Recent Stories
The god wandered into his temple one morning after an absence of years. Someone, he saw, had been faithfully sweeping the floors and mending the roof. Someone had sacrificed a fish on the altar, leaving a heap of ash and bone. Given the poverty of the village, this was not an inconsiderable investment.
In the corner crouched a limestone statue with a trident in one hand and a net in the other. It was not so bad a depiction, but he would have preferred if it had a more heroic cast to it.
Ultimately, it was the unicorn-blood soup.
The fairy food industry drowned beneath a deluge of hate mail. Animal rights groups were up in arms, even though unicorns technically don't exist. The fair folk were baffled. Humans had gone wild for dragon-on-rye. What was the problem?
When the Isperfell come to our village of Merse by the Sea, it is not with their delicate bone-lattice knives readied and their faces painted for war. No, they approach the old way. Slowly and from just down the shore, emerald sea water cascading from their bright scales and lean arms opened wide.
Their needled teeth gleam.
My little brother Kio reprogrammed the lifeguard bot at the bottom of the pool to drag me down and hold me there. I'm not sure he meant to drown me. It might have been a prank. He's a sociopath, and so am I. We're smart, but we still have trouble figuring out the limits of good behavior.
You usually can't tell the bot's even down there; it's hidden under a skin that matches whatever pattern Mom programmed for the bottom of the pool, which that day was Hawaiian fabric sporting hibiscus flowers, palm trees, and pineapples. Possibly she thought this was festive and would impress the bankers at her pool party. She has trouble figuring out good behavior, too.
I didn't need my policewoman training to see what would soon cause this footage to cut out. A woman, dressed for the late fall while everyone else was dressed for the summer heat. Parents and children swam by, some giving her a second glance. Even the summer breeze seemed to avoid her clothes as she stood by the pool gate, looking like she waited for a man on horseback from a distant era. Her face twitched, and the footage ended.
They found her body with the rest of them. Another camera recorded the same woman--no, surely a twin--five months later. At the ski resort, holding flowers from the kind of wedding I used to want. She moved the flowers over the left side of her face.
Estelle knew to avoid the men known as Les Corbeaux in their long, filthy coats, scavengers wielding shovels and pry bars in calloused hands. They were seen less often than they had been in her mother's time, there being no shortage of bodies for the anatomist's table during the long years of Revolution, but here and there one heard of a grave opened and a body missing. It was not unheard of to find a pair of them in the dark of a new moon, or beneath a cloud-bound starless sky. Only a man foolish or desperate would commit his blasphemy alone on a clear night by the light of the Harvest moon.
Perhaps Estelle was the fool for being there. She had been glad of the light when she had set out from the factory in Javel to visit her lover's grave, wilted red roses clenched tight in her hand. Now, though, she stood exposed as she came upon a man bent over a weathered marble slab.
by Michael W Cho
Published on Nov 16, 2018
by Stephanie Monteith
Published on Nov 15, 2018
by Michelle Muenzler
Published on Nov 14, 2018
by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Published on Nov 13, 2018
by Michael Greenhut
Published on Nov 12, 2018
by Christie Yant
Published on Nov 9, 2018
