Hopeful Science Fiction. The Door at Observatory Nine At nine hundred and eighty-seven meters, the observatory clung to the inner wall of a sleeping volcano like a metal insect. Rain polished the volcanic rock until it shone wet-black. Below the instruments, a service road...
Hopeful Science Fiction. The Last Performance At sixty-eight, Elian Vey had forgotten how to enter a room, though he had never forgotten how to leave one. He had walked off three sets and two openings, and every one of those doors had been for him to go out of. The rain came...
Fantasy. The Surveyor of Moving Weather At violet dusk, when the lanterns along Veyra came alight in their long violet procession, Iriq Vale lowered his brass sextant into the river and measured the sorrow moving beneath the water. Emotions ran downstream in visible bands. Grief...
Speculative Fiction. The Monastery of Missing Hours The clockmakers’ monastery stood in a country where dawn might arrive twice before breakfast. Its towers carried no faces, only blackened dials, and inside the refectory the monks argued pleasantly over what year it was. One...
Fairy-Tale Fiction. The House Below the Stacks At low tide, the archive showed its shelves like drowned columns, and Mara Venn rowed between them in a lacquered skiff. She had been an actor for forty years, remembered chiefly for the roles she played after leaving the stage: a...
Speculative Fiction. The Whale's Sleeping Back At dawn, the lighthouse rose from the whale's back like a brass tooth. Below it, the ocean breathed in long, mechanical sighs. Rust-red pipes ran along the creature's charcoal ribs, and pale winter light lay across them without...
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,...
Hopeful Science Fiction. Tomorrow Came Back Empty Everyone in the Vesper Apartments remembered the future, though no two agreed on its shape. In the laundry room, Mrs. Bell knew the exact hour the machines would fail. On the eighth floor, the boy called Senn predicted rain three...
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...
Fairy-Tale Fiction. The Whale’s Last Light After forty years onstage, Alaric Venn retired to a lighthouse built on the broad back of a mechanical whale. The whale lay becalmed beyond the shipping lanes, black lacquer shining under a moon that seemed too cold to cast warmth....
Fairy-Tale Fiction. The Last Door Above Water At the end of his career, Orin Vey retired to a house with black-lacquered shutters and a roof that complained whenever rain touched it. He had played kings, messengers, fathers, and once a doorbell in a play no one remembered. In...
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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