I died on a Tuesday, which wasn’t nearly as inconvenient as dying again on Thursday. The first death was clinical—heart stopped for six minutes during a valve replacement. But death, like most bureaucracies, has loopholes. The surgeons pulled me back and sent me home with blood thinners and instructions to “take
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Limited Series Part 1 My stall at the midnight bazaar wasn’t hard to find. All you had to do was walk past countless other derelicts pawning family heirlooms or renting themselves out as a companion to talk to. To fuck. To play therapist. The smell of deep-fried illegal meat and contraband cigarette smoke
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Kaiel rocketed into space, his flight invisible in the night. Not quite invisible. A missile, silent in the thinning air, ricocheted off Kaiel’s ship and exploded in a blitz of hot metal. His spacecraft cartwheeled; time trickled to a stop, flattening his life-beat to a halt. His spaceship juddered,
As soon as Carna steps into the lift, her pager notifies her of a job on the other end of the galaxy. The pay would cover her rent, but should she choose to accept the run, the cosmic bike courier would, as the ad promises, have to make it all the way across
A Galaxy Run in 30 Minutes or Less Read More »
With the summer solstice sun melting into the horizon, Ulrike hits the gas pedal and screeches out of Glendale along the I-5 to East Hollywood, where she parks in front of a Walgreens boasting a “now with extended hours” sign. With trembling…paws, she adjusts the rearview mirror to check her reflection. Hair—coarse and
This is how they tell it, those childless people who long for a child. The forest witch keeps a mossy glade, and it is full of healthy babies. You can pick one up and keep it to care for as your own. Tanet was not there to get one of the
Héng. Horizontal, left to right. The brush travels slowly across the parchment. Sseong-hi watches the black ink bleeding from the line he has painted on the yellowed page. It spreads along the grain, but he holds the brush steady from start to finish.
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I cy wind rattled the coffee shop windows. The string of fairy lights outside the storefront shook, striking the glass in a repeating tink, tink, tink, like the drumming of skeletal fingers. Darkness came early this time of year, but the shop was lit with the soft glow of many stained-glass lamps. It felt safe.
I wake to the sound of bleating. What the fuck? While still half asleep, I crawl out of bed at–what–2:36 am? I grab my phone and the Swiss Army knife I keep on the bedside table and lumber down the stairs. I make as much noise as possible to scare any
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W hen P-XIE refused to justify her surgery, the reporter asked if it was so she could marry a fish. Her publicist cut the interview off. But that became the story. Pop Icon Gone Fishing: Are Real Men Not Good Enough for P-XIE? Three months later, on a sun-soaked Saturday afternoon outside Saint Louis,
Popstar Mermaid in a Trash Storm Along the Mississippi Read More »