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

“What do you mean, it’s got my soul in it?” The doctor – whose credentials she should have been a lot more careful about examining, would have been, if she hadn’t been losing so much blood when she’d stumbled in… Continue reading

She spent more time in her house, lately, than in her body. Snugging the cable in behind her ear, the familiar click, then laying herself out on the couch and flitting free of herself with a thought. Through the wires… Continue reading

I noticed the first bee crawling out from between my ribs two months ago. It balanced for a few breathless seconds on the titanium strut, cleaning its wings, then launched itself into the flax field I was walking through like… Continue reading

It was always strange to have him in pieces there beside her. Warped bolts buckling deep in charred plates, limbs laid out neatly separate from torso, but still with the potential to be whole and animate and speak to her… Continue reading

What a relief it was to lie in bed and hear scratching outside her windows. It had been so silent before. What a relief to hear it coming closer. That meant it wouldn’t leave her – didn’t it? It tapped… Continue reading