Legend has it a dose of epiphany sent Archimedes streaking naked from his bath into the streets of Syracuse shouting Eureka! Newton’s falling apple, Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, Darwin thinking up natural selection during a carriage ride; epiphany’s shaped human knowledge in blinding flashes. Of all such revelations, Soba Dee had the most profound…
I was having the worst kind of day you could have on a long-haul transport—the kind where your fusion reactor is making funny noises. Not ha-ha funny. Threatening to explode funny. Which was kind of ha-ha funny, because once you’ve been alone on a long-haul transport for 473 days with no human contact, everything is…
The train slid like a silver snake across the ice-hardened tundra, the solar array on its roof soaking up the light of a dying sun. It passed barren barns and hollow homes, clusters of abandoned factories and the clutching fingers of skeletal launch towers. The last two people on the rails sat in the cab,…
Kara stared through the rain-fogged window, hoping, praying even, for escape. And, as always, escape appeared in the form of an oak door with an old-fashioned brass knob that twitched in anticipation of her touch like an overeager puppy. “Turn me!” it seemed to say as, for the first time in her seventeen years of…
The oni blocked Mizumo’s path, looming larger than the strongest samurai, wearing a tiger-skin loin cloth. Muscles rippled under sky-blue skin. Three horns protruded from its forehead. Three-fingered hands covered its face. Elbows rested on knees wider than the length of the monk’s wakizashi blade. Mizumo fingered the sword’s pommel beneath his robes. The oni…
The red “59” flashed from the band on Kena’s wrist, the intensity of its color reflecting how urgent and precious each minute, each second, was. She had given everything for this time and yet, now that she stood here in the stillness and quiet, it felt undervalued. The cocktail of aromas—the earthy spice of the…
She could see the ones that had come before her, and after, that had perched in the chair in the waiting room of the auto dealer shop. They superimposed over her body like layers of frosting on a cake, a finger here, a curly bit of hair there. One tapped their hiking boot. One hummed…
“Speak your third wish, mortal, and let me die.” The voice of the djinn was a mountain falling over. David had picked this spot deep in the forest, a hundred miles from anywhere, so they wouldn’t be overheard. The ancient, wood-bound book cradled under his arm had been right about that, too. “Ah, ah, ah—”…
The first scales grow on the backs of my hands, flesh-colored and brittle. They itch something awful as they push through my skin, and I pick at them like I would at fresh scabs, although you’re not supposed to. Mother hobbles toward me over the sharp rocks. “Stop it. Don’t you know how lucky you…
The dreams begin with Dixie’s first menstrual cycle: Thick trees with spidery limbs overhanging an almost-rotted boardwalk; moss-like fog giving everything a bluish-grey complexion; a muddy bed on both sides, sizable enough to serve as a reptilian’s den; a lullaby of chorusing crickets… And then: The planks dissolving into a body of water; air hot…
