"which flavor cheese?"

"the yellow one."

.................................

Streaking down from the heavens, long tailed comets signaled the end of everything. Tears of blazing light marring the inscrutable face of the sky. Were we ready? It was stupid of me to think about such things now, when it was too late to matter, but I co…

Three of us rode north in my 2002 Camry. Sometimes it felt too small, but having recently been in a Volvo from the eighties, I was forced to concede that cars had gotten a lot roomier since the time of ALF. Wil and David (never Dave) didn't feel the same …

The inside of the tent was dark and cold and claustrophobic. Bree rolled over in her blanket, wrapping it tightly around her shoulders. Dan, her mom's new boyfriend, whispered something on the other side of the tent causing her mom to giggle. Bree rolled …

I ran through the tunnels, following the sounds of your laughter as they bounced off the walls around me. The shape of the tunnels played tricks on my ears -- every time I thought I was close to catching you, I turned a corner to find you were no longer t…

The thing that spoke to me had the face of a dead god but used the voice of my father. I had known to expect this. It was a by-product of the bonding ritual that gave a semblance of life back to this former deity. Not that any of the gods ever truly died,…

Story is marked as mature

So by now we all know that there’s no logical explanation why bumblebees can fly, weight and wings and stuff, it shouldn’t be possible, but bees fly anyway. Perhaps bees are magical creatures, then. And the drop in bees’ quantity is alarming to the wizard…

Prunella turned from her novel and rolled her eyes in copious disgust.

"All hands, prepare for atmospheric entry."

It was a warning, not an order. The crew had been prepared for at least an hour.

Armored Infantry Captain Danielle Freiz was thoroughly annoyed, because her entire squad was late.

In fact, she wasn't even sur…

"Okay, so... Yeah. We've got this." Captain Gaia looked us over. "Hero Corps, let's..."

"Uh, question." Even I couldn't believe I had spoken up, never mind that I had just interrupted Captain Gaia!

He stared at me for a moment. "Is this going to tak…

I held that piece of flesh up before me, bitter distaste filling my mouth. If what my father and I had done before had been blasphemy, this was surely something far worse, to desecrate the body of a god in such a way.

And yet it was necessary. This war b…

I don't know how I made it through what came next. The next days were a blur of pain, both physical and emotional, and fever dreams, in the rare moments when I slept.

My first task was to split the figure of my father in half, carefully using the tools o…

I watched you burn.

I watched as your multi-hued plumage singed and reduced to grey, dead ash.

I watched powerlessly as your skin, flesh and bone blistered, seared and charred. Before long, a pile of soot and slag was all that remained where you had bee…

I wonder if I'm unwanted. Am I the problem? I've always tried to make things better but I feel like I'm trying to keep the heart beating on a dying Clydesdale. Substitute any other majestic animal you want. For me the Clydesdale carries mass and dignity i…

Klaxons. Klaxons everywhere. Truly this was it.

After months of combing through this enormous abandoned spaceship, we’ve all started to lose hope. But V’Ru kept pushing us, and she was right to do so. If we were to make any use of this monstrosity of a v…

The room, if you can call it that, for it was enormous, easily the largest single chamber I'd seen down here in the dark, was a nightmare landscape of chaos. I had to shake my head and blink my eyes several times to try to rid myself of the vertigo it i…

Mitaran nudged the trajectory of the chestnuts with a whispered charm and caught it with one outstretched hand. Always so casual, Katy thought, taking a sip of water to hide her expression.

"Hey, uh, Mitt."

"Mhmm?"

"What are you going to do next year? …

Newkirk and Beckton appeared in a cascading flash and swirl of short-lived white particles as if teleporting in from an immaterial snowstorm. They were surrounded by a thick fog that stirred in a somewhat turgid manner, as if just a touch heavier than the…

Well the new pickles of the litter got along great with me, we played tag and price and code and dead and then we all bundled up in our garters and gilt and glit and flit and kilt and were in the bin of shipping in a nonce.

The dear improprietor of me got…

Dear Dairy,

Today was an awesome day! !

You know that carton of pickles in the back of our fridge, the one on the roof? Well I was gnawing on the wrapper this morning when I finally broke through the plastic frieze packaging and got a mouthful of brine. …

It was a beautiful night. The power was out on our block, so I had a gorgeous view of the Milky Way. Our Husky, Demetria, decided that the middle of the yard would be a wonderful place to howl at the moon. I expected that our neighbour, ever the one to lo…

Start with a knife, a tree, a candle, a corpse. Start with a dead bird and its dead feathers spread out about it, mites crawling across it.

Start with the spark of a match being struck; the brown honeycomb scraping, smudging phosphorous and chlorate toge…

Story is marked as mature

He came in with a haunted look in his eyes. A fine suit hung from his frame, slightly threadbare but still lending an air of battered elegance. His gaze caught on the shelves full of jars, clinking gently against each other despite the utter absence of an…