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Since Mother’s death, a changeling was all I could be. Father said so before he himself passed, “A real child, a real daughter, our daughter, would never cause death, would never bring death upon this family.” Mother named me Yangguang—sunlight. But Father changed it to Yinying—shadow—for robbing his love of her light. But she told […]
Elaine read through the fall of Rome, and the domestication of the silk moth, and the birth of Mary Stuart and the assassination of Elisabeth Eugenie. She read through the invention of the Babbage analytic engine and the Waldorf salad and the pull tab pop can. She faced the wall, arciform as a semicolon, while […]
Yilien likes the masks. She likes that her meaning cannot be misconstrued, that when she dons Politeness no one can accuse her of overcaution or indecisiveness, the way her parents did in her childhood. When she has the right mask, she doesn’t have to speak. When Mirnai shows up in her walled garden half an […]
There’s nothing quieter than the sound of dreams not coming true. The moment when reality sinks in and Gwen realizes she’s never going to have the one thing she’s been yearning for since high school—the thing she made so much space in her life to accommodate—has almost no soundtrack. Distant car-tire rumbles, the stutter of […]
The country was at just over ten thousand deaths the morning that the door appeared. On Kosmo’s phone NPR was interviewing a doctor with a nasal voice about the need for social distancing, while Kosmo himself collected empty cans from around his home office. They were everywhere. Walls of recyclable cans dominated his room. Just […]
Aden had never once forgotten his gear for bulk trash day, but he found it touching that Nura still taped a monthly reminder note on the door from the kitchen to the garage. Sweet of her to remember, given how exhausted med school had her these days. He ducked out to the garage to toss […]
In 1981, Amelia moved to New York City. Brooklyn. Specifically, Prospect Heights, where she rented a room in a rooming house on a street of four-story brownstones. Her room had ornate molding and a white marble fireplace veined in gray that had been bricked up. Her landlady told her never to go to up the […]
Out of an abundance of caution, and as a condition of its funding and founding, the Jesuit lunar colony established in the southwest corner of Mare Imbrium was subject to Curial censorship, with violators placed under interdict. That did not stop the occasional enterprising regent from smuggling out, by shuttle and courier, the green silicon […]
You ever love the pretty right off someone? When I was a kid, had me a BMX, bright red like a candy apple. I rode it all summer long, cresting hills trying to catch the perfect gleam in the sunlight. Only that same sunlight that gave the bike its shine burnt all the sparkle out […]
“He takes them for his servants, and never after are they seen again.” That was how the tale used to end, told by grannies at the fire, by performers at the fair. It always began with a young woman alone, working in the fields or carrying water from the well, on the first day of […]
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