It wasn’t much good, the thing that was him. No wonder he was screwed up now. No wonder He’d unmade him, rolled him out like dough and balled him up again.
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Category: Fantasy
The Universal Absorbent by Phoebe Reeves
The City found itself with a problem: what began as a natural hole in the earth where Its citizens had thrown away their evil had helter-skeltered into a voracious toxic Abyss. The City thought it could wash it away by pouring water down the hole, but that only made the evil float to the surface. It had heard about an Angel that was sent to another place to deal with the problem of evil and that that place had finally (and stupidly, so thought The City proudly as It would never be as stupid as that Other Place) destroyed The Angel and that microscopic pieces of The Angel drifted about the land wreaking vengeance.
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Birds by Sarah Macallister
We all worried. Ever since he came back from Glasgow, Uncle Neil seemed different, jauntier. And it wasn’t just the new hat. He strutted around the village, singing in an uneven baritone. Whistling. To be honest, we thought he’d bagged someone and felt sorry for Auntie Sandy. But it wasn’t that.
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Project Nüwa by Wanying Zhang
Palms slick with sweat, Daji paced around her penthouse waiting for Goddess Nüwa’s arrival. She hiccupped and noticed writhing shadows behind her. She drew in her eight fox tails that had kept slipping from her human figure since she summoned Nüwa about an hour ago. Today marked the hundredth anniversary of the creation of Project Nüwa. She sipped from a glass of a thousand-year-old baijiu and cast her gaze over Beijing’s city lights, a dense kaleidoscope of blue and white LEDs juxtaposed against flashing neon billboards. The World Trade Center, a sleek curtain of glass walls reaching upward, stood as a commanding presence against the city’s skyline. Rain splattered against the floor-to-ceiling windows, blurring the urban sprawl below into an impressionist painting.
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It Had to Be Ewe by Leila Allison
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Beezer and Barkevious claim to be brothers. That’s unlikely in the physical sense–Beezer is a British Bulldog and Barkevious is a Scottish Terrier; but nowadays you can be anything you want to be until you try to buy life insurance. Then again, since they are talking Dogs who live in the make-believe realm of Saragun Springs, such a claim remains possible. Regardless, the boys were wandering the realm’s countryside sniffing for rancid stuff to roll in when they saw Conrad the Blackface Ram headed their way.
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Flesh and Feathers by L.S. Engler
The fog was descending, creeping in from the mountains and cloaking the lake in a heavy mist. Pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders, Birgitte looked up to the darkening sky and smiled. “We should probably be heading in soon,” she said, though her voice held no hint of actually believing it. “It will be night before we know it, and there’s sure to be some talk or trouble if we’re too late.”
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Carrot Season by Alex Maciockay
It was, by all means, a wonderful and perfectly lovely Tuesday. The sun was shining, the flowers were in bloom, and Edmund was running out of time.
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Dissecting Angels by Mason Koa
When hunting season started, my brother Isaac and I brought out the Remington and shot down angels by the creek. We’d descend the hill at dawn and lug back the carcasses in the evening. We bottled the blood for chapels and sold the bones for change to research teams on the black market. Whatever was left, Isaac kept in jars under his bed.
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The Ghosts of Their Daughters by Veera Laitinen
Näkki is a mythical creature from Finnish folklore, often described as a water sprite or demon. Näkki is said to dwell in murky waters and drown any human that crosses its path.
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Roar by Streya Smith
Ashara dragged the tip of her staff through wet sand, carving out magical symbols. Her hands trembled as she clutched the polished beech. One careless line could have disastrous consequences for the spell, but she was running out of time. The sea stretched out to the horizon, met so seamlessly by the cloudless sky she couldn’t see where one ended and the other began. She didn’t have to turn her head to know the tide was also creeping up the sandbar behind her, threatening to swallow the sand—and Ashara—into its endless blue depths.
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