PUBLISHED FICTION

The other side of the sea - kaleidotrope - 4/12023

They trapped the ghost together, stepfather and stepdaughter, in the corner of the warehouse. Prodding it along with puissant whisper-chants, they herded it into the ghostlamp trap they’d arrayed in advance. Powered on, the circled bulbs radiated a fence of thanoptic energies that a spirit could not easily pass. Orf raised his free hand in a wordless signal. The gesture meant that Delpny could begin.

These hands only make last meals - Beneath ceaseless skies #357 - 6/2/2022

Petals dance along the Soljed Island Airstrip. Our bus drives alongside the yawning stretch of runway while we incoming Sisters watch saffron yetna petals frolic on the breeze and skate across the asphalt. Pollen wafts skyward, and so do our hopes for the battles to come. This is the bannerwind, the god-sent wind of glory from all the hero stories, filling our wings. After so many red-snowed winters, this is the blossoming of our victory.

Dogor - Hexagon #9 - 5/20/2022

The record will show me falling in love with Dogor the second he is placed into my arms. He is a bit shy of two months old, a stormcloud of spiky fur and puppy fat with a skeleton afloat somewhere inside. Watching him stretch and yawn in my lap breaks the knob clean off my faucet of maternal instinct. I don’t realize until I’ve gotten him home that I’ve already named him. Dogor, taken from the Yakut word for friend, same as his genesource had been designated.

Coyoteland - Asimov’s SF May/June 2022 - 4/19/2022

Vee doesn’t get why we don’t just dash across the border. The cut-off between New Dirt and the Monument Valley Republic is wide open, at least to her organic eyes. It’ll conserve resources, she argues, which is like-true. I explain that the MVR have trussed up their border in a landmine necklace, the kind that jump out of the ground and cut you in half. Even when you can’t see them, there are walls all over.

The Tesseract - Grimdark Magazine #27 - 7/1/21

A man must have a foundation, or so the Kaiser often said in his public speeches. For the common citizens of the Brotherland it ought to be a love—for him, their leader. If their foundation was solid, then the man that arose from it would be good. All agreed that their Kaiser’s logic was infallible, and few agreed more fervently than the Warden of Indefinite Corrections Outpost 1.

Armed with such stories, I roamed into the woods - Cast of Wonders #456 - 6/13/2021

Never trust a wolf’s promise, Atticus, my mother once told me. Remember the tale of Smiling John and Baron Icepelt. They lie between fangs, and their promises will only ever lead you into their belly. She was full of such morsels of wisdom. There was a fable for every lesson I should know. Not all pertained to talking wolves, but this was most relevant to my task. Remember how Smiling John escaped. If you should find a wolf at your heels, throw meat behind you. Wolves are clever but lazy creatures. They will stop for the easier meal.

The Hottest on the hotline - Dark matter magazine #2 - 3/1/2021

I was finishing up with a promising call when Judith came on to the intercom to announce that we had just broken our jumpslip goal for November, and tomorrow there would be an assortment of donuts available. There were cheers from all corners of the office. Nobody had to guess who’d put us over the top. The man of this and every hour was already strutting towards the boss’s office to claim his prize.

Cleaning Up After The Blackout Boys - Beneath ceaseless skies - 2/28/2021

Posters were going up all along Beetlebrass Street that morning. Some enterprising sergeant had put the city’s street children to work, paying them perhaps in haepennies to dash along its undulating cobblestones and paste writs of requisition across every storefront. Ustuus Creeg stopped to retrieve a loose one before the wind took it. Save the last bite for Private Cly it read, referencing the bashful soldier shown accepting a slice of pie from a pretty girl.

The song of the cicadas underground - The Dread Machine - 1/18/2021

The summer glued Maeve’s T-shirt to her freckle-speckled shoulders. It ran in stinging rivulets over her eye, trickled through her bra-strap and chafed. She paused beneath a fruiting rowan to take a lukewarm swig from her canteen, aware that it was only giving her more to sweat out. Ireland is the home you’ve never seen, her mother often said, but if that was true, she should have told Ireland. By Sunday, Maeve would have reams of dead skin peeling off her back like gauzy pixie wings.

This hard world of unwanted beauty - analog november/december 2020 - 10/22/2020

From space, Sheen was a low-hanging peach. Earth-sized, nacreous with atmosphere, balanced precariously upon the Goldilocks Zone where life was free to fractalize wildly. The planet nestled comfortably against the pillow of its sun, a round, pink, belly gravid with possibilities. This could be a new home, the crew agreed, when surface scans told tales of oceans and oxygen. A new Earth to add to our interstellar horde.

Their Heads All come off - Dream of shadows - 09/14/2020

Nora didn’t want to come here. Her boyfriend, Derrick, he’s the Wambaugh World maniac. Collects the pins and everything. Knows the Loony Luau songs by heart. Nora, on the other hand, had avoided the place like it was a tropical Chernobyl. But Derrick, he pleaded for months until she finally broke down. What could she say? She loved the guy. She told herself she could grin and bear it.

