My daughter is born into the whore spit snarl of a Cape Hatteras hurricane. Beautiful and waxy, her delicate scent distilling the shedded taint of my own sweat, piss, and blood. Blue nostrils flare as tiny lungs struggle to fill, but for this, I app…

Dino’s at the hatch, jigging up and down like he does when he’s worried. “Table Seventeen, the Lantoran’s getting antsy!” I flip the trout end-over-end in the pan: “Tell the lovely cephalopod that his trout is being sautéed in ox butter and I will n…

When we turn thirteen, we witch-children must sing at the Witches’ Sabbat. It is how newly of-age witches are introduced to our ancestors, my grandmother said. Taking puffs of her pipe, she told me about her own Sabbat, in the same woods I would hav…

Please stop screaming. [110dB—adult human is distraught.] I assure you your offspring is just fine. It appears to be entertained by the dust ‘bunnies’ in my holding tank. Oh—please stop screaming—it has found those plastic keys I sucked up last week…

I clearly remember the first time I saw The Lion King. It was July of 1994, me, my toddler, my newborn, and my mother in a classic big-screen theater. I remember being awestruck by that song, and that stunning opening scene. Mom? She said, “It’s…

The precise date and time of the appearance of the Sjöberg Portal is indeterminate, as Ms. Marta Eriksson, on whose property it appeared, noticed it only by happenstance when, upon peering out her study window, she saw the back end of her sheep (Lud…

Three months after the two men had pushed a needle into his thigh, Sheru learned something new about being sad. It happened just after the last of the strange dreams. They were not the kind of dreams that you’d expect a dog to have. The dreams he’d …

For as long as I can remember, Mythili has said she was going to leave. Even when we were children, she would tell Kumar and me that she was leaving the next day and we would never see her again. via Pocket

Sahar, moving softly through the river valley, made sure to listen. The sound filtered into her helmet from the external mics, and she imagined this must be what hiking on Earth must be like. via Pocket

How much is enough? When is it time… for the end? She’s just a reporter. This is just an interview. via Pocket

The interpreter’s voice is weak like a little bird’s, coming from a child’s lungs, but her diction is strong and certain like an adult’s. The Envoy speaks in his Earthian language and Henon words flow from Sam-Sa-Ee’s mouth. Across the table sits th…

Vapour coils along the bough, drifting away in little skeins of dissipating light. Tobias grins. Luminous breath: sure sign of irrevocable infection. “How do you feel, my son?” He looks up at the white rectangle glowing at the throat of the padre’s …

The First Annual Honesty Day was a complete bust. Yes, even I acknowledge that. We all lived through the turmoil, so we all know of what I speak. No one foresaw the tsunami of crushed dreams and ruined marriages and prosecutions. via Pocket

The aliens dug our tunes. It was sweet. They came to down to us in these big blue ships, all curves and awe-inspiring slowness through the clouds like settling continents. Freaked us right out. We, the human race, didn’t even try to attack. We’d see…

Under a sweltering summer sun in southeastern Ontario, an aerial camera watched as two boys walked through a wheat field. Each boy dragged a heavy wooden plank; as they traversed the land, stalks of wheat bent and flattened underneath them. via Pock…

Author : Roi R. Czechvala, Featured Writer “Then stop putting your money in it. Now come on, we’ve got to go, she‘s coming back tomorrow, so we only have a little time. We have to get to the lab,” Jess scolded. via Pocket

She danced across the living room in a yellow sundress, her heels tapping to flamenco on the smoky hardwood. It was Charlie’s favorite outfit–the one he’d gotten her for their anniversary. Her hips swayed like magic, he thought. She paused for just …

Valeria knocks down Devis and scores. The 10-year-old girl then stands over the boy and laughs. Later that day, Valeria is having supper with her parents. “Don’t play with your food, Sweetie,” her mother says. “We don’t get vegetables from the hydro…

There, quick—the blue sky bleeds. A runner in red tumbles across it, unstoppable, the sun itself shattering against her armor. One leg outstretched, the other flung behind her, vaulting from one moment to the next, and between them suspended in flig…

When the guy with the horns came in, I knew it wouldn’t be a good shift. He scowled when the ZapStop’s doors refused to slide open for him. Ignoring the late-hours doorbell, he pounded one meaty fist on the shatterproof polycarbonate. via Pocket

Richard was forty, paunchy and balding when he came home early and found Susan on the bed they shared. via Pocket

Solar flares were partially blocked from pillaging the threatened planet below the behemoth spacecraft. The Bohemia created a cascading, billowing shadow across the Jagron’s continents. via Pocket

‘I’m sorry, Darling but I’m just not in the mood,’ said Martin Riley. ‘I’m nearly seventy and you can’t expect me to have the same enthusiasm I had when we first met.’ ‘I did not mean to upset you, Martin,’ said Mary. ‘I do not wish to put pressure …

Peter had been in the ground for six months when the birds began pushing up out of the earth. Small ones, at first, with brown feathers: sparrows, spitting out topsoil, their black eyes alert. They shook and stretched their wings in the sunlight. vi…

But visions are not prophecies, he told me. Prophecies come true. “There is a place,” I told him, “where time runs back on itself, where parallel lines converge, and where visions become prophecies. Where you will be not alone. via Pocket

I had heard Rob’s question. It’s just that while I was in the middle of performing CPR in the back of an ambulance on a patient who had been very stable until he had all of a sudden up and crashed, I wasn’t going to stop and answer it. It was a stup…

“My mother is the swamp,” Peregrine said. He leaned towards the mire’s trees, heaped as dark and snarled as bull kelp on a beach. His movement was drunken—he swayed forward, and back, then stumbled in. Ebb hesitated. Peregrine had given him the kind…

via Pocket

Our teacher Mrs. Strunt said the allosaurus coming to Hudson Falls was the best thing that ever happened to Hudson Falls, but the worst thing that ever happened to the allosaurus. She herded us onto the bus looking mad about it, trying to keep us fr…

The good news is, zombie unicorns almost never bite. The bad news is, even a tiny scratch from a zombie unicorn horn will turn you into a zombie. Mom discovered that by accident. Mom was really smart. via Pocket