Fiction

The first time I was called a nigger we were orbiting a planet of alien hostiles on a tactical base called Charity. Our last campaign had been successful—we’d mowed down our enemies, trampled their armored corpses, captured their flag. The carbine pulse rifle was a song bird in my hands. “Good game,” I said, scanning…

There are still bars—open and around, hallelujah. None of them serve food. Not since the Celestial Phenomenatic rains, flooding, ruin. Drinks only. But no garnish. No lemons, limes, olives, cherries. Garnish is extinct. Because, although it is neither filling nor delicious, it’s food. Nine&ahalf buys them two beers and a cup of coffee—black, no milk…

Now that Mama was sick it was just him and the old man running the house and things weren’t going too well. It wasn’t just that the dishes were unwashed and his clothes were always dirty; it was as if a dark fog had descended on them all ever since Mama had given birth to…

Dr. Burton was having a no-good, very bad day, and I was more than a little proud of my role in it. I watched from the eaves of her beamed kitchen as she burned her coffee and then her tongue, cussing a little, and then as her boys—all five of them—fought her requests, demands, and…

I’m not saying you were wrong in Sainte-Chapelle when you said what you said about third-class relics while our blind guide named a crown of thorns we couldn’t see because it wasn’t where he pointed or wasn’t there at all. You said veneration was not worship as the city darkened and I stepped in a…

I tried not to yawn as Solomon led me room to room. The corridors of his great house stretched away in rows of golden doors encrusted in gems or jewels or shimmering shells from liquid-green scarabs. He offered to open each one for me but how many steps can a foot really take? He showed…

Bathing or being bathed, she is eternally unclothed. In paintings and woodcuts, in galleries near and far, the masters of Europe have left her like that, as if they saw no other way. Such is the weary weight of history, telling again the already told, nakedness begetting nakedness. She couldn’t have guessed, at eventide, that…

Sarasu is the first to see the birds. By the time the sun has crawled halfway to its peak, she has already been up for hours, gathering what little fodder she can find on the arid slopes. As she trudges back toward the cowshed, balancing a bundle of withered grass on her shoulders, she feels…

Karine had to admit that her friendship with Stephen was bizarre. Not just bizarre. Creepy? Maybe it was creepy. He was a child, really. And she was…how old was she again? These days she had trouble keeping hold of certain facts. Anyway, she was old. Much older than Stephen. But he’s my friend, she thought…