N.K. Jemisin | The Ones Who Stay and Fight

Perhaps you’ve heard an anecdote about a child named Cresencio who was skipping barefoot between hills of corn when a shallow bowl in the field, long turbulent with mutterings, broke into pieces. Cres...

5 Feb 201340min

My feet are scraped and bleeding, my slippers shredded and almost useless. The dress hangs in tatters around me. No longer white, it still bears the pearls along the bodice, and I hope I can keep them...

22 Jan 201353min

You’ve heard of bottled cities, no doubt—society writ miniscule and delicate beyond reason: toothpick spired towns, streets no thicker than thread, pin-prick faces of the citizenry peering from office...

15 Jan 201325min

Addison Howell didn’t so much arrive in the town of Humptulips as appear there sometime around 1875. He had money, which set him apart from everybody else—because everybody else was working for the lo...

8 Jan 201320min

Earth has grown quiet since everyone’s shipped off to the new one. I walk New Paltz’s empty streets with an ox-mask tight about my face. An acidic rain mists my body, and a thick fog obscures the vac-...

1 Jan 201339min

Sheila Halpern got her looks from her Momma, who died pushing her out. Died before, even, but still kept pushing. “You’re the prettiest thing in the whole darn world,” her daddy told her the day he pu...

25 Dec 201242min

The arrival of the dust-covered girl caught Keraf by surprise. The girl’s slender face, sun-beaten to a deep brown, blended seamlessly into the cloth wrapped around her head. She couldn’t have been mo...

18 Dec 201216min

He watched her legs approach in the mirror and smiled down at the butter melting on his pancakes when she sat on the stool beside him. “You’re free to sit anywhere you like, but I can’t much promise t...

11 Dec 201242min