Val had lost hope. Routine carried her where hope had stopped: up the stairs to tend the lamp. Into the forest for wood, apples, berries, more rarely a deer or a grouse. Her stores of magic and wild rice came from the same place, though not from the same method: the smaller, murky inland lake, […]
“What’s your name, girl?” “Dust.” “Dust! What kinda people named they child Dust!” She sat in thought a moment, recalling what her wayfaring aunt she rarely saw told her to say whenever someone questioned her name, if she could remember it all. “It’s short for Dustdaughter…” “That’s a heavy name for a child.” “My daddy […]
It’s not often a city girl like me gets to haunt an ancestral home as summer dies. The Willows is less a swooning plantation estate and more like a calico cat, a farmhouse cobbled together of mismatched parts and sprawled out proudly among the fields and forests. Still, it’s romantic as hell, and I will […]
I believe in stars. I may be alone, my body a minefield and my life a fucking farce, but at least I have that. The night is humid and warm, sticks to our skin like a wet T-shirt. Luz pokes the fire with a piece of scrap metal she found lying by Gunner’s feet. It sends […]
Huda will ask again and again. She will ask it on the first night at the summer place, the porch steps creaking like an old-timey pirate’s ship beneath their knees. She will ask it when they see the Amelia Earhart house way down the harbor, a curled finger, creepy, shuttered-off, and full of promise. She […]
I. That kid didn’t belong here. We all knew it from the moment he walked through the door at Rosalie’s, full of nerves and rage. If you belong, you never sport those two together. Everyone in Riverside knows that. It is a wise precaution to assume that anyone angry is also armed. The drinkers stopped […]
The wind’s moving fast again. The weathermen lean into it, letting it wear away at them until they turn to rain and cloud. “Look there, Sila.” Mumma points as she grips my shoulder. Her arthritis-crooked hand shakes. Her cuticles are pale red from washwater. Her finger makes an arc against the sky that ends at […]
It is January 18th. At 16:25:15, Senior Engineer Robert Brandt asks me to sit on a lab bench inside Examination Room 2 and “get comfortable.” I do not understand how to comply. The sensors implanted in my titanium casing, which covers my organic torso and legs, are not calibrated to sense minute changes in pressure; […]
I wanted to tell you, in case opportunity absents itself forever, that it doesn’t matter. That your magic is algorithmic, that mine is an abstraction of reality. That yours demands cartographic soliloquies, every verse a phrase and a phase of mathematics and momentum, every word you speak a part of the map, and you build […]
The most interesting thing about ghost stories is that almost everyone has one. The other really interesting thing, to me, is that they’re nearly all terrible stories if you try to take them as stories. A good story has a beginning, some buildup, and then a resolution or a twist or something at the end. […]