Science Fiction
Feast of Famine
The buffet was infinite. It existed in a pocket dimension, via some sort of technological jiggering of the sort that you have heard about before and, unless you are totally anal, don’t want to hear about now.
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Fantasy
It Might Be He Returns
What you need to know about the boy in this story is he is always hungry and the sun is always too hot for him, and he would save the world if he could. This is what he tells himself as he sits opposite the tailor’s shop, looking at the clothes sway in the breeze of the air conditioner within. Fawad would save the world, he would change fate itself.
Science Fiction
Five Dispatches from Conflict Zone W-924/B Regarding Post-Battle Deployment of A. Thanatensis
Dispatch #1. [INAUDIBLE] . . . but hopefully I’ve got the recorder working now. This is Dr. Nathaniel Letheford, Director, Alliance for Military Neutralization and Eradication of Sensitive Incidents and Atrocities. I have been inserted into conflict zone W-924/B for sample collection.
Fantasy
You Knit Me Together in My Mother’s Womb
Because her sudden pregnancy doomed her—as she saw it—to diapers and daycares she couldn’t afford and the same drab job she already disliked, Abby asked for Marcia’s advice. At thirty months, Marcia was already the size of a glacier. She moved slowly and inexorably, lowering herself cranelike onto couches.
Science Fiction
Finding Love in a Time Loop: A How-To Guide
We all know, by now, how common time loops are. In less than a decade, they’ve moved from the realm of SF movies into the slightly less-realistic realm of self-help books—most famously, Moving On: How to Keep Going When Time Literally Stops.
Fantasy
Un-Pragmagic: A Tyler Moore Retrospective
Tyler Moore’s spells strive to exist in and of themselves. They make no excuse or justification for their existence: no promise to speak to the dead, predict next year’s grain or gold prices, or read the mind of lawyers during a hostile takeover. They are simply beautiful, challenging, and awe-inducing.
Science Fiction
Domestic Disputes
Once upon a time, on a spaceship traveling through the divide between galaxies, a married couple was bickering about whose job it was to clean the mouse shit that’d accumulated in the reactor tubes.
Fantasy
A Dish Best Served Cold, Or, an Excerpt From the Cookbook Of the Gods
The first thing you have to know is that I did not kill the gods. Now, I’m sure you must have heard differently from your parents when they tell you bedtime stories, your priests who tell you their selfish desires rather than the will of the gods, or from your teachers who pretend to know what they’re talking about.
Science Fiction
How to Win Against the Robots
Mom lives in a little place off the old meat-packing district, the streets full of cobblestones peeking through asphalt as hipsters turn the bones of slaughterhouses into bespoke gin bars. It’s expensive.
Fantasy
What Else, What Else, in the Joyous City?
In Salemo, virtually the entire populace is kept in drudgery and toil. There are no public parks, nor libraries, nor song, nor wine, nor holidays. People slave away in seventy-two -hour workweeks, sustained by unnourishing meals of corn meal and grease, returning home to their miserable hovels at the end of each day to collapse on their stinking cots.
