You saw her for the first time at your front door, like she wanted to sell you something or convert you. She had light hair and dark eyes, and she was wearing fatigues, which was the only way you knew that your panicked prayers of the last few minutes had not come true. “Don’t freak out,” she said. “I’m you. From—uh, let’s just say from the future. Can I come inside?”
This story is about fridge drawings and photo albums and vinyl records and video game consoles and sewing machines and reading nooks and koi ponds and board games and polished rocks
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Kat Kourbeti reads Premee Mohamed's Hugo Finalist Novelette 'By Salt, By Sea, By Light of Stars'.
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The formula for how to end the world got published the same day I married the girl who used to bully me in middle school. We found out about it the morning after, on the first day of our honeymoon in Cozumel. I got out of the shower in our small bungalow and Minju was sitting in bed, staring at her laptop.
Gladys was approaching her first heat when she shed her fur and lost her tail. The transformation was unintentional, and unwanted. When she awoke in her new form, smelling of skin and sweat, she wailed for her pack in a voice that scraped her throat raw.
The customer shakes me until his disc drops into the bin below. Please take your receipt, sir. He kicks me in the side and says, “Thanks for nothing, you piece of shit vending machine!”
Daniel’s birthday happened to be an F day in Brooklyn. The soldiers at FEMA’s Navy Yard outpost would let Morgan Foster through today. They would let her charge a power bank for a few minutes.
On a Tuesday night, I hang the lamp on the hook beside my front door. When I light it, the oceanic darkness that surrounds the house steps back, away from my hands, away from my face. For a moment, I stand on my porch and look down the long driveway, and I guess what creatures might exist out there, circling around me, living invisibly.
