Paranormal

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, …

“What’s your name, girl?” “Dust.” “Dust! What kinda people named they child Dust!” She sat in thought a moment, recalling what her wayfaring aunt she rarely saw told her to say whenever someone questioned her name, if she could remember it all. “It’s short for Dustdaughter…” “That’s a heavy name for a child.” “My daddy …

It’s not often a city girl like me gets to haunt an ancestral home as summer dies. The Willows is less a swooning plantation estate and more like a calico cat, a farmhouse cobbled together of mismatched parts and sprawled out proudly among the fields and forests. Still, it’s romantic as hell, and I will …

Huda will ask again and again. She will ask it on the first night at the summer place, the porch steps creaking like an old-timey pirate’s ship beneath their knees. She will ask it when they see the Amelia Earhart house way down the harbor, a curled finger, creepy, shuttered-off, and full of promise. She …

I. That kid didn’t belong here. We all knew it from the moment he walked through the door at Rosalie’s, full of nerves and rage. If you belong, you never sport those two together. Everyone in Riverside knows that. It is a wise precaution to assume that anyone angry is also armed. The drinkers stopped …

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 …

This is not the story of how he killed me, thank fuck. You want that kind of horseshit, you don’t have to look far; half of modern human media revolves around it, lovingly detailed descriptions of sobbing women violated, victimized, left for the loam to cradle. Rippers, rapists, stalkers, serial killers. Real or imagined, their …

For Lara West Tabitha walks, and thinks of shoes. She has been thinking about shoes for a very long time: the length of three and a half pairs, to be precise, though it’s hard to reckon in iron. Easier to reckon how many pairs are left: of the seven she set out with, three remain, …

And Never Mind the Watching Ones by Keffy R. M. Kehrli. Uncanny Magazine Issue Six short fiction

Presence. Short story by Ken Liu. Uncanny Issue One.

In the spring after the war’s end, the soldiers’ spirits began to wander home, and Lady Magdalena bound their lips with cardamom so that they could not speak. “These souls walked for months, their only thought to return home. You must remember, little of their personality remains at this point. They are solid enough to …

Meerschon Grant Selection Committee— I understand that only one of these proposals you’re reading will be funded. One out of what I’m sure will be hundreds, if not thousands. And that’s just from the research community. Once scholars from other fields learn that this opportunity isn’t limited to the sciences—that they can read the Dead …

Singapore stank. The last Asian post of the British empire stank. It was a country at war, a country under occupation, and it stank. It stank from the musk of the Chinese men milling on the road, it stank from the sewage cooking in the open drains, and it stank from the diesel burning in …

The witch said, “I will give you what you want. All you have to do is wear through seven pairs of shoes.” “Which shoes?” she asked. “Oh, any. But the number is important.” The first pair, she was wearing that day in the woods: red Keds. In them, she would ride her bike down the …

This is the original timeline. You know, the one all of us came from. So we can’t do anything to it, or we won’t be born to invent time travel. We can only meddle with other timelines. This is the original timeline. We’re trying to fix things. Unfortunately for you, if we ever do manage …

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 …

The letter from my grandmother arrived twenty years after she died. It—and its contents—were completely unexpected. “She left me her house,” I told my mom. “Well, you ought to be able to get decent money for it,” she said. “That’s the catch. I have to live in it for a year first. Otherwise the money …

Listen well, oh best beloved, for I have much to tell you before the tide comes in, and there will come a time when you are called to recite it, word for word, whether I am here or no. Listen well, and remember what I tell you: In the long-ago, when the sea blossomed with …

I considered declining the invitation. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. Way too weird. An invitation like that would never come again. I’d regret it if I didn’t go. It lay on our kitchen table for three weeks while I argued out the pros and cons with Mabel. She …

I am dying of the war, though not in it. Such is the nature of wars. A person doesn’t have to die in battle to be killed by a war. A person doesn’t even have to be a soldier to die of one. Wars have always been slow killers as well as quick. The war …

(Content Note for emotional abuse and mentions of sexual abuse.) For Shirley Jackson and Charles Dickens “This is a true-crime tale?” Two reporters sharing the shuttle with us, and of course I got the one who hadn’t done her homework. I suppose I should have been flattered that they were there—a Broadway musical spun off the …

After the memorial service, Phoebe Morris returned to the beachfront townhouse where her mother had lived for the last twenty years, and prepared to cope. There was nothing of Mother’s that she partic…

(Content Note for use of racist slur.) John Wood boarded the Gracie-Ella ahead of the crew. He carried his sea chest on his shoulder. In a satchel slung low on his hip were his tools and the three thi…

“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 …

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 …

At his desk, Ken idled with a Polaroid picture and muttered a few confused curses. He had been staring at it for hours, finding something obvious and dismissing it as far too strange, refusing to appreciate it. “What’s that you lookin’ at there?” a coworker said over his shoulder. Ken turned it over and slid …

You press the barrel of the Aegis-IV Longslide into your partner’s hole, and he spreads for you like he’s purpose-built for this very moment. Your spinal reinforcements are made to handle recoil, but you can feel the tension of him juddering up your arm as you hold him still, keeping him there, keeping him under …