Size / / /

After the divorce, my wife said she didn't know who or what she wanted to be. When I heard that she had become a toaster, I felt vindicated. A toaster! Was that all she could be without me? And she wasn't even good at it. She could only do two slices at a time, and they came out charred on one side and white on the other. Obviously, she was the one with inadequacies.

True, I was unemployed myself. But a toaster! I would never fall as low as that. I would take a job as a human being, or I'd stay on the dole.

Later, she worked as a hotel washing machine, then as a high-capacity dryer until she was demoted. She became one of those laundry hampers with four wheels and a canvas hopper. Finally, she lost even that job.

Soon, however, I felt less and less like gloating. I still couldn't find any work at all, no matter how I tried.

I next saw her while on my way to an interview for janitorial work at a hospital. She was in the parking lot, backed into a reserved space. And she was stunning.

There was no mistaking her, even with all the changes. She had white sidewalls. Her body was lustrous teal everywhere but on the inward curving white panels that streaked back from her front wheels. Her chrome sparkled in the sun.

I just stood there in front of her, searching for something to say until a man came out of the hospital and walked up to her.

"Beautiful, isn't she?" he said, fitting a key into her door. "I restored her," he said, "built her up a little from her original 283 small block, gave her some juice. Dual-Carter-carbed. You know cars? Want to see under the hood?"

His generosity made me uncomfortable. "No."

I hadn't noticed the plates until now. They said "MD." He was a doctor.

"She's the finest 1960 Corvette on the road," he said, patting her roof affectionately.

She was older than that. But damn if she didn't look 1960.

"She used to be mine."

"What?"

"I said she used to be mine."

"I know something about her history," he said, trying to keep a smile in place.

"She was mine. She once belonged to me."

All the friendliness went out of his face. "I don't think so." He opened her door.

"Sure, just because she's gleaming now, you don't think she could ever have been attached to someone like me!"

"I said nothing of the sort." He got in and closed the door. He started her. The way her engine hummed, I could tell she was getting only the best of everything.

He revved her, but he couldn't drive off. I was in the way. I glared. He glared.

I looked from his face to the checkered flags of her hood ornament. Those little flags did something to me. This was a side of her I had never imagined.

He rolled down the window. "Get out of the way," he said.

Oh, the sun on her satiny finish. The gleam of her front grille. . . .

He raced her engine again, menacingly now, then started to pull forward. He might have run me over, but she stalled out. She still cared. But it was too late for reconciliations.

He started her again. I felt all the regret that I had concealed with my gloating. Too late. Too late to change anything.

I stepped out of their way and let them drive off together. I went in for my interview, and I got the job.

I am . . . a mop.


Bruce Holland Rogers lives in Eugene, Oregon, and writes genre fiction and literary fiction. His stories have won two Nebula Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Rogers recently edited an anthology, Bedtime Stories to Darken Your Dreams (IFD Publishing). He has two short story collections due out this year: Wind Over Heaven (Wildside Press) and Flaming Arrows (IFD Publishing). For more about him, see his Web site; for more about his work, see the Panisphere site.



Bruce Holland Rogers wrote and translated very short stories from the 1980s, before the term “flash fiction” had been invented, into the 2010s. In all, he produced over 300 such stories, sharing many of them by email subscription through the now-moribund web site shortshortshort.com. His fiction has been honored with two World Fantasy Awards, two Nebula Awards, a Stoker, a Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His collection, The Keyhole Opera, has been translated into French and Portuguese, and individual stories have been translated into over twenty languages. He has stopped writing fiction and doesn't know if he will take it up again. He spends his time trying to get more French, Spanish, and Japanese into an aging brain.
Current Issue
20 Jan 2025

Strange Horizons
Surveillance technology looms large in our lives, sold to us as tools for safety, justice, and convenience. Yet the reality is far more sinister.
Vans and campers, sizeable mobile cabins and some that were barely more than tents. Each one a home, a storefront, and a statement of identity, from the colorful translucent windows and domes that harvested sunlight to the stickers and graffiti that attested to places travelled.
“Don’t ask me how, but I found out this big account on queer Threads is some kind of super Watcher.” Charlii spins her laptop around so the others can see. “They call them Keepers, and they watch the people that the state’s apparatus has tagged as terrorists. Not just the ones the FBI created. The big fish. And people like us, I guess.”
It's 9 a.m., she still hasn't eaten her portion of tofu eggs with seaweed, and Amaia wants the day to be over.
Nadjea always knew her last night in the Clave would get wild: they’re the only sector of the city where drink and drug and dance are unrestricted, and since one of the main Clavist tenets is the pursuit of corporeal joy in all its forms, they’ve more or less refined partying to an art.
surviving / while black / is our superpower / we lift broken down / cars / over our heads / and that’s just a tuesday
After a few deft movements, she tossed the cube back to James, perfectly solved. “We’re going to break into the Seattle Police Department’s database. And you’re going to help me do it.”
there are things that are toxic to a bo(d)y
By: Michelle Kulwicki
Podcast read by: Emmie Christie
  In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Michelle Kulwicki's 'Bee Season' read by Emmie Christie Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify.
Friday: Revising Reality: How Sequels, Remakes, Retcons, and Rejects Explain The World by Chris Gavaler and Nat Goldberg 
Issue 13 Jan 2025
Issue 6 Jan 2025
By: Samantha Murray
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Issue 23 Dec 2024
Issue 16 Dec 2024
Issue 9 Dec 2024
Issue 2 Dec 2024
By: E.M. Linden
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Issue 25 Nov 2024
Issue 18 Nov 2024
By: Susannah Rand
Podcast read by: Claire McNerney
Issue 11 Nov 2024
Issue 4 Nov 2024
Load More