Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy
The smoldering joss sticks behind the psychic burned my throat as I sipped on chrysanthemum tea from a juice box.
“Where are your lodestones buried?” The psychic had a round face like my nainai, though she wore her hair in a pixie cut instead of the ubiquitous perm.
“The Bronx,” I croaked out.
The psychic snorted. “What were you doing there?” (Continue Reading…)
Episode 3
All wizards are crazy.
Not the quaint, colloquial “crazy” where you have an offbeat sense of humor and wear brightly colored socks, not mild eccentricity coupled with a general lack of fashion sense. Not “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.” Wizards aren’t weird. They are genuinely, legitimately, around the bend.
This is because magic is a form of psychosis.
Forget the bearded men wearing robes covered in stars trying to sell you bargain spellbooks. Nine times out of ten, it’s a scam, and the tenth time, they really can do magic, but it’s not something they can teach5. (Continue Reading…)
Episode 2
Sings-to-Trees’ morning began slightly after dawn, when the hen crowed.
She was a black hen with a fine gold eye and a blue sheen to her feathers. She laid quite large brown eggs. She also mounted the other hens occasionally, an exercise in bafflement for everyone involved. And every morning, she crowed.
As far as he could tell, she seemed happy, so he’d resigned himself to getting up at hen’s-crow most mornings. He hadn’t wanted a rooster, anyway. His farm was located on the edge of what were nominally the Elvenlands. A small human settlement lay less than an hour’s walk away, where woods gave way to farmland. The humans viewed him as falling somewhere between the priest and the village idiot, and thus required feeding either way. Depending on the time of year, gifts of flour or cheese or bacon were always turning up, and they dumped excess chicks on him year-round. He had a hard enough time keeping up with donated chickens—had his small flock been producing more on their own, he’d have been hip-deep in fowl. So he was somewhat grateful for the confused hen, after all. (Continue Reading…)
Episode 1
It was gruel again for breakfast.
It had been gruel for dinner the night before, and it would be gruel sandwiches for lunch, a dish only possible with goblin gruel, which was burnt solid and could be trusted not to ooze off the bread. It usually had unidentifiable lumps of something in it. Sometimes the lumps had legs.
Once, Corporal Algol had found an eyeball in his gruel, the memory of which he carried with him like a good luck charm and inflicted regularly on his fellow soldiers.
“Did I ever tell you guys about the time I found an eyeball—”
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
Algol wasn’t a bad sort, really. He was bigger than usual for a goblin, a whopping four foot ten, with broad, knotty shoulders and enormous feet. He had the ochre-grey skin of a hill goblin, and he wasn’t all that bright—but then, he was a goblin officer.
Smart goblins became mechanics. Dumb goblins became soldiers. Really dumb goblins became officers. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fairy Tale, Fantasy
“Oh no,” Clarinda muttered, fluttering to the body of the fallen prince. His limp form lay sprawled at the base of a willow tree, the fine embroidery on his clothes gleaming in the shifting patches of sunlight cast between the branches. A basket lay near his feet, and an empty wine goblet lay toppled near his hand. Clarinda pecked his fingers. “No no no…”
Notchbeak flapped down to join her. “Who’s this? Are you going to eat him?” He started pecking the other hand. “Dibs on his eyes.”
“No!” Clarinda cried, hopping to the man’s chest.
Notchbeak ruffled his feathers in a shrug. “Well, fine, we can split the eyes. He has two, after all.” (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy
The domovoi is protecting them. Sofiya knows this, even as her mother’s dismissive remarks prod the fireplace like skewers.
When the flames burn to embers and the ashes in the fireplace thicken, she sees him. A miniature creature with short limbs and stubby toes, a round face and snub-nose, a burnt texture to his skin. He smells like crème brûlée just after the surface has been singed.
She feeds him crumbs from her dinner while he answers with titbits of stories that don’t quite make sense.
Where Sofiya sees blinking eyes and the flash of a grin, her mother sees flames and flakes of ash. She tells Sofiya off for staring into the fire too long. Then she sighs into a kitchen chair, takes out her phone and stares at the screen.
In her mother’s work there are great glowing hearths but no domovois. Sofiya has checked. Her mother stirs steaming pots and fills moulds with dark delights in a chocolaterie. They live in Lviv, where carved faces gaze from curved Art Nouveau archways and baroque façades brush against classical columns. City of stone lions, violins and chocolate. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy
This is how the old pass.
Like fog on a sunny summer day. Like a gray cirrus cloud fading before the pearly moon. Like a brush of cool wind on a starry night. Like a snowflake melting upon a windowpane.
