Original Fiction
Please enjoy this selection of novelettes and short stories–all free to read
Joanna’s Bodies, by Eugenia Triantafyllou
“This is an absolutely devastating and thoroughly compelling novelette about two friends, possession, resurrection, guilt, and grief.” — Maria Haskins
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The woman whose body Joanna is renting has a nosebleed. Joanna is about to get evicted again and she’s cranky about it. She screams at Eleni in another woman’s voice.
“Hey, this shit’s burning!”
Eleni doesn’t reply. She has been sitting on the toilet long after she’s been done, counting supplies. Waiting for Joanna to get bored and go watch TV. There were ten rolls of toilet paper when they first set up here. Or was it twelve? Eleni swears the woman keeps everything in fucking dozens, she must have an obsession or something. Twelve tubes of mint-flavored toothpaste. Twelve red toothbrushes—two used by them. But does a toothbrush count as used by a guest if the mouth it’s been brushing is the same as the host’s? Does a new soul bring in new mouth germs?
Not Lost (Never Lost), by Premee Mohamed
This is a story with big feelings about a little satellite very, very far from home:
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Far they sent me, far from my home, sent me to be the watcher. And I was unspeaking back then and I flew the path of my awaygoing, knowing nothing, watching, into the long dark—till their voices became faint and I never did know if they heard me when I spoke. Heard their cries of alarm, sometimes, after I left my home system.
You are broken, they said more than once. Take into you these numbers and tell us if it helped. But how would I know I was unbroken? Only they would know.
Never did I think I was made to fly in sorrow.
They did not make me so.
What Any Dead Thing Wants, by Aimee Ogden
The third week of a planetary exorcism is the hardest—at least if the planet in question has megafauna to deal with. Enthusiasm wanes even faster on worlds that never evolved past microbes. Hob’s crew always comes in like a team of intrepid explorers, swapping stories with the outgoing terraforming crew as they run down the handover checklist. But after ten, fifteen days, the work slows down, as the crew moves farther from the terraforming origin nexus. That’s where the ghosts are densest, the hauntings the most intense. Along the meridian lines that the crew follows around the planet to the secondary terraforming nexus, only the most stubborn haunts linger—the ones that won’t clear out at just the first reminder of their own recent mortality. The ones that don’t seem to give a shit that Hob and his crew are working to a strict deadline. Exo megafauna have, unsurprisingly, absolutely no sense of human decency.