It was soon after Julie began nursing when she realized she could travel through time. When Nathan was a week old, and her breasts ached with regularity ten times a day, she read about common nursing issues online. She’d been thinking her blinks into the past were dreams from sleep deprivation, or maybe even something…
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…
Baleful red light crackled across the sky, outlining a mushroom cap atop tentacles, stretching down into the clouds. Conditions were perfect for the abominably misnamed “sprite” to discharge the shards that powered the airship Jubilee on long-range journeys. “You saw where it struck?” Tali asked. Her pilot, Rowan, rolled their eyes. “Yes, Captain.” Tali nodded….
I meet you in the rain, the fat drops slicking our cheeks. We splash in puddles like children. You kiss like thunder: deep enough to shake the earth, even if only a little. The sun reemerges and sparkles on the wet tar. I turn to see your face sparkle, too, but you’re gone. I look…
The doll doesn’t make it to my front door. I find her limp against my woodpile out back a few days after the first cold snap. She’s been rained on, her cloth skin a sodden gray, button eyes damp. “Oh, hello,” she says, with trained brightness. “I do beg your pardon. I seem to be…
In two and half minutes, I’d either become the twelfth certified wormhole pilot or the seventieth-odd loser ripped apart by Jupiter’s storm shear. The decisive moment was speeding up to me. I’d ghost my electricals, coast through the eye of the storm, and slide through the tiny aperture halfway to another world. Even after all…
I’d always watched the whaling boats going out to sea in the morning; big, asbestos-lined vessels churning through the lava, leaving a black wake behind them. My parents’ house was close enough to the beach that the shingles warped and blistered in the heat, and if you stood at the kitchen window you could see…
I ride into the clearing with my lance pointed skyward. My horse is already skittish. The dragon slaying business is always rough on horses, and I replace mine the way other riders do horseshoes. I didn’t even bother to name this one. But losing a horse always gives the story a little something. I circle…
Rat-tat tat-tat-tat. Someone was knocking on the door. This would have been strange enough, given she travelled here alone, but Simone knew the other side was bare. Nothing surrounded the doorway but crumbling rubble of the building that had been, the inside gone over to weeds and weather. The door stood in the ruin, a…
The third time the ocean comes to our door, there’s no sister to wake me. I’m roused from my slumber by the lapping of waves and tiptoe past our father’s bedroom door. He won’t rise for another hour or two. By then, the ocean will have receded once more. He’ll wonder at the damp sand…
