Science Fiction
Master/Slave Couple Seeking Physicist to Feed to a Black Hole
You are:
A disillusioned mathematical physicist with a wet open mind.
Desperate for knowledge.
A neo-masochist.
A willing sacrifice.
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Flash Fiction
Science Fiction
Guidance
Later, when the cameras were off and he was alone with his wife, hands still shaking from the cocktail of adrenaline, fear, shame, guilt, and vodka he’d been partaking of all day, he started to tell her the truth. Even then, he only spoke it in the dark, so overwhelming were his emotions that he could not bear to be seen.
“The truth,” she said, prompting him, trying to draw him from the enveloping gloom of their bedroom.
Fantasy
Congratulations on your Magic Sword™
Congratulations on your Magic Sword”! For all inquiries as to its powers and perils, please consult the Virtue Exercises Manual”. However, we know new users sometimes get in over their heads. That’s why messages like this may appear on your blade. If you see such a message, heed it promptly, and everything will be fine. Welcome to heroism. We’ve been waiting for you!
Science Fiction
Maskwork Saltman Giftbox
I’m only doing maskwork until I find better, but there aren’t many physical jobs to go around in Schrödinger City. Most get done by gleaming machines, by hop-along bots and drone swarms. Luckily, maskwork needs a human touch—and supposedly, village folk are better at it than the folk who grew up here. Could be. I always liked masks.
Fantasy
The Dragon, the Scarab, the Wolf, the Dragon
Ánar’s bootheels echoed on the iron floor. What a groundbreaking honor this ceremony was for a landless tenant like him—joining old house Veivilkas, of the wolf. Such an honor that it made him leaden to think of, made him long for sleep. At the conclusion of the ceremony, he would no longer be merely Ánar from the undercity, scarab-kin, but Ánar Veivilkas. Nobility. The first scarab-kin to wear that name, no less.
Science Fiction
The Chrysalis of Moth One
They didn’t want either of us to live this long. Sucks for them—we’re good at living in spite. We’re good at surviving, at fighting, at never stopping. Today is the last day we exist in spite of Command, but it’s also just another day that ends in y. Most pilots are paired with a seasoned mentor. Not us. No, powerful men at Command threw us in the pit of a Moth to fight their pointless space war.
Fantasy
A Guide on How to Repay Your Vow to the Deity of Many Faces
If every effort to bring down your child’s fever is unsuccessful and the doctors cannot diagnose anything wrong with her, then you should seek other means to alleviate her health. Before you help her into the house, if you notice that her shadow refuses to follow her body, then you should know that her sickness is numinous, and it is beyond what science can cure or fathom.
Fantasy
The Goddess of Not Enough
You’re eighteen. Your fairy godmother just fired you, because after three balls, the prince has grown bored with you. Tonight you stepped on his foot during a gavotte. “If you’d been cleverer,” the fairy godmother says—her words silver chimes girded with steel—“you’d have pretended your clumsiness was really punishment: a reminder to focus on you, not that floozy in scarlet silk across the room.”
Fantasy
What Do You Mean the Nanobots Formed a Union??
“What do you mean the nanobots formed a union??” I asked the lawyer, biting my thumbnail.
It’s an old habit, kept up well after I got the “Pro Nano Blitz Package,” as the ad called it. A muscular man in tight clothing explained: a quick, painless injection, then a couple days sick as a dog, then another month for the nanobots to multiply, specialize, and spread out through the body. Then: easy street.
Science Fiction
The Age of Cancer
This is our struggle. We scuttle on the sand before the softly breathing salt-burdened sea with the lichen on the rocks a bright poison green and great white butterflies screaming under a red sky while we dream of justice and watch the ghost of a long-extinct rat ancestor, an ancestrat if you please, you know the ones we mean, the toothy ones who built dams to block the rivers, the handsy ones who built towers to block the skies, and choked on their own leavings.
