Lightspeed: Edited by John Joseph Adams

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Fiction

Fantasy

Breaking the Frame

The photograph is of a woman at the center of a forest. She is slim and tall and pale as the birches she stands among. The shadows turn her ribs and spine into branches, into knots in the wood. Around her arms, the peeling white bark of the birches, curved in bracelets. Between her thighs, the hair is dense and springy like moss. She is turning into a tree.

Fantasy

Love Might Be Too Strong a Word

Here’s how I remember it: A touch shocked me. I was reaching for a flash-seared bog-oyster, and then a fingertip, softer than I’d ever felt, brushed my knuckle. The softness startled me so much, it took me a moment to realize the hand had seven fingers, three more than mine.

Fantasy

Cotillion

Celia Townsend’s mother brought up the subject of debutante balls for the first time in June. It was the day after graduation, and they were discussing when Celia would have to be home from Maine at the end of the summer to get ready for her freshman year at Vassar.

Science Fiction

Flash Bang Remember

Red-haired Mother, with her sharp nose and freckled chest, leaned low over the hydroponics channel and declared that the dead plants were Girl23’s fault.

Fantasy

A Moment Before It Struck

He felt death coming a moment before it struck. In the lingering gray twilight, Smoke lay on his bedding, eyes not quite closed and mind adrift, only half-aware of the sounds of the encampment around him: steel on whetstone, the rattle of dice, a soft song, and loud bragging.

Science Fiction

The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species

There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die. Time devours all.

Fantasy

The Necromancer in Love

The young necromancer is a blight on the social landscape, because when his sweetheart meets with an untimely interruption of service (don’t they all? don’t they always?), he’s bound to do something the rest of us regret.

Fantasy

Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream

In the middle of the maze, there’s always a monster. If there were no monster, people would happily set up house where it’s warm and windowless and comfortable. The monster is required. The monster is a real estate disclosure.

Science Fiction

The Giving Plague

You think you’re going to get me, don’t you? Well, you’ve got another think coming, ‘cause I’m ready for you.

Fantasy

Gordon, the Self-made Cat

Once upon a time, to a family of house mice there was born a son named Gordon. He looked very much like his father and mother and all his brothers and sisters, who were gray and had bright, twitchy, black eyes, but what went on inside Gordon was very different from what went on inside the rest of his family.

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