Talent & Culture
Reading Time: 4 minutes A distant relation is bequeathed to someone whose tenuous employment on the outskirts of humanity makes him a less than ideal custodian.
Reading Time: 4 minutes A distant relation is bequeathed to someone whose tenuous employment on the outskirts of humanity makes him a less than ideal custodian.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Totally narcissistic, Electra loved admiring her herself in the mirror. One day a wish turned her to stone gazing in a mirror at herself for eternity. She was mostly happy with this situation, until her old, dying husband visits her and gets a wish of his own.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Azabelle pulled the pins that held up her hair. Dark curls tumbled around her face. She felt Shadow’s presence, of course, but she’d felt it so long she barely registered the danger.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Desperate for cash, Nick and his friend plot a home invasion. They picked the wrong house.
Reading Time: 7 minutes At eighteen, when Gabriel leaves the orphanage, the sisters breathe a sigh of relief. He has never been any trouble. Never talked back; indeed, rarely talked at all. He is obedient, clean, and scentless. The nuns can find no fault in him, but neither can they feel affection. He makes them forget Christ and contemplate Gabriel. He induces guilt. His very silence screams for attention. He is a shadow in the soul.
Gods and Monsters Installment 3: Music and Moths Read More »
Reading Time: 4 minutes A Hungarian folktale about young girl seeking to rectify injustice done to her sisters.
Reading Time: 6 minutes Lightly amusing modern-feel fantasy mashup about an unlikely partnership between a budget-price necromancer and his student locked in an unusual business model.
Reading Time: 4 minutes She kept her eyes shut. She ran deep into the wilderness. And as the sun flickered out, and the sky went black, and she held all the light of the world behind her eyelids, she tried to pretend she could bury her pain, and she wouldn’t die alone in the cold of the mountains.
Reading Time: 21 minutes A serial killer is playing havoc in the city-state of Sheebatiya. Can Allii uncover the killer before fear pushes the city into anarchy?
Reading Time: 8 minutes Gabriel is much more unusual than a virgin birth. Granted, human virgin birth is miraculous, but in many species of fish, lizards, insects, and sharks, virgin birth is the norm. It is helpful to remember that a miracle is not necessarily good, it is simply unnatural.
Gods and Monsters Installment 2: Beginnings of River and Gabriel Read More »
Reading Time: 5 minutes A vampire, attempting to adapt to Western customs, sends her Christmas list to Santa.
Reading Time: 6 minutes Timestealing is an art. And a business. And a service. A good timestealer can predict what the next best-seller will be – most of the time.
Reading Time: 4 minutes The vet said that my grief would modulate over time and eventually become a part of who I was, something I would cease to question, like the existence of my own arms.
Reading Time: 7 minutes My love affairs ever end thus. I always long for them to turn out differently. It’s so disheartening. If only I didn’t fall in love so often with these warm-blooded vessels of nutrition. I constantly swear I’ll convert, become a celibate bloodsucker, a monastic mosquito, a vamp nun. But then I see some sun-glazed man smelling of day, and it begins again.
Gods and Monsters Installment 1: Wherein we meet the three Fates Read More »
Reading Time: 16 minutes When Janza, a bodyguard-for-hire meets a suspicious merchant, her personal code and memories of the oppression suffered by her people battle for her soul.
Reading Time: 5 minutes I decided to go find Death myself. It was 2023, and a lady could do that. I didn’t need to wait around for someone to fetch me. I could do the fetching.
Reading Time: 4 minutes She wondered if she should even say it. She didn’t even want to think it. But Wyx definitely had to know, had a right to know probably. “There’s someone else on board.”
Reading Time: 4 minutes A quick collision of rich space junk collectors, and an expert counterfeiter.
Reading Time: 10 minutes In spite of interfering adults, a spoiled child is determined to claim her birthright in the court of Oberon and Titania.
Reading Time: 3 minutes He used to have choices; now, he has a hunger. He needs to find his fiancée.
