Fairy-Tale Fiction. The Last Exit Silas Venn had spent forty years learning how to leave rooms. Not through doors. He had never needed doors. When a scene ended, a play ended, or a lover asked him to forget, he could step backward into the room as it was before he had touched...
Hopeful Science Fiction. The Room Behind the Stacks At dusk, Mara Venn took off her shoes and stepped into the flooded archive. The water reached her knees. Shelves rose from it like drowned buildings, their brass labels reflecting the violet storm beyond the clerestory. Three...
Hopeful Science Fiction. The Train That Missed Its Century At 4:17 each afternoon the station clock stopped at the same wrong minute. Nobody had ever reset it. The mechanism had been sound in 1949 and the maintenance men who came twice a year checked the sign, wiped the glass,...
Speculative Fiction. The Archive at Low Water By winter, the library had risen to the second railing of its reading room. The librarians rowed between shelves in narrow black boats, calling shelf numbers like bell buoyoys. Their oars disturbed the reflections of chandeliers,...
Hopeful Science Fiction. The Archive at Low Water At low water, the library looked less like a building than a long gray fish resting on the mud. Its reading halls had sunk to their rafters. Only the upper shelves remained above the black water, and the librarians traveled...
Speculative Fiction. The Train That Missed the Century At Platform Sixty, the rails ended in a bar of rust-red sand. Elias Vale stood beneath the station clock with a folded map going soft along its creases. He had been an actor for fifty-three years, and for forty of them he...
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