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.
Reading Time: 17 minutes A woman tries to intervene with the fate of a young barista, but fate will not be cheated.
Reading Time: 4 minutes When a mysterious letter written in strange disappearing ink arrives from the daughter he banished long ago for dabbling in sorcery, a father must decipher her cryptic confession before the words and his memories fade into oblivion.
Reading Time: 31 minutes An anxious young man gets more than he bargained for when he accompanies his fiance’s family on a hunting trip.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Here we have an unexpected intersection of past and present when Fate takes a hand to things up.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Science fiction meets gothic in this story of a groundbreaking discovery gone wrong, and the horrifying fall of the titular scientist.
Reading Time: 17 minutes When Irish-born Father Donahey retires to Winterset, he finds the community is awash with supernatural creatures, some friendly, many decidedly not.
Reading Time: 4 minutes A flash fantasy story about a High Priestess who must deal with rising tides that threaten to drown her people.
Reading Time: 21 minutes Ben is reveling in his tragically achieved freedom. He thinks he has it made, except for an elusive partner. Then an unknown woman first DMs then stands him up. His troubles have only begun when he realizes how thoroughly someone has infiltrated his technological fortress.
Reading Time: 3 minutes In this spooky flash story, a woman haunts her own house after a messy breakup.
Reading Time: 15 minutes In the aftermath of a climate apocalypse, Jeremy and Alex survive by supplying food to the wealthy people living above the water, in the penthouses of Old Manhattan. But the wealthy aren’t the only ones that are hungry.
Reading Time: 5 minutes When Katie’s brain seems to jump out of sync she discovers another, almost identical, mind living inside her own. This duplicate mind gradually is not what she seems but instead something far more dangerous.
Reading Time: 5 minutes When old Ms. Linton rescues a wounded magpie, memories of her past come winging back.
Reading Time: 4 minutes A mother, desperate to feed her young son, takes a risk that doesn’t pay off.
Reading Time: 4 minutes After an elective medical procedure, a “Blank” remains a living being, completely anonymized and freed from any visible identity. If one showed up in your life refusing to leave, would you remember who they once were and what they’d meant to you?
Reading Time: 11 minutes 2,000 feet below the surface, are they the observers? Or the observed?
Reading Time: 19 minutes When a bioengineered “weapon” goes feral, a kill team is dispatched to retire it.
Reading Time: 16 minutes Brother Silas is unhappy with his lot at the abbey. He sees no alternative until a unique manuscript comes his way.
Reading Time: 11 minutes A remote cabin in the southwest desert is the scene of an alien invasion, but it’s not what you think. Maybe the ghost hunters have it wrong.
Reading Time: 2 minutes The holidays take on an ominous tone when a woman receives a phone call from the son she murdered.
Reading Time: 8 minutes When a dead scientist calls a city paper to report a nuclear accident, the night reporter goes out to investigate. What he finds is completely alien.
Reading Time: 9 minutes A little boy sees the ghost of an old man in the mirror. Or is it the old man who sees the ghost of a small boy?
Reading Time: 8 minutes Parenting is hard enough without help from the multiverse.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Maybe the meaning of life won’t be found among the digits of pi, but life can still depend on them.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Her child was now grown, but a fairy godmother’s job was never over.
Reading Time: 4 minutes A young girl, desperate to find her beloved pet, ventures out into the darkness.
Reading Time: 4 minutes Being neighborly isn’t always easy. Morgred has to hold her tongue while her daughter makes other plans.
Reading Time: 12 minutes In the aftermath of the Hives invasion of earth, the society of the old world was shattered, and in response to the possibility of the aliens return, the authoritative Collective took hold of the sphere. Alexander King, a loyal soldier of the Collective, discovers that the Hive’s presence is stronger than commonly believed, and that its secrets may be far too powerful for any military effort.
