“Grace,” the drunk fairy said, “is by far the best of the blessings.” She was drunk because her hostess, who herself had been blessed with hospitality—and a reasonably wealthy husband—had spent the months before her first child’s birth in a fever of preparations, determined to obtain at least one blessing for her own offspring. She […]
[Aboard the Intreplu, Year of our Outer-Endeavors 13890.] Every four hundred years, I make my pilgrimage to the Sol System, as every Decanus of the Zon has before me. For the past three hundred waking cycles, the Captain has seen fit to impede my path on my morning walk to the solarium. Not for […]
At his desk, Ken idled with a Polaroid picture and muttered a few confused curses. He had been staring at it for hours, finding something obvious and dismissing it as far too strange, refusing to appreciate it. “What’s that you lookin’ at there?” a coworker said over his shoulder. Ken turned it over and slid […]
You press the barrel of the Aegis-IV Longslide into your partner’s hole, and he spreads for you like he’s purpose-built for this very moment. Your spinal reinforcements are made to handle recoil, but you can feel the tension of him juddering up your arm as you hold him still, keeping him there, keeping him under […]
We are chaos. We are the teeth of dragons, shed like seeds. We look on your works, ye mighty, and we laugh. —Geoffrey Usborne Bryant “The Testimony of Dragon’s Teeth” I had known Geoffrey Usborne Bryant at school, so when I read of his death in the paper, I felt a chill. Only the chill […]
My best friend NPW has been collecting dogs from the side of the highway. He drives miles and miles each day with one eye to the shoulder, on the lookout for heaps of dark fur. Into black trash bags the blood-matted bodies go, and into the big plastic cooler he “liberated” from a summer hunting […]
“This green-gold city will embrace you/ Take you out of time and erase you/ And for one brief moment you will let her/ For one night only you’ll be hers” —Bess Morris, “For One Night Only,” 1924 The Ambassador Billiard Parlor, the Aeolian Hall, Our Metropolitan Madness Just before midnight on January 3, 1924, Ira […]
Only idiots go back to the haunted houses of their childhood. And yet. Here you are. Standing on the sagging, weed-strangled front porch that hasn’t changed in twenty years. Every dip in the floorboards, every peeling strip of paint is exactly as you remember it. Time seems to have ricocheted off this place. Except not […]
Ghost malls are even sadder than living people malls, even though malls of the living are already pretty damned sad places to be. And let me get this out of the way right now, before we go any farther; I’m dead, okay? I’m fucking dead. This is not going to be one of those stories […]