Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, 2020) is her debut fiction collection. She is also the author of two multi-genre/hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press, 2016), long-listed for the 2016 Otherwise Award and honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review and Shotgun Lullabies (Aqueduct, 2011). She also edited the World Fantasy Award-winning Black speculative fiction volumes Dark Matter. A Marvel writer, her novelette, “Heart of a Panther” appears in The Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda edited by Jesse J. Holland. She is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and associate editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Explore more at www.shereereneethomas.com or follow her via Twitter @blackpotmojo.
Three men emerged from darkness and walked to the edge of the wood, the scent of roses rising all around them. The moon hung like a broken jaw above the Memphis night. The schoolyard lay ahead, its wood fence disjointed and leaning. The fetid scent of wet grass, of mold and moss, floated on the evening wind from the bayou.
Listen to our audio presentation of “Aunt Dissy’s Policy Dream Book” by Sheree Renée Thomas. Narrated by the author.
Editorial from our Issue 111 guest editor Sheree Renée Thomas.
Thistle stood with her back to him, all curve and joy, a plum-skinned promise of delight. He tried to follow her, but his feet wouldn’t move. With each step forward he kept stumbling backward, as if his body wanted, needed to withdraw every footstep, to retrace their path under that lone glimmering star.
That night I dreamed my room was alive. The walls, the doors, the ceiling pulsed and heaved as if they were flesh and breath. The room rattled like the tail of a snake. In the night, dark as the inside of an eyelid, I willed myself awake, refused to sleep for fear I would dream the dream again.