These stories feature individual audio recordings from stories in Issues 20–41. A full podcast feed is also available.
Professor Iris believes there is nowhere better to eat a sandwich than a folding chair set ten meters across the border where the world dissolves into epistemological blankness. […]
I’m mean and I need more. I don’t care what I disrupt. Desire pilots. My life goes on a sleepwalk. I feel sick with this love that won’t die. What they call mad love. […]
The boy wandered into the dense woods behind his house, following a solitary dirt path deep into the shadows, a song in his heart, as spring unfolded around him, daffodils violating the earth, underneath it all a musty rot. […]
You will remember that we trudged up the overgrown slope, away from the burned-out burger van and jagged remains of chalets and portacabins, and passed through what you later described as the loneliest playground in England. […]
Every morning iridescent screams echoed around the streets of the Willsea housing estate. No one really knew where the peacocks had come from. They’d been roaming the gardens of the Willsea longer than I’d been alive. […]
They were tied up together from the start: Dottie and that other place. That other place, that other eye. Charles didn’t like to think of it as a third eye, though that’s what it was. It wasn’t in his forehead, wasn’t in the center of his face at all. […]
No one knows why. Her friends, who were with her at the time, walking around in search of Halloween costumes to wear to a party that weekend, theorize that it had something to do with gym class... […]
Before the Raden Roro arrived at the Poison Court, portents warned of her coming. Comets spread across the sky in a lattice of rubies; courtiers slept badly and complained of feeling watched, and the Rajah fell ill and took to his bed. […]
We keep my sister in a corner of the sky. It isn’t true to say her bed is made of light and rainbows, and it isn’t fair to claim she is comfortable. Lightning chains her wrists, and I want to tell you that thunder is more afraid of her than she of it, she is that vicious. […]
What is the best way to survive a night amongst the singing hills, you ask? Why my child, this is simple—do not go. What? What’s that? When did the dreams begin? Why didn’t you come to me when the Shrouded One first spoke to you? […]
Tearing open plastic baggies with a hotel pen, Laden laces the running bath with fragrant stolen compounds. Gem-like powders and fungal dusts sift downward through steam. Dark versus light, a paisley sparkle snake-fight spins on the surface of the water as substances clash and combine. […]
The idea came to me late one afternoon as I pondered the naked cardboard at the heart of my last roll of toilet paper. Delivery would involve an unacceptable delay, and the thought of exposing myself to the outside world, for something as simple as toilet paper, filled me with a dread resolve. […]
I jostle for position at an imaginary start line that stretches thousands of miles wide. Hydrogen clouds speed past my hull in long striations as I try to maintain my position. The winds reach over nine hundred miles an hour, and the already scorching temperatures begin to rise. […]
[Scholar’s note: the following is taken from interviews held between the 15th and 18th days of the Month of Swallows, in the 1115th year since the Libraerie’s founding. The researcher has attempted to hew as closely as possible to the supplicant’s words, with some minor editing and condensation for clarity. […]
Once again, Harry cannot stop it from coming. Blackness spreads across his field of vision, thick and slow as treacle. Sleep has him—is toying with him. For a moment he resists, and then it takes him rushing under. […]
I heard him come, horse and hooves all, smelling of the war and blood, and knew he was home. I was sitting by the unoon, fire warming my feet, and he was trotting in across the old broken road, barren fields on either side. […]
Sometimes in the night, when the dogs stopped barking at the cars along Route 40, the house ceased settling, and the wind came to a rest in the branches of the old maple by the farmhouse, Rachel sensed them. […]
Yuan used to tell Wenjie about the head thief whod snip your head off with shears and replace it with someone else’s. That’s what happens to people who don’t use their heads properly: they get replaced. But where do the bad heads go? Wenjie asked. […]
It’s been twenty-three days since she lost her daughter. For twenty-three days, Mariska searched, trawling ruin and wreckage, sifting through bone and ash, picking apart carcass and corpse in case her daughter’s atoms […]
We weren’t going to torture the spy. But we did threaten to. And now he’s dead. Cyanide capsule. We weren’t fast enough to stop him. All we have to go on are the papers we found in his apartment in the cinquième arrondissement. We know from the dead spy’s documents that […]
Charlie is an orphan. The last known elephant disappeared from the world twenty years ago when she was eight. Loss of habitat, viral pandemic, human insatiability long since devoured the whale, the honeybee, the domestic chicken, but Charlie is especially conflicted […]
“Sorry about your dad.”
