All Stories

1. The emperor scorpion fluoresces bright blue. Most blue feels unnatural. Electric. Manufactured by pharmacologists. Bottled poison that sits glowing in translucent bottles – dusty on a chemist’s shelves. The corticosteroids and biologics. The synthetic mists that Erica must gulp to stay alive. Or the sapphires and cobalt growing within the earth, silently and privately, […]

The last time my twin destroyed the world left me unprepared for what came next. I found them in one of the southern hemisphere’s largest forests, shattering tree limbs and crushing trunks.  Millions of birds darkened the sky. Ants and beetles transformed the ground into a wriggling ocean of legs and antennae.  “You’re fine.” I […]

The problem with unemployment offices is that the people who work there, who are supposed to help you get jobs and figure out how to be employable, they work at the unemployment office, so it’s not exactly like they’re experts or anything. It’s a fundamentally flawed system. As I sit in the waiting room, staring […]

1 Through the gap in the door, Khalii watches her father Sing to the wind. She listens to the way Papa’s voice lilts, mimicking his syllables in her own soft whisper. He pretends not to notice. Soon enough, Atë Zara will catch her at it and drag her downstairs to help the Titas with rice […]

It was a brick that did it, falling from a great height. So they said; but they never found the brick, and many things fall from heaven. What everyone agreed upon, including the patient himself, whose agreement was otherwise so difficult to secure, was: one moment Aaron Metzger had been en route to his mid-morning […]

The last of the Ruim—quiet, hulking, magisterial—lived in a tribe of fifty in a forest of ruined skyscrapers at the edge of the sea. Among the rusted artifacts of their civilization, they reminded me a little of elephants in some great boneyard, trudging through bushwhacked paths of razorbriar on four stubby legs and impervious in […]