All Stories

GERMINATION The first bud sprouts from Charlie’s left thumb. You think you’re dreaming. Another nightmare, but so much more fantastical than the ones you usually have. Charlie crashing his plane in the jungle. Charlie’s parachute failing. Charlie screaming as napalm melts flesh off bone. Charlie, reporting for duty one leg short, clumsily hefting a gun […]

The silhouette of the Pharos lighthouse floats on the water in the distance, its peak is like the eye of a god, always monitoring its subjects. I can see why it’s considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. I’m standing on a hillside with my back to the library. Below me, the […]

Here is the son of a helium baron. His head is a mylar balloon, lolling above his polo shirt collar. The collar a green piqué. The shirt striped in navy and white. Here is the house that helium built, floating sixty feet up in the sky. A complex system of three thousand ropes tethers it […]

“I’m in.”  Samir stands in the nexus of corridors. They recede from him in all directions, motion-sensor spotlights on the ground fading along the path he’d taken, plunging the past into darkness. He’s a young man, cuts an unimpressive figure: medium height, medium build, dark hair that falls in lank strands below his ears, quick, […]

PROLOGUE ### Event 110107 from the Chronicles of Ideal Histories Translated by Senior Historian Gordon Moyes Classified Information ### This is how it happens. Tyson March kisses his wife, leaves his home, and treks to the Tunnels. It’s early morning, the skydome has just ticked over to dawn mode. Street lights still illuminate the faces […]

“There is an animal,” I tell my young apprentice, “that can make other species protect it to the death.” Clay keeps notes as we crouch low in the dugout, watching the ant-wasp hill under the soft redlight of the third of our thirteen suns. Strange—the words Mission Log had been printed on the top of […]

Alembics line the walls, rounded and bulbous glasses blown in bubbly greens and creamy whites and swirling yellow-blues. Their contents shift and churn of their own accord, some in slow dancing waves, some in quick jerks, crashing against the walls of their vessels. There is a queue out the door, and August wishes they had […]

As she floated near the viewport of the Nautilus IV for the fourth day, Faye stared out at what looked like a giant sleep-deprived but pupil-less eye. In actuality, orange-red lines haphazardly scored the white surface of the moon. She had first seen pictures of Europa right after she turned ten in 2230—the same year she […]

I kept my demon summoning career secret from my girlfriend through six months of dating. But one week after I moved in with Diana, the fiction that I was just some goth chick with a job at the Wiccan bookstore went up in flames (along with five of her blouses) when an imp got loose […]