The tweet was something about women, something about the gays, something bad. And it was just… it was enough. I looked at my inbox, I looked at my dying desk plant, and I just… Screamed. It started small, just a punctuated “Ah!” My desk neighbor, separated from me by the seam of our white standing…Continue Reading “The Scream”
Cassius opens the apartment door and a body slumps inside. Its head hits the wooden boards with a numbing thud. A kid in his twenties. Legs splayed out in the hallway. The rubber soles of his sneakers are still white. New. His tank top is white, too, but graffitied with the red of his own…Continue Reading “A Wave That Breaks”
The girl holds the beam, cupped carefully in her two small hands. She knows it will be useful later, like a remote control for happiness. But what to do with it until then? She steps through the doorway, enters a small palace of pink oh my god so much pink where white lacquered ghosts watch…Continue Reading “Sun Girl”
The girl was four when she learned not everybody’s dreams came true. It was fortunate that she hadn’t been plagued with night terrors, that her mother was the kind to keep close watch on the TV, that she was an only child without siblings to fill her mind with monsters. She mostly dreamed of puppies…Continue Reading “Dreams of the Jurassic”
A boy strolls on a beach on an overcast day. His parents are far off, lounging by their umbrella with paperbacks. He sees something at the edge of the water where the sand is damp. It’s a gently glowing sphere about the size of a softball. He picks it up and he can’t tell if…Continue Reading “Night Maid”
The first time Sysa disappeared, she was three years old. It was nobody’s fault. Everyone who should have been watching her did watch her, but somehow she managed to find her way to the edge of the tide, and then she was gone. While everyone was screaming and running through the water, calling for her,…Continue Reading “She Calls”
Joanne gave her the address, printed on a transparent business card engraved with Roman numerals on the border. In fact, Beatrice could only read the address when she held it up to the light of the sun, and the street number and name appeared between the symbols. “You have to check this place out,” Joanne…Continue Reading “The Time Shop”
Natalie asks him for a gift before he leaves, a part of himself to remember him by. Mathieu pauses in the doorway, considering this wild-haired girl lying on her stomach in bed, the sheets tangled up around her waist. Then he takes off his nose and hands it to her. She is taken back by…Continue Reading “Good As New”
At the tender age of Five Hundred, Alter Barbaken learned about death. It began with a cough and a bloodied tissue, which he found fascinating until the coughing didn’t stop and the blood kept on coming. Soon he lay on the ground, shaky and sweaty, but not afraid for his life–he didn’t think one could…Continue Reading “A Fragile Thing”
Two years, nine months and fourteen days to the day we graduated, Yee Han leaves home, climbs a tree in McRitchie reservoir and never comes back down. At first, his family thinks this is just a phase. After all, didn’t he hate his work, hate jamming his body into random spaces and strangers on the…Continue Reading “Canopy”