The Virgin of Santos de la Tierra
Reading Time: 6 minutes When a Virgin is seen in a small Mexican town it’s a miracle – the town is blessed… or is it?
Reprint
Ties That Bind
Reading Time: 14 minutes A cosmic traveller helps a grieving fisherman to deal with his trauma.
Shadows
Reading Time: 5 minutes Jason’s daughter, Sarah, approached him one morning and said, “Daddy, the Shadow Man is back.”
Hands Down
Reading Time: 2 minutes How will a child react to his father’s unsettling business decisions?
Two Old Friends in the Garden
Reading Time: 5 minutes An old man’s dedication to his garden goes beyond the grave.
Rod Serling School of Writing
Reading Time: 4 minutes A budding student sci-fi writer applies to the Rod Serling School because of the celebrity’s name attached to the school. When a salesman comes by the house to pitch the school, her father joins the conversation, with unexpected results.
Growth
Reading Time: 3 minutes He is deeply fascinated by growth. And he’s ready to sacrifice a lot for its sake…
Life Online
Reading Time: 7 minutes In the environmentally and economically devastated not-so-distant future, best friends Pen and Lissy have fought for years simply to survive. After a lifetime of struggle, Lissy is desperate for escape, and decides uploading her mind onto a computer chip – complete with home-designed software – is her only option.
Classics: The Star
Reading Time: 15 minutes A strange star is spotted in the distant sky. Scientists watch as its near miss brings humanity to its knees.
Once in a Blue Moon
Reading Time: 2 minutes A hungry ghost, pockets full of whatever money he could collect, visits his favorite diner on Halloween
Worm King
Reading Time: 5 minutes While his father’s once-famous bait shop struggles to survive against the threat of an impending storm, Dill encounters an unexpected solution.
The Last Day
Reading Time: 3 minutes A story about a society in which a mechanism was invented to increase pleasant dreams. Old men prefer to sleep unawakened rather than live. One man tries to resist.
In Him, We Know Freedom
Reading Time: 5 minutes While burning barrels light the state capital’s torn paint and hunger pains ravage his stomach, a man looks into a mirror, seeing what he could become and reliving what he had to do to survive.
Humans and Androids as Societal Partners
Reading Time: 8 minutes Do we need new rules for a society where androids are becoming more and more lifelike?
In My Home
Reading Time: 10 minutes A prisoner with no knowledge of their own identity is kept in solitary confinement, visited daily by human projections designed to prevent mental deterioration. When the opportunity for escape is presented, a dormant instinct resurfaces in the prisoner, and the need to fulfill this drive supplants the desire for freedom.
Here Comes the Sun
Reading Time: 4 minutes June joined the Memory Keeper team to help her family forge a path to abundance. When it became harder to meet quota, June learned that she was trapped in a business that viewed her as another commodity. And sometimes, the consequences of faith in an idea are greater than we can imagine.
It Shambles Closer in the Dark
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the dark, something shambles toward you, its squelch squelch squelch sound getting louder, and louder. Is it here for you?
Not Alone in the Universe
Reading Time: 3 minutes Some expected the aliens to solve the problems of humanity, while others were afraid of genocide or enslavement. But it all turned out differently.
Terra Forma
Reading Time: 11 minutes Mirabyi has been tapped to join the moon colony to explore the possibility of converting the dusty surface to life sustaining soil. Her experiments have unexpected results and maybe not the good kind.
Demonology
Reading Time: 3 minutes With his life spiraling out of control, and a desire for revenge taking over his mind, a man takes drastic actions.
I Will Paint the Night
Reading Time: 26 minutes Can Allii come to grips with the pain her family has inflicted on a nation and heal a land wounded by centuries of injustice, hate, and fear. (And find the killer of her beloved stepmother).
The Faster They Eat Her
Reading Time: 26 minutes Young Daisy must evade the clutches of forest-dwelling witch Madame Sosostris and Malcolm, the town brute, as she tries to solve the mystery of her friend Violet’s disappearance.
The Imaginary Librarian
Reading Time: 2 minutes In a sparse, orderly imaginary office, a librarian awaits unseen directives, tending to imaginary tomes with quiet diligence. As dawn approaches, she fulfills a final task, providing closure for a life departing.
A Darker World
Reading Time: 6 minutes Technology allows us to revisit the most cherished moments of our lives. But is that a good thing?
The Fool’s Fiddle
Reading Time: 18 minutes Dragons can’t lie, right? That’s what the legends say. So, when Guy finds himself at the wrong end of a failed heist, he puts that knowledge to the test. Compatriots dead. Hope gone. And his last chance at life is convincing a dragon to let him go.
Willow Prentiss
Reading Time: 5 minutes Guilt, melancholy, and the lost soul of a love form the basis of this twist on the paranormal/magical romance.
The Wreck of the Lorelei
Reading Time: 21 minutes Trapped in an experiment in faster-than-light space travel, the captain of the ship searches for what went wrong.
Freedreamers
Reading Time: 18 minutes In the future, our dreams are mass entertainment … or a weapon of mass destruction.
Patient Diplomacy
Reading Time: 4 minutes A first contact story about the idea that before anything else, perhaps they have to test for biological compatibility.
Confederate Cavalry on a Plane
Reading Time: 15 minutes A physics professor and his student on a plane argue about the possibility of infinite alternate universes, while being robbed blind by a bratty kid. The professor bets the student that even the most unlikely event possible must happen, leading to three very confused Confederate Cavalry charging down the aisle.
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.
Stone Cold Beauty
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.
Home Delivery
Reading Time: 10 minutes Desperate for cash, Nick and his friend plot a home invasion. They picked the wrong house.
Táltos
Reading Time: 4 minutes A Hungarian folktale about young girl seeking to rectify injustice done to her sisters.
Affordable Resurrection
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.
Why the Sea is Boiling Hot
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?
Naughty or Nice?
Reading Time: 5 minutes A vampire, attempting to adapt to Western customs, sends her Christmas list to Santa.
Timestealer
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.
Half-baked Hero
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.
Counterfeit
Reading Time: 4 minutes A quick collision of rich space junk collectors, and an expert counterfeiter.
Thumbing to Sugar Daddy Oberon
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.
The Visitation
Reading Time: 8 minutes A secret government organization is fighting an unknown, but strange enemy.
What You Will Find at a Memory Auction
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.
Robin’s Last Song
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.