01 MOONCALF

The farmer in the cowl snatches the poison the moment my back is turned. I flip the iron latch of my leather kit, withdraw the syringe, and tell him, without looking, “That is for your mooncalf, not you. You’d be wise to put that back where you found it.”

When I face about, the needle of the syringe held aloft like the rapier of a deathless man, the farmer does not flinch.

Read More in Issue 12 Winter 2024

Afterword in the Bunker Review

02 KUDZU BOY DREAMING

This is a dream so he comes across his boy who is awake and smiling at him with a mouth full of pebbles. What remains of his eyes are sunken pits in his face. From within shines a loamy-green glow that casts half-light on the dancing shadows of the kudzu patch. All around his boy is the smell of putrid meat, rotting fruit, and wilted flowers.

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The Year’s Best
Dark Fantasy and Horror Vol.5
Pyr Books

2024 Locus Recommended Reading List

03 THE COMPANION

I was getting close to you. My whole body knew it. Forgive me when I say my teeth grew large and heavy in my mouth. My beastly mind conjured sweet, torturous memories of your blood on my tongue, the tang of your iron, the fact of your life and my dominion over it. When my jaw throbbed and my gums ached, could you feel it? Did my bite haunt you over light-years, through the vast annals of space? Did you still feel me?

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New and Improved! Read on MetaStellar

04 BROOD BABY

It wasn’t the resin itself that granted the House awareness. It was the young wasps creched inside. Lending the House their sweet dreams of metamorphosis. Now, the House could think and dream, it could change its shape as it pleased. Now, the House ached.

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05 PLAYHOUSE ANDROIDS’ LAMENT ON THE ICE-MOON GALATEA

Spirit claims to prophesize. Any android with enough processing power can pull patterns from massive sets of data and intuit a string of plausible events and motions. Is that the same thing as seeing the future?

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06 THE CUT

“Yes. This. I want this. What the Engrimgrau gave you. I can cut this face from you, and your memories with it. Oh, I’ll make you a new face, don’t worry. I’ll send you home and you will be just as you were. A shadow of a girl on her way home from school. She’s never seen or done anything terrible, this girl.”

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Reactor Mag
Must Read Speculative Short Fiction June 2025

07 OATHBREAKER, BETRAYER

The knight saw the silhouette of the monk on the horizon. The armor received the biological facts of the knight seeing the monk: her muscles relaxed and her heart-rate slowed, her neurons flashed, and her endocrine glands pumped dopey, deceitful chemicals throughout her body. Hope steeped every pore. She thought she was saved.

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08 WE ARE NOT STRANGERS

The habits of motherless children are difficult
to parse.

Coming soon

09 THE NIGHT-ROAD

Sun-up or down on this side, the night-road burned eternal-black. Pen was responsible for the burning.

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