We deposit the hip shards in the tin can my mother reserves for these incidents. It is a recycled red bean paste can. If you lean in and sniff, you can still smell the red bean paste. There is a larger tomato sauce can for larger bones. That can has been around longer and the tomato sauce smell has washed out. I have considered buying my mother a special bone bag, a medical-grade one lined with regrowth powder to speed up the regeneration process, but I know it would likely sit, unused, in the bottom drawer of her nightstand where she keeps all the gifts she receives and promptly forgets.
Leah is queer community. Leah is expanding and expansive. Leah wants to fall in love with everyone still alive in this room and beyond and be their bottom for a night, just one night, though she wouldn’t say no to more than one. Leah wants to love the queers she’s never going to fall in love with because they’re not her type. Leah wants to love and bottom. Leah just wants America to leave her the fuck alone.
When I started at Optionality, they put me in a cramped condo with three other newish employees, one of whom insisted on assigning each roommate a different burner on the stove. I was the last to move in, so I got the smallest burner, which means I no longer make pasta.
Going through the archives of Strange Horizons for this special column has been a bit like exploring a treasure chamber. I’ve picked fifty stories. I could have picked hundreds. Meaning: I left a lot of wonderful fiction off the list. But the good thing is that the archives are easy to access for anyone. Just enter the year you want to look at, hit GO and there you are: twenty-five years of outstanding short fiction, as well as poetry and non-fiction, at your fingertips.
When was the first time you realized you were this beautiful? yells the stylist and I look into the eye of the camera and think of diamonds on the surface of a dark green sea, songs of the deep in my ear, the lick of salt on my lips.
You have only ever bought mombar frozen before, pre-cooked and pre-stuffed and ready to throw into the—blasphemy of blasphemies—air fryer, and this is why: the cleaning alone takes an age.
The second time she brings you back, you’re relieved to find yourself speechless. It seemed like it might be easier to just start again, she says, the sceptre in her hand tinged red at the top.
This exhibition presents pieces from our permanent collection that are rarely displayed together, in order to illuminate the life of one of our most celebrated early rulers, Nizararuddin Zafer Abu Hassan Mohammed, better known as Prince Nizar.
The taxidermy head scared her last night when she checked into her presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Johannesburg. Mai Alfred makes a mental note to tell the staff to take it out tomorrow.
The first time Theo saw the Henrietta up close—dead of night, moon hanging low like ripe fruit behind the foremast, shrouded in fog—well, he felt something. Something fear-shaped but with a finer point.
Obee Carter. The man who ends the world, and the man who saves it. He wears the name on his uniform, though no one reads it. There’s a badge on his uniform, at the place that once held his heart.
When I met the young Mr Turing, I had not yet ascended as Autumn’s King. Nowadays it has become fashionable for the sons and daughters of the lesser fey gentry to improve their position in the shifting hierarchy of the Courts by virtue of intrigue, scandal, and the naked blade; but in those times, it was the custom to advance one’s position through the collection of human bagatelles.
“Well,” replied Nikki and bit down on a roasted cherry tomato. “I’m working on this one project. But it’s not for the faint of heart.”
“Ominous,” Oliver said. “About what?”
“It’s a series of interviews. About people who cohabit with their ghosts.”
The house on Hunchback’s Hill—perched haphazardly atop a steep incline at the end of the last street in town—is the farthest thing from an optimal filming location. But director Fotiou wanted au-then-tic-i-ty. So he got the murder house, and the final girl. Hunchback’s Hollow, and Valentini. Simple as a goddamn nursery rhyme.
No one wants to see dead animals. They’re a reminder of the things that matter but not enough. The silent beaks, the red-stained feathers, are accusation—You chose this—and they are right.
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'.
Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
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.
“Please also be reminded of the following prohibited items,” the clerk explains kindly. “No chemicals or toxic substances. No fluids over 1,000 milliliters. No lithium batteries, laptop chargers and power banks, no love, no light, no family, no safety.”
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.”
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.
“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.”
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.
