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I live in my car. It’s both worse and better than you’d expect. It’s an old Subaru hatchback so I can put the back seat down and sleep. I have all my stuff in the back but I have a space where I can lay. The place where I park is, like, the unofficial place […]
“T, wake up.” Anna? Terumi reaches across the empty bed seeking Anna’s warm presence. The voice again, unmistakably clear. “I’m sorry I’m missing our anniversary. It is our anniversary, right?” Baxter the terrier, nestled against her legs, jerks to alertness. The old basset hound Ringo pushes the bedroom door open with his nose. Both dogs […]
(Content Note: Attempted Child Death, Abuse, Self-mutilation) When the doctors tugged me from Ma I gripped on so tight with all my hundred hands that I left little handprints all over the umbilical cord. I grasped before I gasped. And then I was crying because they had to peel my fingers away, one by […]
1. The Sapphire Sword, its luster dimmed. In another world, you held the Sword aloft and it blazed blue in your hand. It made you feel a hero, even on the days you hacked and stabbed and felt anything but. Yet now you have saved that world, you have returned through the portal, you have […]
That fall, the Parrington Museum’s Henry T. Meadows Scholar was a man named Claudius Winterson, of whom my colleagues had nothing good to say. Dutifully, I attended his public lecture, where I sat well to the back and asked no questions, although several occurred to me. I had not intended—duty or no duty—to go to […]
In Lily’s last vlog, she says she’s not scared of dying. I know it’s a lie because her gaze drifts off camera and she blinks three times, like there’s something in her eyes. Lily was always a bad liar, but I am a very good editor, so her six-point-five million loyal subscribers never have to […]
They told us we were princesses, and we believed them. At least, I believed them. I think most of the others did, too. Except Kenna, perhaps; she had her suspicions. But Kenna was suspicious of everything, always. It made her tiring to talk to. To be fair, we did live in a castle. And we […]
On a Thursday night in Harvestmonth, when the moon rises round and bronze as a new betrothal promise watch, is the warlike thrice-veiled Mother of Mákhesthaines, crowned in her black silk mantles embroidered with skulls, permitted across the Holy Square and into the Grand Cathedral of Saint Ignace Battiste. All other times is she anathema. […]
It was one of those rare nights when the smog thinned out enough for stars to be visible in the sky above the penguin enclosure. Gwin adjusted her synthetic feathers with her beak, arranging them neatly and plucking out any that were broken or bent. She didn’t want to groom, but her programming said it […]
Monday’s lover tugs at Jan’s ribbon with his teeth. Jan doesn’t yell at the lover to stop. The guy just received bad news from the front—a friend lost to a bomb, perhaps, a sibling blown to bits; Jan doesn’t ask. He tells the lover, instead, to be careful: We don’t want my head rolling off […]
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