Imaginings set loose.
By David Falkinburg There’s an open wound across the sky bleeding stars waiting to be bandaged with paper and ink. Fire ashes smoke towards it from a tired history smoldering wanting hope from those stars. Have we forgotten what’s above us? Put down your earthen weight and all those retrograding problems and worn out words [...]
By Changming Yuan A whole box of human hearts, each Still pulsing like a fresh-skinned toad Two rows of shining skeletons of unknown gods All with fingers longer than legs, skull-sized toes Three sets of enchanted knives, possessed By evil spirits (need sharpening) Four giant alarm clocks, guaranteed To wake the dead in a five-mile [...]
By Adrian Simmons At 247 Black Oak Lane stands a perfectly un-unusual house. One story, fireplace, a wooden fence around the backyard, and a chain-link one around the front. The front fence, which most of the other houses on the street do not have, is about the only reason anyone would give it a second [...]
By Sean Monaghan They were waiting outside the prison gates when Carmen strode through. It was raining and the water beaded on the car’s black skin. The door clanged shut behind her. So this was what freedom tasted like: wet, and already with watchers. Shafts of light from the setting sun radiated through cloud breaks. [...]
By Hunter Liguore On an unnamed island in the Gulf of Riga, fifty miles north of the Latvia coast, there lived a chiseler and his wife. They owned a house that sat at the top of a sloping hill in the middle of a cemetery, where the chiseler was given charge of cutting stone and [...]
By David Bowles 2370 Seven-year-old Rodrigo ben-David sat alone in the hovel, spooning the last bit of last Shabbat’s chamin into his mouth and using a hard bit of crust to scrape the pot clean. The thin, cold wind rattled the aluplaz walls mercilessly. Winters in the Hellas Region were tough, and in Babulandia, one [...]
By F.J. Bergmann — A moment of perspective that shows how other beings may interpret our arrival.
By Kendall Evans — The mysteries of the ocean are held in tension with the mysteries of space.
By K. Eisert — The Isnians could not accept the humans who found their system. But now that their world is changing, will the last survivor of the human expedition be the salvation of the Isnian race?
By Sarah Worrel — Protests against skyrocketing food prices turn to riots, but this time it doesn't seem as if anyone can restore order. Trapped in her office building, Rickie watches the world fall apart.