …

Even in her dreams, Izze always felt pulled in too many directions. “That’s not the problem. All the tests have said it’s electromagnetic, or the Big Heat of ‘37, or genetics, or all of the above. Or none of the above. One said ‘anxiety,’ but screw …

Everything is broken. The screen that takes up one entire wall of the play area is broken, cracked from corner to corner. There’s nothing usable in the games and toys cupboard, which is piled high with neatly stacked boxes full of mismatched parts a…

You’ve made your phone calls. You’ve rallied. You’ve begged for town halls. What else can you do? Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Make your legislators picture your face when they think about your issue. I’m here to walk you through meeting effectively with your representatives to the federal or state government. I …

Val had lost hope. Routine carried her where hope had stopped: up the stairs to tend the lamp. Into the forest for wood, apples, berries, more rarely a deer or a grouse. Her stores of magic and wild rice came from the same place, though not from the same method: the smaller, murky inland lake, …