Fiction
Lines of Growth, Lines of Passage
I did not remember how I had gotten encased in a cherry tree. Though fragrant, this was inconvenient. It was much more tiring than you would expect, being entirely surrounded by tree. I tried to go to sleep, but the circumstances that had led me here were the only ones of which I could be […]
Your Slaughterhouse, Your Killing Floor
This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish. —Richard Siken, “Wishbone” A girl walks into a bar. She grabs her forehead and yells “motherFUCK” and the bar and everything around it except for the girl explodes in a blast that vaporizes half […]
The Utmost Bound
… and this gray spirit yearning in desire To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. —Tennyson The check-in chime in his headset: on time, annoyingly on time, as usual, waking him as they came around the curve of Venus. “Aphrodite-1, this is Honolulu, do you read?” Faint washes […]
She Still Loves the Dragon
She still loves the dragon that set her on fire. The knight-errant who came seeking you prepared so carefully. She made herself whole for you. To be worthy of you. To be strong enough to reach you, where you live, so very high. She found the old wounds of her earlier errantry and of her […]
The Hydraulic Emperor
The Hydraulic Emperor is nine minutes and twenty-seven seconds long. It was filmed on an eighteen-quadcopter neocamera rig back when neocameras were the only way to make immersive film: an early effort by Aglaé Skemety, whose Bellfalling Ascension is still the critical darling of the immersion-culture literati. The Hydraulic Emperor falls sometime between her earliest […]
Conservation Laws
I met Gyanendra Sahai for the first time in the bowels of the Lunar Geological Institute, in front of a display case containing an old-fashioned, heavy-built moonsuit. There was a large crack along one side of the suit and a rust-coloured discolouration along the opening. I was thinking about the pre-colonization days of moon exploration […]
Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse
My apocalypse doesn’t ride on horseback or raise the dead or add suns to the sky. It arrives by tank and drone, the strict report of automatic weapons, the spying eyes of neighbors. It seeks my spouse’s life. Mine, too. I don’t expect to survive. Chula has better odds. She is a four-time triathlete, perfect […]
How to Survive an Epic Journey
Fill my cup with wine, girl. Pass the honey cakes, and I shall tell you a tale of adventure and heroes. I was there. I knew them all. (1) Meleager liked to think it was for his sake that I ran away from home and joined the crew of the Argo. Ours, he believed, was […]
Learning to See Dragons
The spring she was thirteen, Annie taught herself to see dragons. She sat by the window in the hospital and looked out at the soft, strange Smoky Mountains, and the spreading gossamer haze that rose off them, and the white rucked clouds above. “I thought the old dragon was too mean to die,” her father […]