Size / / /

A questing knight inadvertently resurrects a giant
Who terrorizes the people and covers the land in despair.
The knight flees the kingdom in shame and lives the rest of his days in obscurity
As a humble tailor.

A prince kisses his wife goodnight.
In the morning, she doesn't waken.
He leaves her body in the care of seven discreet morticians
Who know the land's deep places, where secrets keep.
When the men are away gathering supplies, a crone steals to the princess's bedside,
Forces her gnarled fingers into the maiden's mouth,
And plucks the unswallowed kiss from her throat.
The crone weeps as the princess coughs herself alive.
The tears uncrease her face like a hand over a bedsheet,
And the princess knows the face of her mother.
"I never stopped looking for you," says the queen.

A girl steals her brothers' shirts and unravels them into a pile of nettles.
The boys turn into swans and fly away.

A sinister woodsman sews a young girl and her grandmother
Into the belly of a sleeping wolf.
The wolf wakes in a fever, retching until he expels the captives from his bruised innards.
Apologies are shared.
The grandmother leads them back to her cottage
Where the three heal up with a fine lunch and a rest by the fireside.
When the shadows grow long,
The wolf walks the girl back to her parents' house,
Mindful of the terrors that lurk in the forest.




Caitlin O'Brien mostly grew up on an island in Alaska; because of this, she trusts bears more than people. She's a self-taught lockpick and the champion of an un-aired Australian-American game show pilot. She lives in Boston (for now).
Current Issue
25 Mar 2024

Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
to work under the / moon is to build a formidable tomorrow
Significantly, neither the humans nor the tigers are shown to possess an original or authoritative version of the narrative, and it is only in such collaborative and dialogic encounters that human-animal relations and entanglements can be dis-entangled.
By: Sammy Lê
Art by: Kim Hu
the train ascends a bridge over endless rows of houses made of beams from decommissioned factories, stripped hulls, salvaged engines—
Issue 18 Mar 2024
Strange Horizons
Issue 11 Mar 2024
Issue 4 Mar 2024
Issue 26 Feb 2024
Issue 19 Feb 2024
Issue 12 Feb 2024
Issue 5 Feb 2024
Issue 29 Jan 2024
Issue 15 Jan 2024
Issue 8 Jan 2024
Load More
%d bloggers like this: