We were in search of eggs. White ones like the moon, and some as big as newborn puppies in the palm. Biking wasn’t smart because you’d miss the little things hiding in the weeds and bushes, placed out there for us wives to find. It was the daddies of our men who told...
Your perfume suffuses the hall, assaulting me before you do. Jo Malone Waterlily. You only wear it at night, a panther seducing a mate. Three days ago, I’d clocked the bottle on your vanity, drawn to its pale blue orb. Pressing my nose to the glass, I was 8000 miles...
A dream is a film happening while you watch. A boy running with a flowered pillowcase flying from his hand like a cape. Where did he get it? The boy in a space like a dog-trot— the open space between the two sides of a house. But this space between houses. The...
Our tiny mountain town became a city, at least for the day. Even I had a sign on the front door: “Don’t be a Daredevil! Protect your sight with eclipse glasses!” and a pile of them on the display case with all the best Magic The Gathering cards fanned out underneath....
Still, nobody knows if it’s better to write about snow on a country road from an apartment in the middle of an urban sprawl, in a small cabin several miles away from the country road, or on the country road itself. Still, nobody knows if love can exist only in time,...
We've got our winners for this contest! 1st Place: All and Sundry by Candace Leigh Coulombe This story captures the spirit of Elsewhere by transporting us to a familiar place made utterly surreal: a mega mart with everything from milk to robot lovers to xenobiological...
The first person I killed didn't run. I never knew his name, just his crime, so I called him One. "I didn't know I should run because I couldn't hear the rotor blades chop-chop-chopping," he said, sitting beside me on the porch—not the way I left him; the way I met...
In the small hours of the morning, I forage, taking care to nibble leaves both fibrous and tender, for the stories of a world are woven not only from what is young, what is hopeful, or what is easy. When the sun is high, and the air is thick and hot with blossoms, I...
Congratulations to the writers of these 14 speculative stories! We'll be back shortly with our winners! Like Prey Marked All and Sundry Of Souls & Forests Crow Sweetie Come Brush Me A Lamb, Rising Fireworks at Dusk Or the Highway The Marvelous Daisy-Sue, Every...
Next to me at the intersection stands a young boy, hands in jacket pockets, hair the brown of thebrittle leaves in the street gutter. Autumn. The anniversary of my younger sister’s accidentaldeath, by drowning—a riptide, no flotation device. I was nearby. The boy at...
Mother Black Bear sits on her haunches under the heavy limbs of the crabapple tree in the backyard. She rubs her eyes, her long snout, and looks up at the stars and sighs as if she, too, has been awakened by the clock tick, tick, ticking. Through an open window we...
A man with rusty brown hair, a beard, and a plaid shirt has been struggling with something in his mind, so he gets in his truck and drives fast until he gets to the top of a hill and guns it. He’s going all out, and where the cliff juts out over the water, he keeps...