The Seed’s White Corals Everything in the greenhouse was a shade of white that had never touched a sun. The dead moon turned beneath the hull, grey and pitted and patient, and the seed at the greenhouse’s center turned with it, larger than a house, its bark ridged like...
Magical Realism. The Glassblower’s Window Mara kept her furnace beneath the western wall of the botanical garden, where the tree leaned low over the ferns and dropped doors instead of fruit. They arrived in clusters at dusk: narrow red ones, blue ones polished to the color of...
Hopeful Science Fiction. Winter Platform Seven At the end of winter, the station grew a platform no timetable admitted. Frost silvered the rails, and beneath the arched roof the departure board displayed impossible destinations: APRIL FIELDS, LAST THUNDER, THE YEAR OF RED PEARs,...
Surrealism. The Tenant Who Had Not Arrived On the fourth floor of the building for people who could only remember the future, Mara Venn earned her wages by planting stories in neglected courtyards. She carried a trowel made from a teaspoon, a brass key with no lock, and a...
Surrealism. The Forest That Had Been Put Outside By morning, Lichen Reach had no yesterday. Its trees stood in burnt orange light, their roots wrapped around one another like sleeping animals. Between them ran a blue storm-light that had no weather. The ranger, Iven, stood at...
Hopeful Science Fiction. Shadows at the Lift Mara arrived at Saint Orra with a silver spoon in one pocket and a white feather in the other. The spoon had belonged to her grandmother, who said that every city could be fed if enough people remembered to share a meal. The feather...
Gothic Fantasy. The Tide of Glass The lake appeared only when the seed inhaled. Ilyan ferried strangers across it in a narrow black boat, poling through water the color of white coral. Above him the greenhouse curved away into the dark: ribs of pale wood, leaves like stained...
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