Lightspeed: Edited by John Joseph Adams

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Flash Fiction

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.

Fantasy

To Be a Happy Man

My son tells me that there’s a man in the house, someone he hears well after the lights are out, in the narrower halls or maybe at the far side of the den—a gait and creak he’s certain isn’t me or his mom, since he can hear us both breathing heavily and tossing in our sleep.

Science Fiction

Night Desk Duty at the Infinite Paradox Hotel

“Good evening, sir,” Dave says pleasantly, hiding his crossword puzzle under his computer keyboard, as the front door chimes. “Do you have a reservation?” “Afraid not.” The guest fiddles with his suitcase. “I saw the No Vacancy sign, but I gotta ask—” “No problem at all.” Dave’s keyboard clatters busily, a series of well-practiced keystrokes.

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