Why, with everything prime, would I answer the goddamn phone? In the Ten it’s just me and my restaurant. A narrow world of one-way streets and alleyways, black hot concrete and steel. Not much room for the natural things. Hell, there’s barely air that’s fit to breathe. Roses live in tacky plastic pots, vegetables come wrapped in neon gumbands stamped with smiling company mascots. But I like…
Fiction
Technorat
West London was, as always, abuzz. Even at 4:00 AM on a chilly November Tuesday, electric motorcars whirred down Kings Road, zipping people along, early to work or late from [...]
The Carver’s Son
In the time when the world was still forming, there were a few animals, some people, and many, many gods. At this time, there was a dry valley that had [...]
Callista
The stars were becoming transparent as light crept over the horizon. Greg hissed in frustration. If he didn’t get the fans on this part of the atmospheric controller fixed before [...]
The Queen in the Poplar Forest
All the omens meant it was a good morning for a hunt. Legends of the Bronze-Backed Bear have said that one drop of his blood dripped, into eyes, would cure [...]
Jessamine
High in the bluffs, with its tower and its wicker-woven hut, we watched the long north road. We saw her as she came, head held high and her beating heart [...]
Wish You Were Here
A scribble of lightning cracks from the roof of the house to the weedy lawn. I bend down, light up a cigarette on the flaming patch, and stomp out the [...]
Ptomaine
I.
Miss Covington is dead before Frederick finds me.
Despite the damages, she is still attractive. A swathe of unbound hair curls across the snow. Her cheeks aren’t so round and fleshy [...]
The Battle for Moscow, Idaho
My severed fingers lay in the snow of the parking lot, flakes melting on their tips. Shoes squeaked in the snow. I had been shot somewhere in the chest with [...]
The Weatherwoman
They came for him in the stillness of shadow and artificial moonlight. It could not even be called midnight: there were no nights in the Citadel but those requested by [...]
A Little Bit Like the Tooth Fairy (Only Not Quite)
There are three hares in my bedroom when I wake up on Wednesday. Long-legged and soft-furred, they hop about agitatedly. One of them has made a nest out of yesterday’s [...]
Touched
I woke to the sound of frightened children. The wind swung in through the broken windows of the wrecked bus and curled around us, stealing in under our clothes. It [...]
Der Führer’s Bunker
The Soviet artillery is a steady heartbeat above our heads now. Reminds me of a child stomping about the house inside his daddy’s oversized boots, moving from room to room. Footsteps instead of detonations. I rather like the image. So do a few others in here with me. It lessens the fear. And down in our hole, there’s a lot to fear these days…
The Abilene Abduction
Before a microphone: “Sir, so you say you were abducted by aliens?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” says Harold Golt in Tony Lama boots, his daddy’s boots: resoled, real rattlesnake skin.
“Tell us about it.”
“On [...]
Viy
An ogre’s worth five minutes. Demons are ten. Double that if you’re working with two people; triple it for three. Multiply it by six if you want a horde. Increase [...]