I kill ships. Read a tagwisp on the EDNA strand that specifies my function and it would be just that, short but precise.

The city was ready for its beloved daughter to make the first nonmotile journey in history: the ship, which would never leave the city, would traverse half the galaxy.

Here is a most peculiar object. Come closer, take a good look. See, here it is, laid out in this museum basement. It is a battered iron cage—human-shaped.

Some of the passers-by made jokes at me. Though I could not understand their language, yet I felt sure they were joking. I asked my friend, "What do they say?" "The women say that you look very man…

At close range she can be seen to be shaking, a hard tight focused trembling, not confined to the hands. She looks close to resonant frequency. Amrita wants to, somehow, by touching her with one fi…

Splöstlienne was a wasteland of thorns. Here and there, ragged yellow buds were emerging among them, but the cold winter kept them mostly bare.

Part of being a princess in the kingdom of Splöstlienne meant learning the things one might expect princesses to be taught

Later, Brother Francis would not be able to remember when it was that he first started thinking of the golden thing as a man—possibly when it blanched, braced itself against its restraints, and vom…

Kristian is fidgeting and asks the dreaded and inevitable question for the umpteenth time. "Mummy, Ma, are we there yet?" "Almost there, sweetpea," says Maarit, sharing a grimace with me. I’m…

At first, the murder is universally mistaken for a run-of-the-mill political assassination.

The seventh repetition almost played out like all the others. A different person filled Luis' place, but despite the evidence before my eyes, I could only see my idiot husband.

Her feet feel unfamiliar in her plain white washekongs, the tennis shoes she used to wear so often, before her world fell in. Now she only wears two sides of shoes when she needs to fake normal.

Marbles, reading glasses, fichas de Monopolio, a key, all cemented onto the crumbling old plaster, maybe eight feet across. Only when he took a step back could he see it formed the shape of a woman…

Jeffries says he's worried about the retrovirus. I think he just doesn't like Matthews, doesn't want him hanging around. Truth is, myself and the kids excepted, Jeffries likes cattle and dogs more …

I wriggle, delighting in all of these things in me. I want to digest them all.