As children grow into adulthood, it is often hard to know who is the elder until you are told. With Akpan and Udo, anyone could tell at first sight, on first hearing, who was Akpan, the first son in every way, and who was Udo, the one who came after.

Programs such as Deep Blue (b. 1995) and NeuraMind (b. 2015) had been capable of defeating the most skilled humans in strategy games since the early twenty-first century. However, the goal of second-generation programs such as Albion was not to defeat human players, but to imitate them.

In the storybooks, a maiden will recline in plush, green fields. A doe, big-eyed and beautiful, will press the tip of her horn to the maiden’s forehead before lying in the grass and placing her head into the maiden’s lap.

I inherited the molting, which my mother will deny; she’ll insist it’s a thing only women do, each heartbreak withering from the body like a petal.

We are all harmonic oscillators / Sloshing around in watery bags of salt,

This variation on the elixir of life pairs the flavour of roasted roc with the medicinal potency of the philosopher’s stone. But buyer beware: this dish isn’t for everyone.

I want to sink my faces into the hot spring and see which one comes out breathing. I’m hoping it’s mine.

the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—

That was Father—a storm in a drought, a comet in the night. Acting first, thinking later, carried on not by foresight, but on luck’s slippery feet. And so we were not as surprised as we should have been when, one warm night in our tenth year on the mountain, Father showed us the flying machine.

That cis-tem is now only a speck.