They pass in the night, silent, with a single peaceful breath. They pass in hospital beds, amid beeping machines, with a rattle of oxygen shaking free from their chests. They pass with families around them, with aged spouses clasping their hands, or they pass alone, with no one at all. They pass and they enter the shadowlands and no matter who is with them when they pass, this final step they take alone. They enter the shadowlands alone, they stride its craggy shore, they sail their coracles past the moonlit sky, and they do not return. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Africanfuturism, Science Fiction
Onyankopɔn is a woman. And a man. And everything above and in-between. Akuba says Onyankopɔn kissed the tips of His fingers on the sixth day, and sculpted these bodies as worldly vessels for our spirits. Why do we call Onyankopɔn just ‘He,’ when Akuba says that all of us were made in the image of God; all the men, all the boys, all the women, all the girls, all those people who don’t quite look like either men or women but rather cut-and-paste versions of each thrown together?
Why do we reduce Onyankopɔn to only ‘He,’ when I see God in that video of my mother, with her full body that flows like emerald water, and silvery-black locs that cascade down her arched back till they kiss the point where her buttocks greet her waist? You should see the part where she wields her tumi, when she closes her eyes, and her locs dance and rise about her like living, breathing things, when they weave themselves together to form the shape of a stool, when the stool appears in the sky above, when her hair wraps around it and sets it down on the ground. I see Onyankopɔn in Asante from my class; his body glows like the sun on God’s happy day when he Fades from one place and Reappears at another. Onyankopɔn also looks like the man-woman person Da warned me to stay away from, with their body that can bend, and shift into different forms of being other than human. But when Onyankopɔn made me, They did not make me well. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy
Dear Opal’s Mom:
This is Jem, Opal’s classmate. Last week, you asked my Magical Cupcake club to make two hundred cupcakes for Opal’s birthday–chocolate chip and peanut butter. Even though you pay well, I would have refused on behalf of the Magical Cupcake Bakers. The girls outvoted me since we need the money for new cooking equipment. My friends made all the cupcakes in the school kitchens and used my mom’s bakery ovens when we ran out of room in the ones used for cooking classes. That explains the taste you complained about on BakeHub this morning. As you wrote in your post, it was my special touch you were paying for–and that was missing.
Enclosed are a few extra cupcakes for you and Opal’s dad. These I did make, cardamom vanilla, with some hints of ginger from infused milk. This proves that I haven’t “lost it”, as you posted, my Jersey family baking touch. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
They are always at my heels, this pack of girls who might as well be wolves. No matter how hard I try to ignore them, pretending they haven’t hurt my feelings, I can’t seem to shake them off. They stalk me in the hallways between classes, each girl smelling of plastic flowers, raspberry, and freshly applied nail polish. The scent chokes me in the school’s enclosed cinderblock halls. I miss the woods of home.
“Hick,” Marie’s voice whispers at my back.
I glance back to see Marie’s wide smile, her teeth white as the moon. Hannah, lean and narrow-boned, slouches beside her. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Modern Sci-Fi, Science Fiction
Firestorm (12:05 PM): You know, given all the possibilities for an apocalypse, this wasn’t the one I expected us to see. At least not first.
Kazumi (12:31 PM): Did you see the good news, though? The Bureau for Magical Mismanagement think they’ve isolated the cause! Some sort of ritual gone wrong, something targeting men–and they think they’ve even identified which story the group was using for a basis for it! They’re calling for any female practitioners who are willing and able to come to Spiregate to join a ritual to undo it.
Firestorm (12:35 PM): Only female mages, huh? (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Science Fiction
It’s perfectly normal for breath to fog up mirrors. Everyone knows that. For most of my childhood, I never thought twice about the way mirrors went cloudy when I drew near. The only time it really mattered was when Dad flew me to school; even well into my upper school years, I never could sit in the front seat without frosting over the rearview mirrors, much less pilot an aerostat myself.
In my senior year at Ettwood Upper, I was the only person still flown to school by a parent–and Dad never let me forget it.
“You know,” Dad said, smoke and mist drifting out from between his lips, “I did the math. If your Aspiration didn’t block you from piloting, I would’ve saved two hundred hours this year.”
I sighed, letting out a cloud of Aspiration. As always, the faint white mist hung in the air for a second before gravitating towards the nearest mirror–in this case, the left-hand passenger window. “Well, I’m sorry that the physical manifestation of my hopes and dreams isn’t good enough for you.” (Continue Reading…)
