Allpa received the magic sword from his grandmother, as she lay dying. “No, nor do you deserve it,” she snapped at him. She was a fierce old woman with a nose like a hawk’s beak and skin falling away in folds from her cheekbones. “You’re a farmer, n…

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 …

Read Before Use - Uncanny Magazine via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2OSbwLG

Ghost malls are even sadder than living people malls, even though malls of the living are already pretty damned sad places to be. And let me get this out of the way right now, before we go any farther; I’m dead, okay? I’m fucking dead. via Pocket

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 spring she was thirteen, Annie taught herself to see dragons. She sat by the window in the hospital and looked out at the soft, strange Smoky Mountains, and the spreading gossamer haze that rose off them, and the white rucked clouds above. “I thought the old dragon was too mean to die,” her father …

“Goodbye!” “Bye, Miss Ninah!” “Goodbye, goodbye!” Ninah stood at the door, watching the kids head off to their parents in other parts of the ship. When the last one had vanished, she wheeled back into the classroom, ready for the bittersweet weekly ritual of taking down the art projects. The preschool classroom was small, carved …

This is a story about the myths built into our spines. You and I are chatting about work one evening in early September, the conversation of friends who, two decades after meeting in high school, still can’t quite grasp how to shoulder the weight of our world. Perhaps we both would rather talk about the …

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 …

Computron feels no emotion towards the animated television show titled Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード). After all, Computron does not have any emotion circuits installed, and is thus constitutionally incapable of experiencing “excitement,” “hatred,” or “frustration.” It is completely impossible for Computron to experience emotions such as “excitement about the seventh episode of HyperWarp,” …

1. October 31, 11:57 p.m. McKenzie shows up at the Spruce Street Guest House a few minutes before midnight, dressed all in black as if she’s some kind of ninja. She’s even got a black stocking cap pulled over her blond hair, which is sticking out from the bottom in a luminous sheet and ruining …

Vivian’s late grandmother was a witch—which is just a way of saying she was a woman of unusual insight. Vivian, in contrast, had a mind like a hi-tech blender. She was sharp and purposeful, but she did not understand magic. This used to be a problem. Magic ran in the family. Even her mother’s second …

Fifty-three percent: Water. Tasteless, odorless, almost colorless blue. A single oxygen atom with open arms, clasping hydrogen twins. The universal solvent, creating the specific you. Eighteen-and-a-half percent: Carbon. As graphite, soft enough to mark paper. In diamond, hard enough to withstand the pressure of six million atmospheres. In your body, the respiration of thirty-seven trillion …

Erika went west by bus until the names on the signs began to look alien and the other passengers spoke in a lilting dialect that was hard to understand. The bus climbed switchback roads up from the dry steppe and into verdant hills, gradually emptying of people until Erika was the only passenger. The bus …

Sunday, 1 September 1918 A Depot, A.P.O.S. 17, B.E.F. France Dearest of all Friends, There’s no sense being cross with me—you know better than most that an officer can’t give orders and then blame the soldier for carrying them out. And more’s the pity if that officer issued contradictory orders in the first place. You …

Entrance There’s a ticket booth on my tongue. Don’t look in my eyes, don’t plead curiosity, you won’t get anywhere with that. Try it and you’ll see your reflection in my sea-green gaze: your shadow sprinting through the heavy glass doors. You’ll smell a whiff of brine, perhaps something more volatile. You’ll be caught and …

Chapter 4 “But they’re going to kill you,” the woman said. Harkim sighed at her silhouette. “Of course they are,” he replied. Chapter 2 The car lurched again. Harkim looked up from his agent’s face on the backseat screen, wondering what on earth was wrong with his driver. “Luketon? Have you been at the …

For Jill and Julia Rios Emma Anne had a tin can attached by a string to her belt. Lots of things on strings bounced and banged from it: some useful (like the pocket knife), some decorative (a length of red ribbon longer than herself, looped up), some that simply seemed interesting enough to warrant a …

In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu farts in his sleep. If you’re dank like me, you gibber up the Old Fuck’s brainspout, crouch in there full gargoyle on his raggedy roof, wrap your gash around the slime-lung chimney, and huff that vast and loathsome shit like the space-curdled milk of your mama’s million terror-tits. …

Down on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, there’s a little bar called Cooney’s. It’s an old bar, with a tin ceiling and carved-up tables and a floor you don’t want to look at too hard and no air-conditioning to break up the historic atmosphere of stale beer and dusty upholstery and unwashed hair. No …

Today is not the day I wanted to do this, but we aren’t always given choices. It’s time to pack for the new seasons. No, you can’t stay. This place won’t be here soon. It’s already going, slipping away, each new summer tearing off strips. You can see the new flesh underneath. We’re still guessing …

Outside the cracked window of the garret, the cockle-seller hollered, “Cockles an’ mussels! Cockles an’ mussels!” Her voice blended with the other London morning street sounds to mean that Vaughn was going to be late. “Botheration.” He tied off the thread in the fine blue leather of the gloves he was stitching and snipped it …

Hello. Is this your city? No, no. We understand. It is not a city yet. It is merely embryonic. Conceptual. An idea to which your bones are laced, the sinews that tether the tendons of your dreams. It is only a city in waiting, a city mid-birth, a city breathless, inexorable. But you desire a …

Here I am, the understove-listener, the ancestral keeper of an indefinite gender and infinite hairiness who lives under your kitchen threshold, under your fridge, making your ice cubes perfectly square when you deign to pour yourself a drink: minimalist living requires an absence. I protect you while you sleep—but you want to wake up in …

Hello. Is this your city? No, no. We understand. It is not a city yet. It is merely embryonic. Conceptual. An idea to which your bones are laced, the sinews that tether the tendons of your dreams. It is only a city in waiting, a city mid-birth, a city breathless, inexorable. But you desire a …

Outside the cracked window of the garret, the cockle-seller hollered, “Cockles an’ mussels! Cockles an’ mussels!” Her voice blended with the other London morning street sounds to mean that Vaughn was going to be late. “Botheration.” He tied off the thread in the fine blue leather of the gloves he was stitching and snipped it …

Do you remember the hands of men? How they pressed into your skin until red blossomed across the surface? How their intentions left patterns on your body? When you fled through fields, through forests, up mountains, up hills, into streams, into …

Today is not the day I wanted to do this, but we aren’t always given choices. It’s time to pack for the new seasons. No, you can’t stay. This place won’t be here soon. It’s already going, slipping away, each new summer tearing off strips. You can see the new flesh underneath. We’re still guessing …

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 …

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 …