I can walk out the front door into the wide, busy, surprising world and do whatever I want. But he can’t, and so I stay. He smiles at me across the breakfast table at 9:34 exactly every morning. At least,… Continue reading

It was the worst place her car could have stopped. Sputtering one last rum-bitter gasp of spent fuel, a shuddering fume-cough, then rolling to a silent, inertial halt on the gravel shoulder. Under a moon that was always new on… Continue reading

I love you. He leaned over my bed and whispered it, while I pretended to sleep. Again and again, so close that his breath quivered my eyelashes, the hazy, half-shut camouflage through which I watched him. His face a black-hole… Continue reading

Rain ran down through the channels in the bell, ringing it as the wind never would. Its maze-like latticed frame was made for water, not air, its clapper a sloshing bowl that overlapped onto his head where he sat otherwise… Continue reading

It was the inevitable conclusion that no one wanted to acknowledge. Copy an object into a matter replicator, and it could be tweaked and reproduced and perfected forever. Nothing produced by the natural world would ever be as perfect as… Continue reading

They had lost half their platoon the first night in that damned city. And Jameson had no idea how to explain that to his superiors barking on the radio, since they hadn’t actually encountered a single enemy combatant. They hadn’t… Continue reading

The piano was a more gorgeous inheritance than Tabitha had ever have expected from her grandmother, stout as an oaken castle, gilt with golden fairies and petals in mother-of-pearl. It barely fit in the combined dining and living room of… Continue reading

The guide walks ahead of them with a telescoping pole held importantly above and ahead. A white slit in the dark, like the wick of a phantom candle leading the way. Every hundred paces, they cluster up close behind him,… Continue reading

The most gorgeous garden in the city, in the tiny backyard of a middling sorcerer. The fence, rotten with rain and neglect, bloats like a wooden belly, trying to contain it. The hum of the bees that make pilgrimage to… Continue reading

You’d think the cattle might be uneasy around a possessed cowhand. I was worried about that when I first picked up a white spur out of the mud, white in spite of the mud, and felt something that never speaks… Continue reading