Before they arrived, the visitors announced it by radio: signals traversing galaxies, warping time and particle. Syllables spelled out in numbers and strange hieroglyphs confirming presence and arrival.
Read MoreWhen Evening Arrives
Shoppers at the Thersian Grand Market jostled to haggle over tanned eelskin baubles labeled as Shawdese good luck charms, unaware that actual Shawdese neither made nor used such objects. The only regular Shawdese presence in the Thersian Grand Market was the crematorium ash that made up most of the hard-packed earth under those very shoppers’ feet. That, and the occasional traveler from the Southern Wastes.
Read MoreSpirits of the Broken Lands
Our ancestors used to think bears were just cute. My grandmother remembered her mother having a small toy shaped like a bear. “But not really like a bear, but a child’s idea of a bear,” she said. It was easier to live with a hazy concept of a bear than face the horror of what their built-up concrete cities had done to the territory that bears need. They rarely saw bears; the people of my great-grandmother’s time had sent them to live in the fringes. They need a lot, the bears: space, food, fealty. They withered at the fringes.
Read MoreMarked by Bears
When Coyote wound round his tail twice and laughed, loped through the six-way intersection at Lincoln, Belmont, and Ashland, he never thought so many humans would die.
Read MoreHappy Trails
She did the sleeping room first, fast and mechanical. New arrivals spent time in Gloria’s torturous training room where they practiced bed linen exchange, bath sanitizing, and launder cycles while Gloria railed on them about pride and efficiency as if being fast at cleaning was the ultimate Native pride.
Read MoreSecurity Breach at Sugar Pine Suites
My mother looked nothing like this woman, but my mind is pulled back into the undertow of her anyway. I see her in the days before she died, her shrunken frame nearly swallowed by white bedding and overstuffed pillows. She sits up as if she’s just remembered something. “Pass me my lipstick,” she says. Cherries in the Snow. Even without a mirror, her hands are steady and she draws on the red pout, smooth and sure. She blots her lips together and says, “That’s better.” Says, “Take a photo to remember me by.”
Read MoreThe Rat
The noise wakes the trees outside the hospital window. They stretch and shake out their leaves. A dislodged sparrow turns toward me and gapes open its beak. It squawks “beep beep beep” and I realize it’s been doing that the whole time. There are other noises, too—a distant, distorted voice like a conductor shouting into a bad mic—are we near a train station?
Read MoreWake Up, I Miss You
The blade of Legrue’s scalpel flared in his headlamp’s narrow beam, casting glints of light across the slender hand strapped to his cutting table.
Read MoreGift for the Cutter Man
When Tara awoke Thursday morning, her pillow had turned to marshmallow, gooey from the warmth of her head and the sunshine blazing through the window. Fruit rollup blankets slicked her legs with psychedelic slime. The mattress, now a soft-baked blondie with white chocolate chips, was permanently indented by her ass.
Read MoreCandyland