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1500 words
The worst of it is the noise of them. The shouting, the scuff of sandal on stone, the scrape of bronze on the wood of the temple door. Hot summers and lean rains have bred discontent—crops dead in the field,…
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1500 words
It’s two in the morning and Ivan Ivanovich won’t stop throwing himself against the side of my car. I wake to the insistent blare of the Altima’s impact alarm. The first time he did this, I shoved my dislodged foam…
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1000 words
I. Each day in the Hall of Lights may be divided into four hours. The days are identical, or seem so. Hour one. Before daybreak, the limner emerges from her alcove. She dips her brass candlelighter into the eternal brazier…
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4100 words
The partially petrified remains of the last living vampire lie preserved on an island at the top of the world, under the watchful eye of the midnight sun. Little is known about her save what survives through legend. Stories passed…
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4200 words
“Your stitches are wrong.” I stared down at the lure fish in my lap, gutted from throat to anus and half-sewn up again. Jutting from its mouth, the neck of a wine bottle emerged like a bright blue parasite nestled…
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4200 words
April 2007. A child comes back from the dead. A standstill operation, an hour past reasonable expiration, a minor thaumatological miracle. Alice is the resident assisting, and when Elise finds her, pulls her close, minutes in the aftermath, she looks…
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2100 words
The copper foundries and noodle factories have vanished. The dockyards have been torn down; now the Kwun Tong waterfront shimmers with glass-fronted blockchain startups and AI treasuries. The Horsepaint Chemicals Building and its conurbation of dripping air conditioners and tinted…
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1500 words
There’s a monster on the loose, but the final girl is standing alone in the kitchen. Her small hands are sliding under the skin of a raw chicken. She’s placing garlic cloves one by one, and the pads of her…
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3000 words
There is illness in the wind and unease in the soil. It has been here since 1904 when the first splotch of chestnut blight showed in our hills; it will be here until the last American Chestnut is dead. The…
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2100 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…