Last month I talked about writing during the Ebook Revolution Hysteria of 2010-2013 and how this crashed against the realities of not only the market and my own stupidity but also the compounded tragedies of being unemployed, beginning a divorce, and having my mother killed by four different kinds of cancer all within months of […]
4.200 – Reuniting with Departed Lovers, Pets, and/or Network-enabled Electronic Devices, Alternate Methods for In some rare cases, the methods laid out by section 4.100 (Classic Necromantic Rituals) will fail to return loved ones—or their devices—to life. In such instances, the practitioner or her client may feel the onset of despair. As though caught […]
This is not your usual holiday issue. There are no jolly elves or mistletoe garlands. No perfectly decorated trees full of fairy lights or any other toothsomely sweet tableaus appear in our stories this December. But this is a holiday issue. In Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami writes: “And once the storm is over, […]
April 14, 1994, Mubaro, Rwanda The girl waits. There are only the silver threads of a web swooping precariously over the top left corner of a splintered window frame. There are no rays of warm light seeping through mottled glass. There is no slight breeze, no swaying jacaranda branch heavy with purple blossoms her mother […]
MONDAY, APRIL 10 The first stop on Selma’s route was equidistant between the mall and the cemetery. Zoning was weird out here. People of shapes she’d never seen streamed down the sidewalk, all in black suits or black dresses. One broke from the crowd and boarded Selma’s bus. The woman climbed up to her and […]
Poppy fell the moment Carlos showed her his feet. She’d never met a man—or rather, a civilian man—with feet uglier than her own. But ballet slippers weren’t any kinder to toes than combat boots were. Before she saw him, she’d planned on making a tactical retreat from the reception. It’d been a mistake to take […]