We crackle and crunch through the forest, tracking gore through the red and silver leaves of this wretched forest so far from home: the centaur, the nyanga, Oberon, and me. And Tchakalaktsa, of course. My love. My life. Skink of my heart. Or what’s left of her…in spirit, in the glass vial that bounces comfortingly […]

I was finishing the last of my nightly coffee when the nineteen-seventies twins approached my table and asked me to bear witness to their disappearance. This was not an unusual request at Cafe Liminalité, being the locale of patrons that dreamed too much and ate too little. I, being its longest and oldest customer, had […]

Ollie’s and my plan was simple enough: we were going to drive our grandfathers’ ashes to Alaska. Theirs had been stationed there for Cold War reasons Ollie never fully understood, and mine had always wanted to go. I had a little red car that, while not new, was sound enough to make it from Boston […]

1926 Washington, D.C. Shaw District   “There’s a man on the front stoop.” The words spilled from her in a much more mundane way than Judy had expected, considering how her neck was fluttering with her excited pulse. Alvin looked up from the new Langston Hughes poetry collection he was reading under the lamp in […]

The thirty-third annual convention for the Lefthand Metro Worm Cosplayers Club was, not surprisingly, ruined by drama. Helk, the convention committee chair, was a micromanager, which meant that they weren’t allowing anyone else to do anything. And that meant nothing got done. Including arrangements with the venue they’d been working with for the past twenty […]

Thuận Lộc stared at the cup.  It was dark, and mottled with the characteristic patterning of silver-eye fungus. The tea inside was trembling—the faint vibrations from the Mausoleum, the dead ships’ atrophied motors that would never again allow them to hang, weightless, among the stars. Even now—even standing far away from it in that small […]

“Ambition!” Trevor emphasized, rapping knuckles hard on the wood table. “That is what makes the great men!” He took a satisfied swallow from his mug. Across from him, Barnaby put down the daily he’d been reading and sipped from his own beer. Pulling out a handkerchief to dab froth from his lips, he scratched thoughtfully […]

Bloodsoaked and grinning, the Soldier climbs to the summit of the ruins. The wind is mountain-top fast. It grabs the strands of her hair that have escaped her ponytail and sticks them to her ecstatic mouth: the slick surface of teeth, the gloss-wet of lipstain. She stands up straight and the wind lights her up. […]

Hollywood’s highest-paid actress for the last two years breaks up with me thirty seconds before I jump out a window. Secrets have never been Adelle Tremaine’s style. She lives for drama even off the stage. So when she storms onto the set, makeup smeared and heels dangling from one white-knuckled fist, I know there’s a […]

Content Note: Racism   Seven of Nine is a third-culture kid. Those of us who leave one country for another at an early age recognize the beats: You’re one person, a whole, unconflicted person with a whole, unconflicted family that belongs—until being literally assimilated as a child. You learn to adjust, but eventually—perhaps as a […]

So, hear nah. This is how it happen. Was years after Malcolm pass through and wash away a lot ah we little islands coasts, and mash up so much ah Florida and Texas and them places, and people say they ain’t waiting for no next storm like that one, and they pack up they things […]