Fantasy
The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue
There is a werewolf girl in the city. She sits by the phone on a Saturday night, waiting for it to ring. She paints her nails purple.
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Fiction
Science Fiction
Water Finds Its Level
When people asked where I met Roger, I always told the truth. “We met in the Collision,” I’d say. Then they’d give me that look that people used to give you when you told them you met somebody online. The look that said you must be reckless or naive or desperate, and that no good would come of it.
Fantasy
Fantasy
The Missing Metatarsals
His head swiveled to track me as we walked in lockstep through security. A birth defect called Möbius syndrome inherited from distant Nepalese ancestors left him with underdeveloped VI and VII cranial nerves, so he can’t blink, bite, or form expressions without the help of a series of tiny implants. My girlfriend Billie is a muscle artist, and she’s tweaked the inspector’s presets a couple of times, giving him conscious control of his face, but that’s not the same as the real thing. Not the same at all.
Fantasy
The Man Who Carved Skulls
“I married your mother for her skull. It’s no secret.” Jarak put aside his rasps and gouges for the moment, resting his eyes and mind from the precise, exacting work his trade demanded. He didn’t mind his son’s persistent questions at such times. Akan was at an age when he should be curious and, if curiosity was a duty, Akan was a dedicated boy. It wasn’t as though Purlo the Baker, whose skull rested patiently on Jarak’s workbench, was in a hurry.
Science Fiction
Science Fiction
Fantasy
Dinner in Audoghast
Delightful Audoghast! Renowned through the civilized world, from Cordova to Baghdad, the city spread in splendor beneath a twilit Saharan sky. The setting sun threw pink and amber across adobe domes, masonry mansions, tall, mud-brick mosques, and open plazas thick with bristling date-palms. The melodious calls of market vendors mixed with the remote and amiable chuckling of Saharan hyenas.
Fantasy
Schwartz Between the Galaxies
This much is reality: Schwartz sits comfortably cocooned—passive, suspended—in a first-class passenger rack aboard a Japan Air Lines rocket, nine kilometers above the Coral Sea. And this much is fantasy: the same Schwartz has passage on a shining starship gliding silkily through the interstellar depths, en route at nine times the velocity of light from Betelgeuse IX to Rigel XXI, or maybe from Andromeda to the Lesser Magellanic.
Fantasy
A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain
On a beach by the sea stands a gutted stone tower. A man is climbing up the remains of a staircase that spirals up the tower’s interior. Vivi sits on the roof, oblivious, counting coins that have spilled from her breast pocket: one fiver, three ones, one golden ten. She’s only wearing a worn pair of pajamas, and the damp breeze from the sea is making her shiver. She has no memory of how she arrived, but is vaguely aware of the sound of footsteps.
