Senn had been lost in space for five months when the devil first offered her a deal. He appeared in the mess as she was reconstituting protein. Naturally, she assumed the isolation was getting to her, and she retreated to her bunk to cry; but the next morning, nothing in the tiny kitchen was where…
The planet couldn’t suppress the shiver of excitement rippling over its surface when a transport landed in a ring of fire and smoke. Its first visitors! How air-light their steps, so miniscule and fragile. It tried to stay stone-still as they ambled about. Look! the planet thought. See my ravines? Like rivers of stone. That…
Today we are adults, all of us in our cohort. For our second gift, we will be marched out of the Foundling Complex, where we have spent the entirety of our lives, and put on the spaceship we have been trained to crew. Our first gift—in my hand is a memory chit containing all that…
I hefted the bulky envelope and stared at the return address. Wellsley college. Well, damn. They don’t send heavy packets to rejects. I didn’t even need Cousin Lei’s red-envelope-telepathy to tell me what it said. The rest of us held our red envelopes up to the light to see what bills were inside. Cousin Lei…
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…
When I step off the bus it starts pouring, taking everyone by surprise—except me. Fellow travelers jostle for position under the bus stop’s overhang, kids shrieking and parents scolding them to stay out of puddles. A businessman grumbles about not having his umbrella: “The one day all week we were supposed to have blue skies!”…
“That carbon scoring came from laser blasts, not a hot re-entry. You might be able to fool the others, Tara, but not me. You should know better. That’ll cost you extra.” Janae side-eyed me while tilting her head towards the marks on the glider while shoving her hands deeper into the pockets of her coverall….
Vincent sat close to the furnace, sweat dripping off his forehead. His legs ached with the strain of trying to sit still, trying to show that he wasn’t nervous. “Who’s it going to?” Freda, the glassblower asked. She sat at a bench in front of the furnace with an ethereal sort of presence that made…
Down in the valley, beneath trees whose trunks rise evenly spaced and straight but whose gnarled arms twine high above, a woman kneels digging. She digs with her hands, nails tearing. Bright-beaked birds watch, hopping among the risen roots. One chirps a sad melody, but the song is lost beneath the waterfall’s thundering: a…
