Fiction

Eyes of Carven Emerald

Sunrise glinted bloody on giant tumbles of statue; it edged the palace beyond with blood. A limestone arm, severed elbow to thumb, came almost up to Alexandros’ waist. Fingers thick as logs lay scattered behind it. Sunrise glimmered in the statue’s blank, rain-filled eyes, and trickled down the pitted stone cheek. So too would Dareios of Persia have fallen, had the coward not fled.

In Dec. 2016 (Issue 60)

Read
Listen
- Buy eBook
  - Direct (ePub/Mobi/PDF)
  - Amazon (Kindle)
Subscribe

Fiction

The Things My Mother Left Me

by P. Djéli Clark

Tausi sat listening to her aunts, who crowded in a circle at the far end of the room. Their dresses were a kaleidoscope of greens, reds, blues, and yellows, each worked with repeating patterns that shifted with the eye. Huddled like that they seemed to her one polychromatic beast with seven heads and fourteen limbs. None of them made an effort to whisper as they planned her life.

In Dec. 2016 (Issue 60)

Fiction

The Padishah Begum’s Reflections

by Shweta Narayan

Hidden by the feathers of the Peacock Throne, Jahanara watched the Frenchmen’s heads appear at the top of the steps. Diwan-i-Khas, the hall of so-called private audience, would loom before them now. Morning light caught on its outer pillars and scalloped arches, setting the whole aglow: marble embers sparking with pearl and silver inlay in creeper patterns wound around gearwork. Light slanted through the hall, danced on silk and dust and metal, and threw the delegates’ shadows in before them unannounced.

In Dec. 2015 (Issue 59)

Fiction

Kaiju maximus®: “So Various, So Beautiful, So New”

by Kai Ashante Wilson

It hadn’t come down since great-grandparent days, but as its last descent had left no stone on stone—nor man, woman, child alive—anywhere people had once dwelled aboveground on the continent, the hero would go up before it came down again, and kill the kaiju maximus. They would go too: the hero’s weakness, and her strength.

In Dec. 2015 (Issue 59)

Fiction

The Lily and the Horn

by Catherynne M. Valente

War is a dinner party. My ladies and I have spent the dregs of summer making ready. We have hung garlands of pennyroyal and snowberries in the snug, familiar halls of Laburnum Castle, strained cheese as pure as ice for weeks in the caves and the kitchens, covered any gloomy stone with tapestries or stags’ heads with mistletoe braided through their antlers. We sent away south to the great markets of Mother-of-Millions for new silks and velvets and furs.

In Dec. 2015 (Issue 59)

Fiction

Ledge

by Austin Bunn

Mother, I have seen such marvels. Like the ocean aglow at night with a cold green fire and a fish with a child’s face and two fleshy whiskers. (No man would eat it. We blessed the creature and tossed it back.) I’ve seen a corpse with golden hair in a boat set adrift; his eyes were the slits on a newly born kitten.

In Dec. 2015 (Issue 59)

Fiction

The Glass Bottle Trick

by Nalo Hopkinson

The air was full of storms, but they refused to break. In the wicker rocking chair on the front verandah, Beatrice flexed her bare feet against the wooden slat floor, rocking slowly back and forth.

In Oct. 2014 (Issue 58)

Fiction

The Dryad’s Shoe

by T. Kingfisher

Once upon a time, in a land near and far away, there was a girl whose mother died when she was young.

In Oct. 2014 (Issue 58)

Fiction

Miss Carstairs and the Merman

by Delia Sherman

The night Miss Carstairs first saw the merman, there was a great storm along the Massachusetts coast. Down in the harbor town, old men sat in taverns drinking hot rum and cocking their ears at the wind whining and whistling in the chimneys.

In Oct. 2014 (Issue 58)