Beautifully written SFF
Nikki shook the can and sprayed again, trailing a long, jagged streak of crimson paint to the far end of the wall until the contents came to a sputtering halt. He stepped back to the crowded sidewalk to admire his handiwork. He had defaced twelve buildings around Reflection Square. Eight houses, a grocery store, and three shops, all built of smooth, white stone and lined in neat rows with equally tidy flowerbeds. Mature trees dotted …
I didn’t actually want a dog, so I guess I got what I wanted. The little guy belonged to my grandma. I don’t know many old ladies, but I still feel confident saying that she was a very cool old lady. She was 85 when she died, but she wasn’t that “so old it hurts to look at you” kind of 85 that makes death a blessing. She was more of a “gardening every day, …
So there we are, in the venerable Rat King Tavern, on La Isla de los Diablos Perdidos (Lost Devils Island to you English-speakers), somewhere deep in the Emerald Sea, and it’s me and One-Handed Carlos and the Professor and Barney that acts as the bartender, and we’re swapping true tales of the strangest things to ever cross our paths back when we were still sailing instead of warming barstools and seeing to visiting crews. It’s …
It was after summer that Nora started to sink. Just footsteps a little deeper than usual; she saw them as she came back on her walk, comparing her outgoing, energetic pace to her homecoming, philosophical one. The prints were firm and well defined in the hard wet sand, but deep, and she tried to remember whether she had been running. But the toeprints were too clean, and besides, running, at her age? Examined, her memory …
Black flowers carpeted the floor that morning, cloaking the bedroom in funeral colors. Their petals, large as my hand and soft as suede, belonged to no plant I could name. The salt and midnight smell of them soured the cottage air. I would have liked to make tea before dealing with the evidence of Inae’s magics but, fearing some subtle poison contained in those leaves, I started the day with sweeping. The petals were thickest …
Resten Light woke up, pushed the fibre blanket away, and pulled apart the two wings that formed the doors of his nest. He took in the immense sky, its colour and its shapes. Clouds coalesced around the upper reaches of the Far Tower. No-one in his community had seen the top or knew what shape it took. Some said it was flat – truly horizontal – but few believed that myth. Horizontal was unobtainable. He …
