Kat Howard | Breaking the Frame
The photograph is of a woman at the center of a forest. She is slim and tall and pale as the birches she stands among. The shadows turn her ribs and spine into branches, into knots in the wood. Around...
28 Aug 201220min
Charlie Jane Anders | Love Might Be Too Strong a Word
Here’s how I remember it: A touch shocked me. I was reaching for a flash-seared bog-oyster, and then a fingertip, softer than I’d ever felt, brushed my knuckle. The softness startled me so much, it to...
21 Aug 201242min
Linda Nagata | A Moment Before It Struck
He felt death coming a moment before it struck. In the lingering gray twilight, Smoke lay on his bedding, eyes not quite closed and mind adrift, only half-aware of the sounds of the encampment around ...
14 Aug 201235min
Ken Liu | The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species
There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations...
7 Aug 201223min
Maria Dahvana Headley | Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream
In the middle of the maze, there’s always a monster. If there were no monster, people would happily set up house where it’s warm and windowless and comfortable. The monster is required. The monster is...
24 Jul 201244min
Peter S. Beagle | Gordon, the Self-made Cat
Once upon a time, to a family of house mice there was born a son named Gordon. He looked very much like his father and mother and all his brothers and sisters, who were gray and had bright, twitchy, b...
17 Jul 201228min
Jake Kerr | Requiem in the Key of Prose
There is such a thing as an antifuse. This device is used to maintain the ongoing flow of electricity when there is local failure. The antifuse works similarly to a fuse in that it is designed to be s...
3 Jul 201221min
