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Reading Time: 5 minutes For the King it is love at first sight, but can love, no matter how intense and generous, be forced?

Reading Time: 4 minutes A not-quite-human entity roams the world, hoping to find true love before her kind is erased from existence.

Reading Time: 5 minutes A mother, son, and grandmother evacuate a dark, frozen planet earth but dread something even worse.

Reading Time: 3 minutes When you’re married to a witch don’t make empty promises or you may find yourself learning a hard lesson.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Trapped in a life pod attached to a dying spacecraft, an aging, battle-weary engineer has less than three minutes to live and an impossible choice to make. However, thanks to two computer programmers—over 100 years in the past—he’s not alone.

Reading Time: 5 minutes A tightly wound architect is forced to extremes when ridding her house of a man who keeps growing from the walls.

Reading Time: 4 minutes The hole in my floor descended deep into the ground. Damp, mildewy air wafted up.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Online dating can be predatory, but who exactly is doing the hunting?

Reading Time: 3 minutes There’s something I never told you, but I think you’re old enough now to know. I have a magic inside me. It lives between the lines in my fingertips and changes what I touch so I can fly away to a world far less frightening.

Reading Time: 4 minutes A boy’s love for his mother helps him avoid a snare set by the Devil.

Reading Time: 3 minutes The five second burst of sound cycled over and over, breaking against his thoughts like waves against a levy, overwhelming him, washing him away.

Reading Time: 4 minutes One can spend an entire lifetime searching for something, only to find it lies just beyond your grasp – and your lifetime has vanished in the blink of an eye.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Rosie O’Connell smelled only dust where once there had been life.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Jenny hangs the traps every sunset. She measures the string against her arm and wraps it twice around each jar tied with a double knot. She hangs them from the strongest branches of the big dead oak on Hangman’s Hill.

Reading Time: 4 minutes There is something special about desert at night: A dark-grey sea of emptiness stretched before us, with nothing but sand dunes and tall, sharp rocks for miles around. If we watched closely, we’d see it was crawling with life, with snakes, scorpions, and other little nightmares, but I kept my eyes on the road, and the hitchhiker – Joey – stared at the sky.

Reading Time: 3 minutes The oldest mask shop in Venice has a mask for everything, and the owner will take whatever you have to offer.

Reading Time: 4 minutes She flails her arms and legs against the straps that bind her to a wooden chair in the middle of the boutique.

Reading Time: 4 minutes When I mentioned the Kintoc spring tale of relocating entire lakes using braided ropes, a herd of elk and sub-zero temperatures, I didn’t consider that I might soon be living all of it.

Reading Time: 3 minutes A century ago, a question blossomed in our awareness that has tormented each subsequent generation’s brightest scientific minds. Since other intelligent life must be out there in a universe so vast, why haven’t they found us yet?

Reading Time: 4 minutes “My name is Calder Freeman. I am the head arcanist at GraveSecure.” He said it casually, like someone offhandedly mentioning they were a garbageman or an accountant, not an honest-to-God necromancer.

Reading Time: 4 minutes As William ambles into the kitchen to retrieve his morning coffee, he slips on a patch of melted ice. When he falls on his back, the dishwasher swings its door open and smacks him on the head.

Reading Time: 2 minutes We live in an old red schoolhouse in the forest. The forest is thick and woolly, and at night you can hear the wolves sing. It is safe here.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Brother Gregor bent close to his work, his hands trembling as he lifted the taper. Candlelight flickered in the gloom; incense sticks pierced the fetid air. A drab grey light trickled through the tiny windows, illuminating the chalk circle drawn across the floorboards.

Reading Time: 3 minutes I found it in the usual place, where I always find them. Under the rock. “Hello,” I said.  “What’s your name, little feller?” No answer. But I expected that. 

Reading Time: 3 minutes Inspired by both the art of Louise Bourgeois and a news story about a sex-bot repairman, “Spiral Woman” gives a kind of agency to a member of the already-marginalized servant class of the future.

Reading Time: 4 minutes You can change your appearance with the touch of a button. But should you?

Reading Time: 4 minutes A video game eventually progresses from virtuality to reality.

Reading Time: 3 minutes I haven’t seen what the world is running from, and my father won’t tell me. But I have heard what they say in the village. The monsters came from the sky to live in our oceans.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Two cyborgs, a woman, and a parrot, are outmatched by their deep space competitors.

Reading Time: 3 minutes When Maria wakes up covered in Marigolds she knows she’s dead.

Reading Time: 4 minutes A hayride with an old friend from the past unveils uncomfortable truths for Max and his family.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Lizzie Williams kept the head in a burlap sack. We’d pay to look at it, pay even more to hear its secrets. We hated that head.

Reading Time: 3 minutes “I feel like I left my mind on Mars. Even now, I can still hear the wind.” Rosie reaches over from where she sits on her rocking chair and winds her fingers around mine. She hasn’t changed a bit, despite the years I was gone. Her face is still every bit as bright and optimistic …

The Lingering Taste of Mars Read More »

Reading Time: 2 minutes A band of faeries endeavors to help a worthy little girl by doggedly placing wish opportunities in her path.

Reading Time: 4 minutes A scientist ponders the mysteries of dark matter — though it, and he, may not be what they seem…

Reading Time: 3 minutes When civilization begins to crumble, the 1 percent retreat to their summer homes.

Reading Time: 3 minutes The old storms have gone away, and a little wonder has gone out of the world with them. Can they be brought back?

Reading Time: 2 minutes A thing of beauty cannot be endured.

Reading Time: 3 minutes With any experience in life, you have to take the good with the bad… unless you have the technology to sell either to the highest bidder.

Reading Time: 3 minutes What makes a house a home? In the future, we might not have to be the ones who decide that.

Reading Time: 4 minutes A haunted musician is compelled to make music for creatures he finds in the shadows…

Reading Time: 4 minutes In a society where everybody is beautiful, physical imperfection becomes a career move.