I don’t know where she came from. It was just that one day she wasn’t there, and the next, she was. My brother and I lived beside a lake on the edge of the town. My name is Stella. Jack was a hunter, and I was a fisher. Every morning when he left for the [...]
My brother has turned into a swan, which makes it hard to concentrate during band practice. After one particularly loud honk that should have been a B flat, Mr. Zankowski starts to shake his head when he looks at me. Which reminds me of the way Mary Anne Bosnick shook her head this morning when she noticed the white feather stuck to the back of my plaid skirt.
Traveller Yud climbed up the stairs and was on the landing between fifty-five and fifty-six when he finally stopped to rest. Elsbeth Rose put a last, bold stroke of red on the canvas when the knock on the door came and she sighed and laid the brush down gently and went to answer it. The [...]
When the roses got sick was the first time Maggie realized she could fix things. Mommy was very angry at the ugly, gray spots on the stems. She called them something like lee-shuns and said it had to do with fungus. Maggie didn’t know about that, but she was upset when the buds drooped over [...]
Once upon a time a dead girl lived with the other zombies in the caverns below the port of Tabat, in the city beneath that seaside town, the city that has no name. Thousands of years ago, the Wizard Sulooman plunged the city, buildings and all, into the depths of the earth, and removed its [...]
Dad stopped drinking the day my sister was born. He called her his angel, and the booze didn’t take him back until she died. He came drunk to the funeral, crying and roaring, loud enough for two parents, loud enough to make up for Mam’s silence. At the end, the men had to hold him [...]
Manuel Lainez walked across the reddish sand of the Playas Valley. The sun almost touched a low mountain range that hid the town of Lordsburg from view, and Manuel picked up his step. He had lingered at the Navajo reservation for too long, in thrall to his uncle’s tales, and now he hurried back home, [...]
Lisa dug up the first skull just before sunset, as the last light streaked the stony earth of the garden. Her hands recognized it before her eyes did, and she jerked away, rocking back onto her heels so violently she almost hit the patio. From behind her, the sound of an angry string section started [...]
Why did I ever go back? Wasn’t it enough that the eggs fried evenly in my iron pan, that the white edges crisped so prettily, like doilies, that the chimney huffed its smoke grandfather-satisfied, that the green trees stayed in their civilized trim, that they never again reached out for me as they did in [...]
With some polytropic characters it is possible that there is no real self behind the shifting masks, or that the real self lies exactly there, in the moving surfaces and not beneath.—Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World She went down into the labyrinth under the patternless city and sat on a fallen pillar for a [...]
