One “If I were the mayor, I’d have renamed this town long ago,” announces the man beside me, his chuckle wet with old hurts. I turn to read the scythe of his mouth, his milk-pale skin, his eyes like tatters of the noon sky. A foreigner, most definitely. Only outlanders court strangers in bus stands. […]
The Victorian House in Old Town The first house the real estate agent shows you will not work. It reminds you too much of the house you grew up in—old, dark, cluttered. A musty odor hangs in the air, the sort of smell that has become as much a part of the house as its […]
Opinions varied as to whether the village of Kille had been blessed by gods or cursed by demons. Every child born in the year of our prince’s ascension to the throne came into the world possessed of a supernatural and supremely useful limb. The blacksmith’s son had a pair of tongs for a left hand. […]
On land that was once peat and marsh, the Americans leave behind three asphalt highways into the sky. They leave behind snazzy call signs, late-night radio banter, and flight paths to Europe over the icy North Atlantic. They leave behind their wharfs and dry docks, hangars and fuel tanks. They leave behind the gymnasium, mess […]
Torben knows he has only one shot. The crossbow shakes in his grip. There is a single bolt and even if there were more he has not the strength to reload for the weapon belongs to Uther, the woodsman, who has left the boy to wait in the small, smelly blind set between the trunks […]
I. The Tale of Legs Love has many forms. Some forms inspire love, others hate. The witch was the first and only child of a well-to-do family of Boston Brahmins. The doctors told her mother that she would never bear children, and suggested her father content himself with political fundraisers and season tickets to the […]
They come for me when one of mine is to be dealt the cups. Where do they find me? I am in the gap between cresting waves. I am in the curl of a leaf. I drift where hearing muffles to a whine, soaked in darkness, riding the clogged shadows behind the beam of a […]
His coding renders the bedroom simple, familiar. An open window looks out over a lush wood that stretches as far as Daniel can see. He goes to the farthest of the three beds positioned against the wall. This first bed is firm to his dreambody, firm as a floor. The second is so soft he […]
I’m teaching earthworms how to dance ballet when the Grand Duke comes to steal me from Petrograd. Earthworms are slow learners, but we speak the same slippery languages. I’m instructing them on how to pas de deux when stone scrapes on stone and the lid lifts off my new home. The Grand Duke’s long eyelashes […]
When little Tommy Flowers was presented with a baby sister, he was disappointed to find that she was not a Meccano set. Her head lacked the simple geometry of strips and cogs and angle girders, and her fingers were innocent of gears. What was worse was the fact that she cried so—wailed, really, and nothing […]
