She had never understood why so many people came out of cryosleep in need of counselling. Not if they’d been unconscious for only a few weeks or months, not long enough for temporal displacement to be its own understandable source… Continue reading

Her grandmother had always said the moon was just a hole in the sky, a cozy place for a white snake larger than the largest mountain to curl up. It ventured out sometimes, of course, as hungry as all snakes… Continue reading

Easier when doom came all at once, as something that had to be fled on foot or else. As something slow, there was time almost to believe they could adapt to it. They even dared to keep drawing water from… Continue reading

A cat or fox, or even a stag, would certainly have made for a more convenient familiar. Something that could move on its own, do minor chores, the sort that didn’t need hands, and curl up next to her in… Continue reading

The rope hung down into the darkness of the rift, still and almost certainly not touching the bottom. Kay had tugged and swung it about, trying to sound the depths, but there seemed to be as little sound as light… Continue reading

She was far past the point of wanting to simply sit down and cry. It felt almost as if she had missed the gap in her resolve that would have let her do so – the hole she could have… Continue reading

He took as deep a breath as he could hold, as deep and sound as ever, it seemed, and shone the penlight into the hole again. Holding his side with a splayed hand, stretching the skin from the edges of… Continue reading

“There,” one of them pointed, leaning precariously far from the edge of the slanted roof. “Right there.” The other stayed sensibly seated, squinting at a horizon that looked no different than it had five minutes or five days ago. “I… Continue reading