Sci-Fi + Fantasy

I sit on the floor of what should have been my future child’s bedroom and stare at the field of stars painted on the ceiling, tears pricking the inside of my eyelids. Not two hours ago, Doctor Sharma confirmed that the tiny little dot of potential on the ultrasound monitor had no heartbeat. If next […]

“Maybe we should have noticed sooner,” says Elaine Bantam, “but we all go through that phase around here.” She sits next to her husband, Nat, on the couples’ front porch, facing the cameras. “Started with small things,” Elaine continues. “Ralph, our oldest, began leaving milk and bread on the back porch every night. Now, I’m […]

It was ill luck that found Aphra tending the mother vine on Roanonck in a late August squall. It was a fate fouler still that found her watching as a pirate ship scuppered itself on the nearest Carolina barrier island. She stood next to a live oak while the sailors launched a dingy, which began […]

The god’s carcass floated between the Marble Nebula and the Third-Quadrant Gate. Scavengers had already begun harvesting vital minerals and resources from the decaying godfall and ships matched its velocity as they fell through the cosmos. Most were enterprise-grade ships, though smaller vessels dotted the space between. Many had a charter to sell their harvest […]

No one can hear you scream in space, which I thought meant it would be quiet. That was before I’d spent two hundred days in this patchwork maze of ducts and tubing we called a colony. Thwack! Thin metal panels adjusted to pressure changes with swift switches to convexity. Somewhere, a sensor flipped, a fan […]

Deep in the Valley of Unwanted Souls, at the dreariest end of a narrow gravel road, the colorless fog parts and a wagon pulled by a lone, clip-clopping mule arrives with the midnight deliveries. The wagon stops between two monstrous structures built of shadows and cloud-reaching stone spires. The Asylum and the Library. Both sanctuaries […]

It’s been thirteen years since I threw that old red flip phone across the beige-carpeted living room of my first apartment in Albuquerque, startling the white rabbit I lived with, who hopped away into the bathroom and hid behind the toilet. The memory erasure worked, for thirteen years. But after watching that viral video on […]

I. The chief priests chanted hymns over the bonfire’s raging flames that first night in Izuland. Their voices were unnaturally high-pitched, a shrill tone I feared would tear the cords of their voice boxes out of their throats. They threw herbs into the fire, discoloring the flames into a cold green conflagration that screeched in […]

The taxi pulls away from the curb with a wheeze of exhaust, lifting the edge of my cape and rousing a lone, unraked leaf from its slumber on the yellowing lawn. Down the street, a child laughs, her bicycle weaving down smooth asphalt flanked by identical red brick facades. She is too far away to […]

After the first lost girl reappeared, sleeping like some fallen angel in a drainage ditch on the edge of the woods, Homily returned to her fossils. The lost girls were shells pushed deep into the ground, left to harden into stone, and then pried out again by fault lines and fingers and the nets of […]

Chapter 1 Lane explained that we weren’t allowed real names only after she hired me. “You’ll be ‘Foxtrot,’ she declared. She convinced me that my new name fit perfectly. I couldn’t be ‘Bravo’ or ‘Charlie,’ because both of them were still alive, but she couldn’t legally say where or when. ‘Zulu’ seemed insensitive, ‘November’ was […]

They’re coming for me, gaining ground with every stride. If they catch me, they’ll tear me apart just to see what’s inside. The path—if you can call it that—is uneven and dark. I strain my eyes against it out of habit, but there is no light here. I run faster, propelling myself deeper into the […]