Lightspeed: Edited by John Joseph Adams

LIGHTSPEED & NIGHTMARE Kickstarter graphic. Left side: Bright light blue background with rays (as of light) bursting out from the center. Central image is an open book with a rocket blasting up out of it. Below the book is the LIGHTSPEED magazine wordmark; the word lightspeed is rendered in a orange-to-yellow gradient, with a white outline around it and dropshadow underneath it. Right side: Bright light yellow background with rays (as of light) bursting out from the center. Central image is an open book with a haunted house emerging from it. Below the book is the NIGHTMARE magazine wordmark; the word nightmare is rendered in a dark red to lighter red gradient, with a white outline around it and dropshadow underneath it. Top: the words "LIVE on Kickstarter"

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Flash Fiction

Science Fiction

Under a Star, Bright as Morning

Jo drives urgently as they race toward the star, not sure how far to go, racing because the baby is coming tonight, now, and He (a He, of course) is supposed to be born under the star, that’s how the story goes. The story, the new story and the old, begins with a visitor, a messenger. Molly had just logged out for the day when the monk knocked on her door.

Fantasy

a testament to indirection, an enigma, the sun above

So, this is awkward. We aren’t at the stage in our relationship where I’d feel comfortable revising your life-poem on the fly. Even as a backup plan . . . yet here we are. I’m sorry. I know I should have said that to you before the anesthesiologist put you under and the surgeon opened up your skull. But now the surgeon is staring at the quivering quill in my hand.

Science Fiction

Islands of Stability

Jeanne Calment said she was 122, but there were questions. The records from 1875 were shaky, some of them deliberately burned. Tanaka Kane, 119, was on firmer ground, and then there were loads of others in the hundred-teens. For some time 120 seemed to be a firm limit.

Fantasy

Only Some of True Love’s Miracles

True love’s kiss works miracles. Everyone knows the story: The sculptor who carved a perfect woman, his own creation, and when he fell in love with her (and how could he have failed to fall in love with her, his own creation?) and kissed her.

Science Fiction

An Incomplete Body Has No Answers

You don’t know why you ask because you already know he can’t answer. A body is only a body when it has all its parts. And he—that beloved man you once hiked through Angkor Wat’s abandoned halls and root-choked courtyards with, who once pulled you from the dizzying edge of the Queens-Manhattan skywalk—is now just an unsightly array of incomplete parts.

Fantasy

Fragments of a Symbiotic Life

I was born normal enough, except that I was four days late, which isn’t so much, and slightly jaundiced, which isn’t unusual, and had a raccoon for an arm, which is admittedly strange. It wasn’t my whole arm—I was human to the elbow. And it wasn’t a whole raccoon.

Fantasy

An Elegy for the Former Things

You’ve been driving for hours and I wish you would stop. You clutch the steering wheel so hard, your knuckles pop white, your palms slick with sweat and desperation. Sunken, glassy, your eyes flick between the fuel gauge, the endless road, and the trembling land through which we pass.

Science Fiction

The Pearl Captain

Josea Dream was the pearl captain at the heart of the bivalve ship Blue Spring, which had swum the black for a thousand years. It was a mystery to Josea—it was a mystery to anyone who’d ever thought about it—why the bivalves suffered their captains’ proddings.

Fantasy

Further Examination and Capture of Candle Skulls Associated with the Baba Yaga

Recent scholarship has shed considerable light on many previously puzzling or mysterious aspects of the life of the Baba Yaga—or, as some would still have it, the Baba Yagas. But one element has remained largely unstudied, and indeed, almost completely ignored.

Science Fiction

Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight

Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight is an American web series created by an unknown animator or animators. The show combines magical girl anime tropes with cosmic horror, following high schooler Sally Hoshino (Kira Kira Sunlight) and her friends.