Category: issue 5

Idris put the finishing touches on the letter, angling the chisel to get a crisp edge on the last stroke. The dislodged sandstone whipped away in the ever-present wind. He winced as a few grains lashed his face, grateful for the wrappings protecting his skin. Bracing his legs against the wall, he leant back upon his hanging platform to admire his work.

They gave us support groups after they brought us down. We’d expected death, but they said we’d been punished enough. That was true. And there were too many of us who were still well-liked among them, even if they had decided we needed to go. So they gave us support groups, and they gave us decent apartments, and they trained us to do jobs like the rest of them. We took to it all quickly enough. Thousands of years may tend to make you inflexible, but they don't make you stupid.

Standing in their galley kitchen, Juniper sank her knife into a soft block of smoked goat cheese. She had left it out to soften for so long that the cheese practically parted before the knife touched it. She considered the other sliced and chopped hors d’oeuvres on the tray: cheeses, check; sliced cucumber and whole cherry tomatoes, check; olives stuffed with garlic, just needed straining; sliced baguette, check; blueberries from Laila’s enspelled hothouse, check; seasoned almonds for Lydia and salami for herself, check.

The Taoist priest circled the rosewood pedestal that had last held the Cloud Step, absently tapping his lower lip with the bamboo spine of his fan. Master Lee Engseng ran his fingertips over the pale blue silk cushion that had held the teapot, then went down on his haunches to inspect the base of the pedestal.

The music vanished as quickly and mysteriously as it had appeared.

I’d started cooking my first meal in the kitchen, corn soup with egg, when suddenly I felt a light hand on my shoulder. I turned around, and there was the previous owner of my new house, standing right behind me as if she hadn’t died the week before.

The poets over-romanticize the stars. They name them for your gods; proclaim them grand and omniscient. You mortals always elevate what you cannot understand, casting the distant and mysterious as beings worthy of fear or desire. Think: things that go bump in the night, or the blacksmith’s apprentice who smells of cloves and fire and won’t look twice your way.

The clank of a metal-shod staff heralded the arrival of Melnock the wizard to the library of Babyl-no-Ktan.

The maps aren’t always right anymore. After the ocean took little nibbles out of the coastlines and then big gobbling bites, mapmakers were still trying, storms or no storms. But then there were bombs too, and any new maps stayed in the hands of their makers.

It was said that in the ancient days, heroes walked the earth, as common on the ground as worms after the rain. Of course, the last bit about worms was said only by Jinye’s grandmother, a weathered crag of a woman who considered herself the authority on ages past.