After visits from the Whale, when the Lifemaker retreats to his chambers, Lúcio swims to the aquarium by the window, where he and Olga watch the fish fly by.

Despite the barriers between different cetacean languages, our song crosses the vastness of the oceans, traveling in sync with the currents and even traversing great expanses of land. Our singing conveys the concept of “hope,” which is how we define the wait until our home feels safe again.

Every few years, my face erupts in a frenzy of eyes.

Now that I am back in our homelands, I am haunted. I dream of faces hovering over me, taking my blood. They suck at my veins like infants at a bottle.

I watch the salmon and the dog dance together, alive and dead and still kicking, kicking, kicking.

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.

After my mother died, Dr. Rostrow called to ask me if I wanted anything out of her brain.

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.