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700 WORDS
This was before she knew about magic. Before she was pissed off because her mother told her she couldn’t attend Jenny Mulvey’s sixteenth birthday party. (To be fair, she’d come home stinking of vodka the last time.) It was before…
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600 WORDS
She is stood under the hawthorn tree at the southernmost corner of the farm. And she is resting: rest the likes of which her ancestors could never have imagined, but also refused not to. And she has come to remember…
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4,000 WORDS
In your last life, you were a tiger princess. You lived by the water and you adorned yourself in gold circlets; you chimed when you walked, like birdsong, like blessing, lotus flowers threaded in your long, raven-down hair. A snarl-handed…
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3,700 WORDS
Pennerel House crawled with spiders. Any errant shadow was almost certainly an arachnid. They scurried along the cracking baseboards and made hopeful burrows in fallen curtains. They dropped onto your face as you slept and exploded from drawers when you…
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4,000 WORDS
As I awake one morning from difficult dreams, I find that my husband has transformed into two people. One Ezequiel lies beside me in our bed, as always, half-sitting up and typing furiously on his laptop. The other Ezequiel sits…
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4,000 WORDS
“I didn’t think the portal would choose you.” This is the first thing Ma tells you when she finds you standing in your childhood bedroom, unable to remember how you got there. You are grasping for a nonexistent blade at…
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4,000 WORDS
You’re only this young and usable once, so you have to make the most of it. At least that’s what your perfect, omniscient parents say. As the founders of CL-1, Neo-Shanghai’s largest genetic engineering company, they’ve already calculated the trajectory:…
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1,700 WORDS
In the clutches of Winter, I eat a dried fig for dinner and dream of the woman I left on the bridge. At the threshold where Xīngpíng ends and the road begins, she once clasped my hands and told me,…
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2,100 WORDS
We stopped burying bodies when the bogs spread centuries ago. Instead, we submerged family into our mire, mingling great-great-grandmamas with grandbabies that died too young. It was not dirt but it was still our land. Land we had to adapt…
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1,000 WORDS
You look up from your book, wearing a smile you’ve reserved for me. “Tired of studying?” I take a seat beside you and sprawl out, my back against the table. “I hardly see the point.” The top of the library…