Sci-Fi + Fantasy

At 8:00 a.m., service bots inside Ultragrace Tower begin preening front desk flower arrangements and coating board rooms in jasmine-scented cleaning agents. By 8:45, water starts rushing through the sprawling network of plumbing in the megaspire—a building so tall it brings renewed relevance to the word skyscraper. White-collar brass file into cavernous bathrooms, flushing toilets […]

This home has everything a civilised person could want, but that stopped being a consolation long ago. With my wheelchair sideways, I twist to reach into the butler’s sink. Grasp the crystal tumbler. A wipe with the tea towel, then lift it up to the light. The cut glass is good at hiding errant drips, […]

The best part was always the name. There was a special kind of intimacy to claiming something so tied to a man’s sense of self, of sliding it over my tongue and between my teeth, swallowing it, owning it. In my younger days, it was a kind of addiction, that first crunch of biting into […]

Rachel had been buried less than four hours before Nelly escaped upstairs to her gaming rig. After the stragglers headed home from the wake, I stood in her bedroom doorway. The house was silent except for the click-clack of her joysticks. Nelly’s preteen body slumped against the rig’s contours, which were shaped like an ebony-black, […]

When he saw the relationship timer appear above Julie’s head, Cal almost started to cry. He’d really hoped she was the one. While he knew the concept of “the one” was a romantic fallacy created by pop culture, deep down, he’d still hoped. Everything had seemed perfect. They both liked hiking. They were compatible, sexually. […]

February 7, 2042 Glen Ellyn It’s a Friday afternoon, that last day. There’s over a foot of week-old snow on the ground. The last several days have been bright and sunny — too cold for snow — but today the sky is gray and heavy. Naomi and I are having a late lunch when the […]

Someone received the wrong poem. This was very bad. It could unravel the fabric of the universe itself. We lay our scene at the burbling fountain in Lincoln Square. That June was remarkably cloudless, with the usual scream of distant cicadas. In the square, the brown cobblestones bucked up and into each other like a […]

“The average size of the womb excavation is three metres square, with a depth of one metre. Existing soil is removed and replaced with a mixture of purified soil and organic fertilizer, hydrated with distilled water only. The seed is then planted half a metre deep. The area should be blocked off from animals to […]

When I got home from the brewery to the shithole basement my wife and I shared, I wanted to sleep but couldn’t. Not with the damned chip in my head. I cracked open the window for some air. Through the bars, a majestic view of a midwinter night’s dream in Zagreb, in the year of […]

The children load me into the trailer. Padlock the tailgate. Take the dirt road past the sanitation plant, the tannery, the strip club, the gun store. I’ve known nowhere but the farm, the pen, the milk bottles & dust & feed. The children laugh in the cab, turn their muffled music up. I put my […]

*2025 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize 2nd Place Winner* “Choose to disconnect—yes or no.” The doctor turns a tablet toward Glettus. Glettus scans the med-bay, his hatchmates circling him, the other ailing bodies beyond his bed. He wants to feel angry—that delicious rage the hatch could stoke within each other ahead of a mission—but the […]

*2025 Refractions: Genre Flash Fiction Prize 3rd Place Winner* Viscous green fluid sloshes and nearly spills as its container is hurled down the slick café countertop. Mel reaches out to stop it, much to the amusement of the man behind the bar.  “Always wanted to try that!” He chuckles and snaps his suspenders. Mel says […]