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 […]
It was when the child was dying that the woman who spoke to spirits came. It is always when children are dying that women who speak to spirits come. They don’t knock. They scratch at the door with their ragged nails, or whistle a three-note tune outside the window. Any other children are immediately sent […]
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 […]
The vendors on Angler Row sell the best fish this side of the Evergloom. The other squids might tell you to go over to Benthos Plaza, but there’s two things wrong with that: one, that place only sells meat that’s been dead for a month, and two, it’s on the opposite side of the Grand […]
While the men were stitching the mourning-flags, the leading women of the village gathered on the hillside, the same hillside where Arrani had always sworn that in summer nip-berries could be found growing in the shade of the sliver-barked whistling trees. None of the other women had ever discovered any nip-berries there, but each summer […]
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 […]
