Eurydice has never felt as if she fits in her own myth. It doesn’t belong to her, not really, because the story doesn’t end when she leaves it. Orpheus gets to keep going to the land of the living, and he gets to grieve, and he gets to die a brutal death, and then the story ends. She is left abandoned in the aftermath.

Davvit was six years old the first time he saw a shark kill a man on the beach. It came up, looked the guy’s wife straight in the eye, then stabbed him in the throat, right there next to the cotton candy stand beneath the hoverboard rental hut.

You leave while it is still dark. Your lover sleeps on his stomach, the sheet draped only to his waist. You don’t want to go. You want to slide back into bed and listen to him breathing. And for him to make you coffee later, dark and sweet. But you’ve never let anyone haunt you. And you’re not about to start now.

Chained doulas pull a child from the womb in low-gravity orbit; a babe of the Many Mouthed Empire, unencumbered by duty. Defiant, I face the birthing altar—jaw, clamped; gaze, glassy. (I mustn’t. Look.) I dreamt of children, once. Now it’s as if Mama Caarine gazes through the newborn’s eyes; as though my brother, Zjor-Anu, thumbed […]

The label said, Grow your own girlfriend! Cultivate the perfect partner! Just add water! Sam pulled the packet off the shelf.

Before we delve into the difficulties of designing doublets for dragons or flame-resistant undergarments for would-be dragonslayers, let us consider six instructive examples. Firstly, Cinderella. Set aside the matter of her ballgown. Any fairy godmother can conjure a fabulous confection of chiffon or taffeta. Focus instead on the shoes.

It begins with an explosion: his mother. He isn’t born yet, but he’ll be made from the bits and pieces she leaves behind. Star-stuff. She’s also left some heavier elements, extra dusts and gasses he’ll have to figure out what to do with later.

Atomic Tangerine skates like a dream / nobody beats Atomic Tangerine. —Federova, Anya. Preserved Graffiti of the Water Riots. 2055, mixed media. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

When I was small, my mother told us a story about a talking fish who granted wishes. I got the family sow, who doesn’t. “Something’s wrong with Little Sister,” I whispered to the sow. Her ears perked. “Tell me.”

The rat was a god, but you had no idea. You found it snapped in half on the trap you set, dead.