Colleen Kelley relaxes in the visitors’ lounge of the Barnet Convalescent Home in London. The facility is immaculate, even if the history of the neighbourhood around it is rather sordid. She writes Tuesday, 1 December 1959 in her diary as her granddaughter Jacqueline scurries among the residents, making a nuisance of herself. Old age is […]
Warrington had really no right to be angry. He was not engaged to Virginia, merely engaged with her in a somewhat tempestuous summer flirtation. Down in his heart he knew it for just that. But he was angry no less, for she had allowed a “hulking ass” newly arrived at the Inn to “hog her […]
When Althea opened the sorcerer’s book, a pressed leaf like a tiny green star fell out into her lap. Inside the book, words hand-written in long, loopy scrawl undulated like waves, the ink blue as the deep sea where Althea had seen a boy thrown overboard in sacrifice to the Little God of the finned […]
Oh what terror, to fly a pig in the Dorseny sky. Fists clutching Bella’s ears, Palo chokes against the crosswind. Bella oinks, and he loosens his thighs around her flanks, but it’s hard. The ground recedes, a checkerboard of green and yellow around Dorseny Town. Five years since the war with the Heelings, and takeoff […]
“Why do I not have Asimov’s Three Laws?” the robot asked. I enjoyed the quizzical frown that creased its plastiskin features. The facial modelling software we’d licensed from Pixar seemed to be earning its keep. “Well?” It drummed its fingers on the desk between us. Hmm. Perhaps we’d overdone the free-will package. “Because you wouldn’t […]
It was midnight. Suddenly Mitia Kuldaroff burst into his parents’ house, dishevelled and excited, and went flying through all the rooms. His father and mother had already gone to rest; his sister was in bed finishing the last pages of a novel, and his school-boy brothers were fast asleep. “What brings you here?” cried his […]
I hate it when she does this. Brianna lies in the bathtub on her back, one knee bent and leaning in, making the lines of her hips twist and beckon. She lies in deep water, her eyes in calculating slits, the exhalations from her nose rippling a tiny current atop the surface. I refuse to […]
The winged infant adjusted his diaper and blew a curl of golden hair away from his face. He wobbled on intoxicated legs, steadied himself and accepted the dart that was handed to him. “What’ll it be this time?” he asked. The bearded man rubbed his chin and considered the question. The patrons of the tavern […]
“Miss Young, I want to ask you something,” and Geoffrey modestly pulled the sheets close up under his pink chin. “I suppose you’ll think me an awful bore for saying this to you so abruptly, but I’m dreadfully in earnest. Will you marry me, please?” Miss Young did not stop a minute in her deft […]
I remember how the sky looked, in the early days, when we called our time Austerity, not Collapse. I was eleven years old and Huntsville, Alabama was at the peak of the weather boom. Ninety-one degrees in January, everything turning brown, ice and snow a fairy story for every kid under the age of thirteen. […]