I don’t know when the beige began. It was just there one day: a lingering malaise that hovered over everything. It was on my food, my clothes, on my breath, a nothingness, a sheen of banality, a taste of bland. What’s more I didn’t understand why it bothered me. My life’s work pretty much demanded […]
Never fall in love with a deer woman. Deer women are wild and without reason. Their lips are soft as evensong, their skin dark as the mysteries of a moonless forest. A deer woman will make you do terrible things for a chance to dip your fingers inside her, to have her taste linger on […]
2448 He’s thinking of changing his name again. His name was first Vlad, but he’s been going by George since the early 22nd century. He would have changed it to something else a long time ago—that’s what he’d been doing every twenty years or so, for centuries—but Eliza liked it, so he kept it. In […]
(Content note: mentions of genocide) “Baobao!” The Protector-General’s fat little dog disappears around the corner. Aida, cursing, digs her heels into the ground and runs. Baobao likes to chase after anything that moves. Usually Aida indulges him—it’s fun to see Baobao’s fat bum wiggle as he hops after squirrels he’ll never catch—but the sun […]
(Content note: sexual assault.) When she was a girl, Vasilisa wanted to be a sniper. She’d grown up listening to tales of the valiant Stalingrad sharpshooters who had bolstered the city’s resistance to the German invasion in the Second World War. She enlisted in the army as soon as she was old enough, and […]
(Content note: sexual coercion/assault and suicidal ideation.) Before I was a sycamore I was a woman, and before I was a woman I was a girl, and before I was a girl I was a wet seed wild in the hot-pulp belly of my mother. I remember it: a pulsing blackness, veins unfurling in […]
Restless and troubled by salt-dreams, Dion was up before dawn. The night workers in the dryhouse sang work songs. Dion yoked her buckets across her shoulders and waded out into the sea, the face of the waters still black and littered with reflected stars. Red bands across the eastern sky shot through heavy clouds that […]
The seat beneath her was glossy plastic and not interested in prolonging their acquaintance. Shifting from thigh to thigh, Julia Popova flipped through newspapers in search of the logo and slogans for bourbon that she had labored over for weeks. New York Times, March 3, 2005—ESCAPED CARRIAGE HORSE. Reports to the Parks Department of a […]
Fifteen-year-old Miles Blackwell slapped the mosquito that landed on his neck, squashing it against his skin before it could bite him. So much for the expensive, mail-order “blessed” bug spray that his mother insisted he use. He was starting to wonder if the Lord really had favorite brands. He needs to know, Miles repeated in […]