There’s this thing about rocks. They sit. That’s it. In desserts beneath glaring suns they watch the world around them bake and boil. In the crashing waves and hidden riptides of oceans and seas they stay stubbornly, steadfastly, still. In forests, prairies, bogs, and fields they wait as one becomes the next or another. At…
You’re driving up the Pacific Coast for a family vacation. Your son asks about lunch and your daughter won’t stop fidgeting. Your partner needs to pee. You desperately want to stretch your legs. Your right leg aches, the way it always does on long drives like this. You see a sign for the town Seahaven,…
Who ever said death had to be so bad? Dalton was perfectly fine here, thank you very much. Being caught in the in-between of life and rebirth gave him all the time he needed to do what he enjoyed—watering the front lawn, trimming the azalea bushes, sipping on a glass of Casamigos at sunset…
The small god tears across the universe like time might break. Their being hinges on an axiom: outpace light; see the past. They push until their form is gaseous and all the worlds become one bright luminary ahead, but it’s too little, too slow. When they look back, their star remains dark. The small god…
The Grove of Knowledge benefitted from an accord with the fungi underground. The fungi spread far and wide, with eyes and ears in every corner of the realm, allowing them to provide the trees with all manner of news. “There’s a pirate queen docked in the castle’s main harbor.” “Lady Greyton has been missing for…
I did not invite the Tongue Takers to dinner, but three extra chairs have found their way to my kitchen table. They returned early this morning. News of their arrival oozed through town like a pox, spreading across the marketplace in a wave of moaning and wailing. The cleverest of us had fled inside, locked…
Emma understands that the world might be ending. Wormholes. Soft spots. A parallel universe that’s starting to leak through a hundred different holes in a hundred different cities. One of which happens to be just outside her house, right next to the mailbox, at the end of the driveway. How much longer do we…
“I am not a necromancer,” I repeat, blood dripping off my chin with patters of splat splat splat onto the reports spilling across the interrogation table. “I’m a doctor. Just a doctor.” “Mm,” the interrogator purrs. Red flecks from the events of the past half hour speckle the words on her badge: Necrohunter Tess Belmont,…
The glade stretched out before me, bathed beneath a dappled azure sky. Flowers blossomed in the high grass, crimson poppies and sunshine flares of dandelions peering through thick tangles of green. The day was warm and the air was full of the scent of the forest, which waited, cloaked in shade, through a gap in…
Nomi knew she couldn’t eat her mother all by herself. But the idea of calling a reclamation team made a silent scream spiral out of her chest, infinite in every direction. So she sat in the corner, tucked against the bulkhead, and watched rigor mortis slowly settle the folds of her mother’s face. Nomi had…
