If I had only learned to drive, or better yet, refused to visit my parents in their apocalyptic bunker, we’d be happily at home, cuddled on the couch in front of the Criterion collection.

But the ferns have turned Papa's thoughts to slow, ponderous things, moving the way a fighter does just before they hit the ground. Fresh fiddleheads unfurl from his skin each night, bobbing merrily with his breath each morning.

His grip tightens, turning the picnic into murder.

We’ve travelled for weeks to find something like this—not the planet, but its ring, swirling iridescent with icy blues and silver. A bounty of water.

In a sea of long grass and tiny yellow blueberry flowers some ways off of Route 1, just about halfway between Cobscook Bay and Passamaquoddy Bay, the town of Sauve-Majeure puts up its back against the Bald Moose Mountains.

There are big curse words and little curse words in anybody’s language. A little cursing isn’t hardly cursing at all. A child could do it and everyone round the supper table would laugh, turn red, and stick a bun in that sour young mouth while secretly making a note to…

The ocean is a woman and it is dreaming, dreaming, Ekaterina thinks as she holds the hardsuit’s arm open, ready to clip a sample.

Three pieces of toast—dark on one side, light on the other. A cup of coffee. Rosh’s preference is Blend 14, with hints of Sub-Saharan Africa and caramel, delivered tepid with more milk than expresso.

When the news said three more young men had been found dead in their homes, Grace knew her mother had come to town.

Barely afloat, our house thrummed with the possibility of sinking. You shook, I shook. Mr. Shindey almost stood, surprising his cat. He wanted to help.

Life is transactional. Give this, get that. It’s the first law of thermodynamics, nothing personal. No sense getting dust-fucked over it.

Near the center of the space, a worktable, and a loom—and the Matron. She sits at her loom, just as she has every evening long after the world has gone to sleep.

His white skin looked even more pale in monochrome. In the final chapters, he had worn his officer’s uniform, to remind me of his country’s authority over my city.

Tory writes, draws, and codes in Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Drabblecast, and PseudoPod, and her art has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex, and Spellbound. I can&#82…

I dress up as a clown and let people beat me up in the alley behind the cybermotel. The first man who ever did this to me, he was my best friend.

Frederick says I shouldn’t spend so much time with dead things. He warns that I, too, might atrophy and ossify.

Not everything that’s missing was taken, but once it’s gone, it’s gone, ain’t it? There’s nothing to be done about it now. What isn’t dead is burned to the ground. What isn’t mourned is barely remembered.