Devilish Calliope And the ungrooviest apocalypse - metaphorosis - 08/14/2020

I’d just worked the handcuffs loose when my phone started vibrating in my pocket. Even hanging by my ankles above impending doom, I knew I’d be in real shit if I didn’t pick up. I made a sort of cup out of my hand and pressed the phone to my ear. “This is Devilish urgently speaking.”

Big Brother - Pseudopod #716 - 08/07/2020

I was seven when I first met my big brother. It was five minutes after school let out, and Jason Bigmore and his fourth-grade friends had caught me before I could make it out of school grounds. This was a game we played most every day—sometimes I won, but this time around, two of them held me down by the arms while Jason smushed my face into the black dirt beneath the dead old oak tree out by the baseball diamond.

The Alternate Appeal Of a JElly Fox - The colored LEns #36 - 07/09/2020

I was midway through a series of concept sketches when Chuchuko popped out of my drafting table with a high-pitched dojyan. “Ohayōgozai-nezu, Otsuji Yuko!” chirped the RariJump mascot. “You have two guests waiting in the president’s office. Your presence is requested immediately! Otsukaresama deshita!” With that, the hot pink mouse swan-dove back into my table, rippling my sketches like reflections on water.

Its mouth a blizzard, its belly all of winter - Tales to terrify #440 - 07/03/2020

It’s a long moment before the light finally clicks. Harvey can’t take his eyes off the car because he has no idea what to call the thing. For a tow-truck driver on the job ten years, that’s an unsettling first. It looks kind of like an old Ford F-100, but no, that can’t be right--the headlights are set too close together—the eyes of a predator, not a grazer.

Samson Opens His Eye - Hexagon #1 - 06/01/2020

Power crackles in a malignant heaven. Lightning flashes, strikes metal, the utmost nail of a titanium hand protruding from the earth. Shedding momentum with each sliver of a second, it gutters down a stair of servos and wires into the earth, where worms ride robotic skeletons like reef-smashed ships, then at last between the slats in a steel ribcage. A bone-cold battery snaps up that last, dim volt, and warms.

Samson comes alive.

Pax Mongolica- Asimov’s Science Fiction - May/June 2020 Issue

Anubis’s eyes are playbear eyes. Button-brown and just as deep. There are fleas in the fur around them; I zoom in with my camera to watch them map the god in lines of red bites. I snap a picture and those eyes capture me in their mud. I wave at him from the other side of the bars. 

Five Days to the dragonhaul - Heroic Fantasy Quarterly - 02/02/20

As soon as my companion and I stepped out of the train I was smothered by a desert-like cold, the subcontinent of Thoreal telling me with no maundering that it did not want me here. Like all those who still lived in this lonely place, I did not listen. Like all those, for better or worse.

The debt I sought was here somewhere, in someone’s pockets.

The MEat Reigns  - The Horror Tree - 04/21/2019

Sir, my mission was to gather information, and I’m telling you, this is the information. No, don’t take my word for it, I brought plenty of footage. Not that it matters to me anymore. And bring more of that chicken, would you? God that’s good.

The Color of my home is red like an apple  - Metaphorosis - 03/29/19, Podcasted in StarShipSofa #611 - 11/06/2019, Reprinted in Metastellar - 04/30/2021

The color of my home is red like an apple. That is what God told the father of all my fathers, who told all their daughters, who told me. I do not know what an apple is, only that it is sweet and red like my home. My name is Anan. I have lived as long as nine suns, and I have always served God.

The Little g-d of Lodz - Metaphorosis - 11/02/18

On September 6, 1939, a Rabbi and Kabbalist named Yitzchok Falk sets fire to the Great Synagogue of Łódź. “The Germans will burn it anyway,” he tells his apprentice they drag a body out of the trunk of his car. “Let it burn without victims, and for a good reason.” The boy, Max, who holds the feet, only nods.

Chasing the Start - Strange Horizons - 04/09/18, reprinted in ESCAPE POD #752 + #753 - 10/1/20, 10/8/20

There, quick—the blue sky bleeds. A runner in red tumbles across it, unstoppable, the sun itself shattering against her armor. One leg outstretched, the other flung behind her, vaulting from one moment to the next, and between them suspended in flight for a small forever. You read the number that burns on her armor and you that this is not the end. She is proof that you are not finished yet, a promise chiseled into the diamond of history. She will always be here, always this strand.

You want to say something to her, but she is already gone.

Emperor All - Pseudopod #590 - 04/13/18

It is like X-ray vision. Like in the comic books from when he was ten. John blinks the rain out of his eyes, and suddenly he can see through the mugger, through his shellacking of wet muscle and scaffolding of bone to the chassis beneath, to the gears and flywheels that make him move and point the knife at him. John reaches through a yielding mist of sinew and makes key refurbishments, so that the knife is aimed at the mugger’s own throat. He unscrews the man’s skull and with an easy tinkering makes him the saddest he’s ever been, plugs bright blaring red thoughts into his head.

KEnopsia - Mirror Dance - 03/15/18

The assassin arrives in the city of Kenopsia in the body of a goat, one of a bleating herd driven down from the misty hills. His contact arrives early at the livestock market to purchase him for a sum of ten aterjots, to share his pipe and a knowing silence with the shepherd, who has taken an immeasurable risk for his sake, and to lead the assassin home at the end of a rope leash.