“I fell,” said the cyborg, and for a moment his audience stood astounded, waiting for the larger speech, the longer explanation. None came. “I fell,” he said once, and spoke no further.
Read MoreHiraeth: Tragedy in Four ActsIn the flickering amber torchlight, the mummy’s skin was burnished sienna where Jackson peeled the rotting bandages off. When Jackson pressed fore and middle fingers to the slender collarbones, the skin crinkled like tissue beneath the warmth and weight of a living body. Color bloomed through the skin and Jackson watched as one might witness a comet streaking across an otherwise dark sky; the transformation in the body was sudden and startling.
Read MoreThe Three-tongued Mummy
Parts of my arm swirled around the room, my vision scattered across a thousand panes of glass. I could see the poets clearly now, dark, unblinking eyes, toothless mouths, their gray-blue flesh seething with unattached meaning.
Read MoreHow Lovely Is the Silence of Growing ThingsMartin repeated the name and said, “It’s a microscopic parasite that can be bred and altered in a fairly simple controlled environment. You can suppress its reproductive cycles and implant it with differing forms of DNA that it, in turn, blends into the host system. Those traits make it one of the greatest possible biological and genetic delivery systems.”
Read MoreCut, Cut, CutHe was testing Cloe, it was his job. She must appear human, otherwise there was no point in her existence to him or anyone else. Cloe searched for the correct answer; the human answer. “Today is better than yesterday,” the android said.
Read MoreSay, She ToyIn the beginning, the story goes like this: a fisherman brings home a selkie wife. He spies the maidens bathing in the salt-cove by the sea, their great, glistening seal skins heaped on a stone. When the sun begins to slip from the sky, the sisters slide into their coats, transforming from lovely women into sleek, dark seals who dive into the water and away: all, of course, except the youngest and loveliest, who runs from one place to another, naked and distressed, unable to return to her skin and the sea.
Read MoreThe Selkie Wives
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.
Read MoreAunt Dissy’s Policy Dream BookThe Second Coming was something of a washout, if you remember. It lit up early-warning radar like a Christmas tree, of course, and the Israeli Air Force gave the heavenly host a respectable F-16 fighter escort to the ground, but that was when they were still treating it as a UFO incident.
Read MoreJesus Christ, Reanimator
This is how it is: We who live on the edge of the Heap are different. Harper’s arms are no more than nimble flippers that sprout exposed bone. Zora’s skin blisters from the sunlight, while Ernest cannot raise his medicine ball sized head—he only lolls it. They cannot of course talk, so I talk for them, and I talk to them. We bronzer children of the golden class are a motley litter of rejects, everyone knows.
Read MoreWaste