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In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents Kate Heartfield's "Limestone, Lye, and the Buzzing of Flies." You can read the full text of the story, and more about Kate, here.

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Anaea Lay lives in Chicago, Illinois where she writes, cooks, plays board games, reads too much, and questions the benevolence of the universe. Her work has appeared in many places including Apex, Penumbra, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and Nightmare. She lives online at anaealay.com.
Kate Heartfield is the author of historical fantasy novels including The Tapestry of Time (2024), The Valkyrie (2023), and the Sunday Times bestseller The Embroidered Book (2022). Her debut novel was rereleased as The Chatelaine in 2023. She has also written interactive fiction through Choice of Games, and Assassin’s Creed novels. She won the Aurora Award for Best Novel three times, and her fiction been shortlisted for the Aurora, Nebula, World Fantasy, Crawford, Locus, Sunburst, Scribe and Ottawa Book awards. She is currently the Writer in Residence for the University of Ottawa. A former newspaper journalist, Kate lives in Canada with her partner and son and a black cat named Minerva.
Current Issue
3 Aug 2026

I had a daughter and then I didn’t. I woke in the cradle of midnight, shivering from a supernatural cold. I thought at first that she was crying, that she had woken me, like so many midnights before. But there was silence all around me. I sat up on one arm and peered into her crib. She was gone. In her place was wrapped a sallow, horned little boy. His eyes blinked open. I look at him. He looked at me. Changeling, I thought. Then he started to scream. “Why weren’t the windows
The deads are punctual. They arrive exactly when there is nothing left to distract us.
survival is a fungus
In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, Amritesh Mukherjee and Abigail Nussbaum join Dan Hartland to talk about literary awards.
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