Fantasy

His ass was the first thing I noticed.

Spice plums will soon enter their multi-year blooming phase on Laligurans and should be edible soon. Experienced gourmands know the younger buds have less of that delicious peppery nectar but are also the least likely to fight back. Plan your timing with risk tolerance in mind.

After long deliberation, the Exobiological Taxonomic Association has officially categorized the Tiktalufi chimera as fruit! Don’t let their screams fool you - that is air escaping as they deflate, and the trashing will stop within an hour of being plucked from their Life Vine.

She walks with feline grace: bare-foot and silent. Come closer now and look. Look into the fire and see what I see. See how her measured steps leave no trace on the frost-bound earth. Or perhaps that’s simply a trick of the light? The same trick that makes her eyes flash silver as she passes the warm glow of the cooking fires into the woods beyond.

I met the Devil once in a bar on 54th street. Funny little fellow, wore a striped suit and tie that had seen better days, kept drinking water and calling it wine. And he said to me, the Devil did, he said: “You’re Death, man. It’s who you are. It’s what you do.” 

I battled with deStruct-O on the edge of the volcano he was trying to reactivate. Toxic gases plumed and rocks flew. Dodging a careening boulder, he ever so slowly lost his balance and toppled into the caldera. I swooped down, scooped him up and deposited him outside the hot zone for the Agency team to deal with, then plunged back into the lava to deactivate the magma enhancer.

This story originally appeared in Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine in December 2021

Leucosia sighed as she glided to the front desk for the afternoon shift. The holiday season was shaping up to be the worst--the incessant rushing, the constant demands, the haughty entitlement. Flame-haired Teles, the most experienced of the sirens, spent two hours mediating an argument between two lycanthropes who strenuously disagreed about whether to go through with a waxing and pedicure. Last week, the octomaid Manami expelled a leering kappa after he had gotten handsy during a massage.

"Go home, Violet," said Uncle Cornelius when he opened the door. "I haven’t heard from a single one of you in over ten years." His eyebrows were storm clouds in his craggy face, just as she’d remembered.

"I shan't," she said calmly, lifting her chin.

"Shouldn’t you be off at college?"

"I flunked." She’d avoiding practicing this conversation in her head too much, so her responses would be more natural.

It was late on a normal Friday evening, and Dan and I were sprawled out on the sofa in our little flat above the Cutting Edge hairdressing salon watching Netflix. Suddenly, a weird sound filled the room. Kind of like FFFFT! closely followed by the tinkling of falling glass. For what must have been a couple of seconds, everything stopped. Then Dan threw my arm off his midriff and jumped up, yelling, “What the fuck was that?”

“Um… Jingledeep?” said the barista. She was a tawny-skinned woman, scrunching a beautifully bejeweled nose as she scrutinized the name on the cup. She looked at the man next in line at the counter. He was middle-aged with a hairline that was losing both ground and color. He wore a perfectly pressed gray suit and black leather loafers that he probably paid someone to polish. He was looking up at her from his phone with a whole-body frown.

“I have a coffee for…Jingledeep?” she read, half an invitation, half a question.