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Chlorophylliation

Reading Time: 5 minutes Colonists struggle with a strange, addictive plant that is strangling their settlement.

For Warmth and Trinkets

Reading Time: 4 minutes Brrr’s investigation reveal his ice planet is losing cold and fledglings because of bureaucrats chasing profit with human aliens.

Deracination

Reading Time: 4 minutes Lovesick Serena is prepared to risk everything and uproot herself completely to be with the one she loves. But are her feelings returned?

Clean Slate

Reading Time: 21 minutes On a Saturday morning, Grace Merritt vomits up a pocket watch that she’s never seen before.

Enough

Reading Time: 3 minutes This is the tale of a young photographer looking to catch her big break by capturing the perfect shot in the woods supposedly haunted by the ‘Snow Witch’.

(Image provided by Jessica Turner)

Mired

Reading Time: 5 minutes In this short historical horror, a soldier on WWI’s Western Front struggles with the enormity and guilt of having volunteered to enlist.

A Voice for the Scavengers

Reading Time: 23 minutes A government Hunter in a post apocalyptic world is challenged with either changing his allegiance or living a lie.

A Substitute for Salvation

Reading Time: 23 minutes A post-apocalyptic love triangle inspired by “Casablanca” that revolves around a misanthropic bar owner, a Mars-bound clone fighting for his freedom, and a repurposed sex droid.

Those Halcyon Days

Reading Time: 4 minutes We had spent the winter together, sleeping on ice caps, pointing out constellations far above us in the sky.

In the Bowels of the Theater

Reading Time: 20 minutes There is magic in the theatre, ancient and powerful – not just of the stage, but of an elder and mighty god…one which Sucunde would see freed and restored.

Fidget

Reading Time: 3 minutes Dubious captains, drones, economies built around recycled rocket boosters, and love.

Club Fiends

Reading Time: 20 minutes The wild hunt calls, and it’s time for Ondine to depart this world, alongside her club-obsessed brothers and sisters. Yet she’s in love with a mortal – or is she? Her decision to stay or go must be made fast, for a terrible monster hunts her

Checkpoint

Reading Time: 16 minutes On a distant planet, a young alien and his human neighbor plot to escape to the paradise known as Earth.

Speed of Shadow

Reading Time: 16 minutes When a mysterious, dark figure keeps up with a family’s car at highway speeds, one little girl must inform her dad of the danger before it’s too late.

I Got Dem Ol’ Apocalypse Blues Again

Reading Time: 19 minutes Jackson, a wanna-be bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic city, has been hired to find the people responsible for several acts of industrial sabotage. A moral person living in a city where morality isn’t a particularly good survival trait, Jackson ends up facing a crisis of conscience.

Mortimer the Maus

Reading Time: 14 minutes In “Mortimer The Maus,” Picco conveys the childhood terror of becoming lost in a large crowd, and the perils of being found by something else.

The Feather and the Lamp

Reading Time: 11 minutes A magic lamp should have been a gateway to Imperceptibility’s every desire. So how did she end up in the underworld covered in slobber from a three-headed dog? And then there’s capture by fanatical priest-mercenaries, sacrifice to a quantum dragon, and getting trapped in a chicken coop. Will she ever find her way back home? More important still, what’s a goose feather got to do with any of this?

The End

Reading Time: 3 minutes The end of the world? Seriously?

Annihilation Plan: (Mars Wars Book 3)

Reading Time: 9 minutes If you happened to have an illegal telescope, or proxied your galaxynet address well enough to pirate your way to satellite images of Mars, you might glimpse a damaged but operational Mars Orbiter 1, alive with ‘rebels. If so, you’d be witnessing Mars Wars.

Virtually Yours

Reading Time: 12 minutes In a world of seamless surveillance where virtual and real coalesce in a teasing dance, love is the trickster

Mother Worked Nights

Reading Time: 5 minutes A boy struggles to come to terms with his absentee mother. His father insists it’s due to her busy work schedule, but something doesn’t seem right.

Playing House

Reading Time: 5 minutes Three sisters play a dangerous game in a house which mysteriously appeared–and which could vanish again at any moment.

Arachno Thank You

Reading Time: 5 minutes Thomas makes progress with his shrink, but the process of opening up and sharing his dreams has an unintended effect.

(Image provided by Ursula O'Reilly)

Changeling

Reading Time: 6 minutes Marion recalls a tale her grandma told which she has never forgotten. The story of Kara O’Brien, a strange looking child who attended the village school in Connemara, Ireland, where the old lady grew up. Marion’s grandma reveals a secret that was known only by herself and her Aunt Josie. Kara O’Brien was no ordinary child.

Incandescent

Reading Time: 14 minutes Sarah moves back to her old stomping grounds and buried memories return to haunt her. The only way to exorcise them is to face them head on, but she’s not sure if she’s ready to shine a light on the horror that lies within.

The Laws of Nature

Reading Time: 4 minutes Two space prospectors, Zdenek and Sarika, encounter an unusual unknown life form in space. Due to carelessness, the first contact with it turns out to be too harsh and the situation escalates…

Simulacra

Reading Time: 10 minutes The alarm blared. Tim Jorgensen opened his eyes and sighed. The clock was yellow. It should have been red!

Living in a buggy computer simulation is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The Sleepy Warrior

Reading Time: 14 minutes Even on the sunniest of days, a whirlwind of violence can form in the calm.

The Savage Year

Reading Time: 23 minutes In 1968, mage Artemis West has a dull government job double-checking the bindings of ancient demons. Only someone’s just set one of them free. With the help of a teenage vagabond girl, Artemis has to catch a cosmic horror or America won’t make it to 1969.

Komorebi

Reading Time: 3 minutes An android physician achieves a fleeting moment of sentience.

Dumping Ground

Reading Time: 7 minutes A damaged android is abandoned on a junk world, where she finds a society of androids who had been discarded by humanity.

Ascending

Reading Time: 4 minutes Does the value of true peace transcend the means of its own achievement?

Ye Anointed

Reading Time: 19 minutes As many faithful gather to worship their gods, another group gather for something else.
One sees it as a sermon with a dead audience,the rest see it as an unholy sacrifice to a malevolent entity. Terrible,but necessary in order to end their suffering.

Medicated Success

Reading Time: 15 minutes Mr. Frabbit is a new man on new medication. His days of hallucinating blue cats are behind him. Now he can look forward to returning to work. On his first day on the job, he is alarmed to be having hallucinations of miniature trains. This is new. Mr. Frabbit begins to question if his medication has been successful.

Three Eight Two

Reading Time: 13 minutes Where past and future meet, often it’s those living in the present that feel most conflicted.