Category: Fiction

Deep in the woods, where the sun’s light never reaches to break apart the shadows, through a thicket of brambles and stinging shrubs, there stands a house. It is not made of gingerbread, nor does it walk on chicken’s legs. But it is, for want of a better word, home. My devil trees need feeding. […]

The egg crunched in her fist, yolk oozing between her fingers onto the kitchen counter. She wiped away the mess, dropped the empty carton into the whirring garbage disposal chute, and patted down her apron in the doorway to the dining room. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Astrid, “but we seem to have run out of […]

אדם יסודו מעפר וסופו לעפר In the first world, the chosen people had crafted them of mud, and flame, and Word. Cracked clay limbs had softened to flesh, and the Messiah—both elder and child—had awoken to song: Odem yesoydoy meyofor vesoyfo leyofor. Man begins in dust, and ends in dust. Tsayt played beside the park’s […]

Later, when you ask the woman you remember as the one with a bloody mouth why she saved your life, she says it’s because she didn’t mean to hurt you. You didn’t ask to be saved. You also didn’t ask for your legs to be crushed, and her bloody mouth didn’t undo the gap between […]

Things vanish in the Wildermere. The usual, expected things—livestock, the occasional person—but also the less conventional. The less tangible. You walk to the border between this world and that, stand in the tangled underbrush, and peer between the gap in the ancient redwood trees. And something is snatched away, leaving only the faintest shadow of […]

Harris walked into the tent, his sun-burned face wrinkled into a permanent, unconscious frown. “There aren’t enough bees.” “Fuck,” Grace muttered. She pushed the monitor back, blanking the screen showing the active bee swarms and the yet-to-be-pollinated flowers, and unhooked herself from the computer. “That means we’ve got to go out there.” “I’ll get the […]

If I were Palaeolithic, I would paint your name on sacred stones with ochre and ash.

My mother had been dead just a week when a moth flew into my room.

You catch a faint whiff of blood while selecting durians for the buffet. You smell it, despite the fusion of sweat, lubricant and the sandal-bottom aroma of durian fresh from the tree.

Our world was dying; that was the excuse anyways. A better life, Dad promised, and Mom followed. But we only traded one wasteland for another.