The road lay before me like the body of an overdosed hooker; all valleys and plains and nameless geography. My hand stroked the air from the window of the pickup as the wind smoked my cigarette and left me with ash. This could work, she'd said. We can make this work. Behind us, the dome ...

The van comes for me at the usual time. I imagine myself as the driver must see me, a doll with matching parts, standing in front of buildings that are coated with red sand. I pull my coat around me but the cold wind climbs under and up my bare legs. I am wearing the dress that my mother saved ...

The engineer stumbled into the cargo hold and dropped his bags like they were made of lead. At the moment, he couldn't think of any place in the galaxy where he'd rather be. Not that that was a surprise. His pilot wandered into the hold wearing underwear, a bra, and a towel wrapped around her ...

After a night of drinking, following the uncontrolled sleep of total blackness, there comes for humans a level of morning sobriety that is so clear it is painful. The white light of morning truth shines through to the black recesses of the human brain, and suddenly, the consequences of all ...

The feeds are not for the news. The feeds are the distraction, the feeds are the facade. The news is contained within them, invisible to the naked eye, downloading itself as cookies, slipped into meta tags. Sometimes, Anna wondered who controlled the news, who encoded it so carefully before ...

No one is sure where it came from. The old books with paper pages will tell you that it came from Cologne Cathedral, but I’m not so sure anymore. I imagine it comes out of the woodwork when trouble starts and times are dark. It’s time for the holidays again, but all we hear are the bombs ...

Me? Oh, I've always known. I mean, not that I knew what it meant, but I've felt this way since I was a child. It wasn't something that came out of nowhere, you know? But yes. When I went to high school, that was when I really had problems. I remember hiding in the girls' bathroom and mewing ...

Hongping watched a small child flounce across the glacier floor. The furry grey snowsuit the child was sealed into kept it from going faster than a clumsy amble, but it didn't seem to mind. It was charging toward a huddle of summarily swaddled children. Waving its arms like that, the handless ...