I’ve ferried two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death, and I can already tell my two-hundred-and-twenty-second is going to be a real shitkicker. I know by the lightness of the manila folder in my hand, the preemptive pity in the courier’s face as she gives it to me. I read the typewritten card paper-clipped to the front with my stomach tensed, braced for the sucker punch.
Read MoreMr. Death
Our late fee is twenty-five cents per day or a can of non-perishable food during the summer food drive. By the time the boy finally slid The Runaway Prince into the return slot, he owed $4.75. I didn’t have to swipe his card to know; any good librarian (of the second kind) ought to be able to tell you the exact dollar amount of a patron’s bill just by the angle of their shoulders.
Read MoreA Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies
You maintain a menu of a half dozen Experiences on your digital blackboard, but Vision Quest is the one the Tourists choose the most.
Read MoreWelcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™
The future was glorious once. It was filled with sleek silver spaceships, lunar colonies, and galactic empires. The horizon seemed within reach; we could almost grasp the stars if we would but try.
Read MoreI Remember the Future
The moon came up and the sun went down. The moonbeams went shattering down to the ground and the jackalope wives took off their skins and danced.
They danced like young deer pawing the ground, they danced like devils let out of hell for the evening. They swung their hips and pranced and drank their fill of cactus–fruit wine.
Read MoreJackalope Wives
If you were a dinosaur, my love, then you would be a T-Rex. You’d be a small one, only five feet, ten inches, the same height as human-you. You’d be fragile-boned and you’d walk with as delicate and polite a gait as you could manage on massive talons. Your eyes would gaze gently from beneath your bony brow-ridge.
Read MoreIf You Were a Dinosaur, My Love
Poets and sages like to say that there is clarity in certain death. That a calm resignation settles over the nearly deceased, and they embrace the inevitability of the end of life with dignity and grace.
Read MoreGhosts of New York
I am copying this out while I can. Leuwin is away, has left me in charge of the library. He has been doing that more and more, lately—errands for the Sisterhood, he says, but I know it’s mostly his own mad research. Now I know why.
Read MoreThe Green Book
This 2009 reprint by the late Eugie Foster is one that feels eerily prescient.
Citizens change their identities based on the masks they are mandated to wear. But one person longs to be their true self. Eugie's story is an incisive, devastating look at society and its control of self-identity.
Read MoreSinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast