Advertisement
Claudette lowered her infrared goggles over her eyes and waited for the ghost. By the cash register, webs of energy, tinted green by the goggles, swirled in a loose spiral. Spectral lines tightened in time with a throbbing hum of energy. As she walked closer, Claudette’s hair stood on end along her neck, and the […]
“Ambition!” Trevor emphasized, rapping knuckles hard on the wood table. “That is what makes the great men!” He took a satisfied swallow from his mug. Across from him, Barnaby put down the daily he’d been reading and sipped from his own beer. Pulling out a handkerchief to dab froth from his lips, he scratched thoughtfully […]
{Because this story encodes a great deal of information in complex formatting, descriptive passages like this, enclosed in curly brackets, have been added to help screenreaders and other accessibility devices make sense of the formatting for readers.} Worlds pop into existence, composed by clicking keyboards or in spraying foam on waves of thought; tucked away […]
There isn’t a more resilient thing than a small flower. Your great-great-grandmother was a yellow daffodil. Where she was born people called her narcissus. Her many heads blossomed from a loamy opening in the forest on a particularly chill spring day. They rose hungrily, searching for a few precious rays of sunlight. Her stems pushed […]
I was finishing the last of my nightly coffee when the nineteen-seventies twins approached my table and asked me to bear witness to their disappearance. This was not an unusual request at Cafe Liminalité, being the locale of patrons that dreamed too much and ate too little. I, being its longest and oldest customer, had […]
Content Note: This story uses unusual formatting and fonts that may not be accessible to screen readers. A screen reader- and accessibility device-friendly version is located in this link here. Worlds pop into existence, composed by clicking keyboards or in spraying foam on waves of thought; tucked away in spells, algorithms, entangled particles, recipes; evoked […]
“It was like this behind the Iron Curtain.” The woman in the grocery line was wearing a cowboy hat and had the leathery skin of someone who’d spent their entire life in the sun. Smoker skin, Payne’s mother had called it. She always loved finding ways to blame people for their misfortunes. Payne thought about […]
I stood at the back of the viewing platform and watched my fifteen tourists stare at the Fairy Falls of Mallu. Low murmurs of appreciation arose from most of my people. Images of Fairy Falls were often included in collections of Year’s Best Pictures on interstellar substreams, but the reality was better. Under a warm […]
Downwind from the encampment, the wind stank of refuse. The stench of people weeks into an unwashed trek intensified as Yue Ling limped out of the tree line, raising her hands over her head as she slowly approached the sentries. Both were young, younger than her oldest nephews. They straightened as she got close, hands […]
Matt tells the waiter he’ll have his eggs over easy. They come back scrambled, a neat glistening pile framed by perfect triangles of toast, a lacy froth of hashbrowns lurking across the plate. He doesn’t notice he’s chosen to move until he’s already halfway to the kitchen, adrenaline flooding his body. It feels good, electric, […]
Advertisement