Liv’s voice slid down my neck like muddy water, the gravel in it catching at my skin. I didn’t want to look up but I could feel her standing there, could see the chipped black polish on her quick-bitten thumbnail from the corner of my eye. […]
The carnations are oversaturated. I’m in the shop, stocking dental floss and toothbrushes when I see them at the edge of my vision: a bright matte red. Like an apple in an illustrated book I once had. The drawing had no depth, just the outline of a perfectly symmetrical apple with one leaf coming off the stem and inside it, red. […]
Herewith, the results of our modeling… Tonight, we shall demonstrate that categories can be usurped by force for a most dramatic effect. Transitions are mundane: they occur all the time. They are also liminal: suffused with ambiguity, and hence opportunity. Think of this: […]
Bird-clawed and bony, we tread lightly in the shadows, accustomed to the dark. This night, it’s too late to turn back, to break the pattern I follow by rote. Donovan stands against a lichen-edged wall, uneven stones pressing into his back. I hold him, fingers forcing space between his ribs. […]
Till runs her fingers across the angry ridge of skin on her wrist, the latest mountain range to erupt from the fault lines of her veins. Even now the plate tectonics of her bones haven’t resettled, and the carpals grind against each other as she flexes the crust for her audience to see. […]
The doctor turned to watch the great baroque tower falter and sway. A single, skeletal digit, it stretched to brush the pale cheek of the broken moon above, shedding bits and battlements and synth as it grew. The moon was called Izanagi, and the planet it circled was called Izanami[…]
The jenkem pot lies on the floor between us, its tear-inducing fume of alcohol and excrement weighing like plague on the basement's dank air. A red-white crack of light cast by the cop car in the alley stabs through a ragged hole in the wall, illuminating particles of worse-than-dust, but neither I nor Mbesi stir from sprawled repose […]
The sea is rife with immortals and healers. Soft things with cells that never quiet, but keep dividing into pouches of seething organelles. They need never fear that their children will cart them off to a retirement home that smells of nectar and licorice. Much of the time, their children are themselves, cloned afresh […]
Hope is the thing with feet. Brother Jude and I scuffed ours along a cracked sidewalk. Basement holes yawned left and right, swallows flew south, and I leaned forward, hitching up my bedroll and hustling to keep up with Jude, a head taller and half-again wider, a born heavy-lifter […]
Violet woke up with the bruises. Outside, the sky had turned dark. A hushed grey filled with pinpricks of blue fire, and the world tipped forward, a great dome that would suffocate her if she breathed too deep. This was how it had always been […]
A yellow beak, the shape of a crescent moon, pricks through your abdomen, and you know it’s time. Everyone else knows it’s time too. The townspeople track your pregnancies, right down to the hour, so when you phone the paramedics, the woman who answers doesn't bother to ask the nature of your emergency […]
For the past five days, as the cruise ship Venusian languorously travelled the Mediterranean from Barcelona to Venera, the weather had been perfect: bright blue skies tempered by the occasional white cloud with not a hint of rain; never dipping below fifteen degrees centigrade at night, never going above twenty-five in the daytime; a steady breeze that carried the mesmerizing aroma of the sea. […]
His shame was exposed, the scar where a shell splinter had torn through his groin and ripped away his manhood. Albert no longer cared. He was counting the moments until he died. A deep sucking followed the crack of bone. The slurping of marrow, the fluid dripping from her jaws, the varied noise of her digestion. […]
Gerald Michael Leary flat out fainted when Cecilia Murphy lifted up her skirt and showed him her naked flesh. As usual, she hadn't worn any knickers, and the curls of her brown pubic hair writhed like tiny little snakes. It happened during a pub brawl, when he was about to lay one on Sam, Cecilia's brother, who'd been egging him on about his eejit hurling team. […]
The waters had gone stale; the salmon runs dwindled. When we got hungry we remembered what we had tried to forget: that whales were conjoined with humans. That we might speak. […]
Sal doesn’t plan to find the body. She doesn’t even mean to go out. Water’s fetched. Cabin’s swept. Dinner sits hot on the sideboard. In the stifling kitchen, Ma and George scrape gravy to their mouths without a word. […]
In the light of the full moon, her vision enhanced by vermilion, Dematria watched in horror as Hecate’s changeling centurions terrorized her beloved goddess-city, Venera. The Romans had so far ignored the archipelago; in return the city-state fed the Roman capital with a steady supply of underpriced vermilion spice […]
When the first snow falls, it burns. The other women dance in the flurry without me, beneath a moon clouded by giants’ breath. Snowflakes spin into their open mouths and dust their outstretched hands […]
In twenty years, Lynd had never really looked at the book. It had come into his possession as a parasite — an unwanted hanger-on that had happened to be grouped with the books he really wanted at an auction. […]
Every one of the lights of Budapest is an eye, and every one of those eyes is staring at him. He turns his own eyes to the river, ribbon of darkness cutting through a sea of flying photons, but even the river is not dark. […]
Sarai rubbed the smooth skin of the horse’s neck while the alien ship spiraled across the vast desert night sky. “Hush,” she whispered, more to herself than the summoned animal, as the trail of fire and smoke arced above the scrub and cacti […]
Beneath the rusted hulk of a station wagon, Tabitha crawled toward the body. She had never liked Gordon, but he'd been brave. The last of the brave ones. She pulled herself into the open, unbearably exposed. […]
Mar 26, 2024 — Issue 41 is live today. Read stories 1 & 2 online, buy the full ebook, or subscribe to Patreon.
Dec 5, 2023 — The new print anthology Volume IX is here. Order now!
Nov 14, 2023 — Issue 40 is live today. Read stories 1 & 2 online, buy the full ebook, or subscribe to Patreon.
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