Sci-Fi + Fantasy

missive #124:15-june-2204-18:09 I’m not coming home. I hope you get this message, at least. Leaving you was the stupidest thing I ever did. I see it all so clearly now. You were right. I was scared, and I left for idiotic reasons. You had every right to be mad—I wasn’t ever trying to find myself. […]

Twigs snap under my boots like thin, frozen bones. Behind me, the wind is hurrying the fog across the darkness. I glance one last time over my shoulder, back to the village—its warm orange glow, barely visible at this distance—back to the house where my family prays pointlessly over my soul. Then I turn and […]

Prove you’re not a robot, the laptop demanded. Select all images with cars. Selby squinted at the grid of thumbnail photos, feeling a burp of anxiety that summoned sense memories of elementary school math classes. Timed tests, that was the feeling. Three minutes to solve 25 division problems and prove your humanity. The first thumbnail […]

A pedestrian lay in the middle of the road, blocking my route. People tended to step aside when I approached, perhaps not fully trusting that I could see them. So when Pedestrian Obstacle remained motionless, I opened an incident report. A minivan, stopped in the opposite lane with lights on and driver door ajar, further […]

We’d put the white wasteland of the Tiberius Peninsula behind us when the doctor told me about his last expedition and how badly it had gone. How men he’d trusted for years had just thrown their hands up when the chips fell. How some had gone so far as to claim to have different jobs; […]

The tiger didn’t watch anyone, didn’t see their phones being pulled out of back pockets, didn’t see a mother gasp and hold her child back, didn’t even see the car that slammed its brakes to avoid entering the same row as the tiger. The tiger simply walked across the Target parking lot, as if it […]

Don’t open your eyes. Don’t let them see where you’re going or what you’re about to do. In the darkness, let them think you’re still asleep in your apartment. Don’t wonder if anyone’s watching as Cygna guides you, hand in hand, down the long staircase into the bowels of the city. The metro is full […]

He wonders if the bed springs know that they are different things from the springs in his body that clench and unclench throughout the night, instinctive in a helpless attempt to roll himself away from the fire burning in each of his bones. It’s the left side, hip to ankle, shoulder to ribs. He thinks […]

The Cost  Your mother refuses to mention the costs associated with this trip. It is your 16th birthday and the first you’ve celebrated with more than a cake and the same, flickering e-candle. She greets every new experience like a test of will and haggles with the taxi driver to get to the spaceport. He […]

Chapter Two My father had been obsessed with making sure I knew how to tell when and where an animal had been. When he was whipping his little Toyota truck, which he lovingly called The Yoda, up the side of a mountain, speeding around corners with no guard rails, he’d screech to a stop next […]

The scryer was dead. The rusty bullet hole in the center of his forehead confirmed it. That, and his serene milky gaze into nowhere, the small smile on his blueing lips as if finally confirmed, in his final moments, of something long suspected. “What’s the prognosis?” Damon was only half paying attention, standing to the […]

Chapter One The first person I tried to kill with a shadow was my sister. I had removed my only pair of stockings and left them to dry by the fire while I relieved myself. Remil had taken the socks, unraveled them into two useless piles of thread, and then laughed when she’d seen my […]