Reading Time: 8 minutes A secret government organization is fighting an unknown, but strange enemy.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Ken’ichi’s white hazmat suit shines like a beacon as he breaks over the ridge, even through all the rain. His gait is slow and uneven. I never expected to see him again.
Reading Time: 4 minutes A young man can no longer afford to keep all his memories. How will he decide which ones to keep? And he’s running out of time.
Reading Time: 4 minutes No magic in it. She didn’t need any. She just turned around looking some kind of way, and bung he went. Sometimes, a person sees their future in stark clarity and chooses to roll off the coil while the going’s good, and that’s the best thing that could be said about Amajane’s father.
Reading Time: 5 minutes Idyllic was the only word Brody could think to describe it. How had he missed this bit of paradise so close to camp?
“—ody?!” The static hiss of Control cut sharply through his helmet, killing the serenity settling upon him. Brody sighed. His last check-in couldn’t have been, what? Fifteen minutes ago?
Reading Time: 21 minutes After her technological tool failed to warn the world of the sudden loss of birds on the planet, a self-exiled blind elder who has Aspergers and suffers from dysphonia, finds new hope in the field of soundscape ecology.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Conscripted Lieutenant Lovemore Vulgaris has been instructed to design the people of the future, and he’s not messing around.
Reading Time: 4 minutes “What’s mechanical, Papa?” I asked.
“What you said. The neurons,” he replied.
Neurons? Then I remembered.
Reading Time: 10 minutes A young woman faces her vengeful parents returning from the dead.
Reading Time: 10 minutes A couple unknowingly house a blood-sucking parasite under their bed.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Marco backs away until he hits a door. He reaches behind him, turns the handle, and falls into the room. The door swings shut. He backs away, waiting for Big Bob to come through it, running through the best next words to choose.
Reading Time: 4 minutes After a chance encounter and a night of passion in Manhattan, a woman must choose between her responsibility and her heart.
Reading Time: 12 minutes In a Victorian town plagued by werespiders, a curious spinster takes in a mysterious woman.
Reading Time: 4 minutes “Sorry it’s not sunny.” Amar shrugs. “Rainy days are the best for time travel.”
Reading Time: 5 minutes A young girl, determined to catch Santa in the act, waits impatiently with a list of her own.
Reading Time: 4 minutes The town of Boyerville is covered in smoke from a nearby fire. Officially, the fire was started by accident, but the townspeople suspect otherwise.
Reading Time: 5 minutes The real crook is the Company and always has been. It’s them that got reaction drives outlawed when water’s free, dammit. They only done it so we’d have to buy fusion fuel at a thousand percent markup. Most of us so-called pirates were just freelance miners that couldn’t afford the new engines.
Reading Time: 13 minutes A mother and her young daughter fight to survive in a world ravaged by an ongoing world war between megacorporations.
Reading Time: 12 minutes Novel excerpt: Veronica is eternally fifty-one years old with a proclivity for problematic drinking. Like most hormonally-challenged women negotiating the change of life, she is a hot mess. To retain her sanity, she attends weekly AA meetings and adheres to a strict diet of organic, locally-sourced, (mostly) cruelty-free human blood from the hospice facility where she works.
Reading Time: 3 minutes She has plenty of matchsticks at home and she is clever with crafts. She really thinks they should be more expensive—matchsticks—considering how versatile and sturdy they are. She’s thinking of the fine wooden ones with fire-red tips. This is not the first time, of course. She must be half matchsticks by now.
Reading Time: 17 minutes Dorian Salva is an artist with a consuming passion for birds. One night, his work-in-progress takes on an eerie life of its own, and the relationship between artist and subject, painter and painted, undergoes an uncanny reversal.
Reading Time: 5 minutes A fractured fable and a meal served up in a haunted castle.
Reading Time: 2 minutes This has to be the year the bodies crest the top of the structure, because her parents are selling the cabin. They keep saying, It’s changed, it’s changed, it’s not the same. Even when she says she doesn’t care how it used to be, that she likes it now.