Doll Seed
She stood in a brass doll stand on the window shelf in Mrs. Lovey’s Irresistible Toys and Candy Store looking out on Eighth Avenue and 72nd Street.
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Category: Short Fiction
Genre Short Fiction Published in Apex Magazine
DEMON FIGHTER SUCKS
Run didn’t always hate Demon Fighter. She used to love it. But she also used to have a mother. Lots of things change.
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All This Darkness
Nobody ever says we have coal in our veins; they don’t have to. We have black half-moons under our nails when we wake in the morning; we ooze like oil when we skin a knee, split a knuckle fighting. We aren’t afraid of the dark or closed spaces.
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Mishpokhe and Ash
Golem waited patiently outside for months. Sometimes she would tend the garden when Magda’s mother wasn’t watching or send a twin to bring back scrap metal for an ad hoc repair, but mostly Golem stood still. Magda had not given her leave to come back inside.
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Throw Rug
Then he pops back up. I should stop the match but the kid seems fine, and I’m only a little worried when I blow the whistle again and the boys go back at it. Again, Wham! And Umi is pinned again. And again. And again. And each time I’m sure that he has a busted rib or a ruptured spleen, but each time he gets back up.
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This Is the Moment, Or One of Them
Your current plan provides a limit of 50 reviews per original moment; 10 reviews per shifted moment. For more reviews, please upgrade to an Amethyst or higher plan.
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The Life & Death of Mia Fremont: An Interview with a Killer
Mia foolishly believed, as the young are wont to do, that she could avoid villainy. The key was to be a good person. Good people aren’t villains. She knew that in her heart, and she knew it because society told her it was so. The road to being good was laid out for her by her mother, religion, and Saturday morning cartoons.
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She Searches for God in the Storm Within
The sky was the color of iron and the air tasted like iron filings, like blood. It reminded me of Reef’s belt buckle, which made me think about the things he would say and how they never matched the things he did. And how, despite the way he always used God to prop up his reasoning, it still crumbled like a mountain beneath God’s wrath.
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If Those Ragged Feet Won’t Run
Everything aches. Her back is tight and knotted at the bottom of her spine, because Keena is in a phase where she wants to be able to look up at her as she’s held. With that thought, Bethesda glances down, peeking under the wrap to see if she’s asleep. Keena dozes, lips parted, cheek smushed against Bethesda’s chest, eyes hooded. Good. Good enough.
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A Love That Burns Hot Enough to Last: Deleted Scenes from a Documentary
You know the story. You’ve seen the news clips and the Behind the Music episodes and the biopics: the poor kid from the Chicago projects, her church-obsessed single mom, how Ti spent every spare moment of her childhood there, singing her little heart out. How that safe and stunting space celebrated her, and how it maimed her. How she got on television; how she captured the heart of America from the first moment and didn’t let it go until she died.
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Black Box of the Terraworms
The first god tastes of cardamom and coriander. Its pungent skin is brittle and cracked and breaks like dry seaweed. The seven legs of its impressive mass bend and form great peaks and valleys. Bogs of noxious fumes bubble from its pores. Our programming tells us the god most closely resembles an arachnid to you Earth-raised beings. Imagine a black widow the size of a mountain range, but with skin like yours, tearing open like a burning house. Full of death, and therefore life, rotting and stinking with history.
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The Eight-Thousanders
He spoke once, the words whispered by frozen lips on a face so frostbitten he looked like a porcelain doll. I found him below the summit as our expedition bottlenecked before the Hillary Step on our final ascent of Mount Everest.
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