All Stories

The blood-splattered farce began as I was painting my toenails, about to complete the old fly-to-Saturn, come back as your own granddaughter trick.  Okay, the flying to Saturn part was new, but you know the drill: travel as far as you can, out where record-keeping gets shaky, bring forged identity chip, dump previous identity chip […]

This 21st century has been good to us, I remind myself, while Hans and I wait in the boardroom for the meeting to start. We’ve slotted half an hour—longer than usual, but this new product update matters. “You must be Wendy.” A woman with sharp heels breezes in, smelling like meat. “What you’ve achieved with […]

Someone left cat food in the extremely haunted basement trash room of my building and it made me so hungry I forgot how creeped out I was being down there for a second. So I hit up a photographer I modeled for a couple times to see if he had work for me, and he […]

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 […]