Category: issue 7

Anika Bandele was certain she was being haunted. It was about time, she supposed.

Feather Rex is three pink boas to the wind. Synthetic ostrich feathers drift loose throughout the arena, while their plucked strings lie limp at Feather’s rotors. Some fluff has caught between Feather's arm plates, but most swirl over the broken metal in the centre of the ring. SolderBoy lasted three bouts, but once the boas snaked around Solder's arms, Feather only had to tighten until Solder's elbow joints locked together. After that, it was just pummeling.

“How long has it been? A century?” asked Otto, spreading out in a wingback chair in a private booth. “Two, actually,” said Vanessa, perched like an owl on an identical chair opposite his, a table between them serving as a neutral zone. “I think carriages were still in fashion.”

The recipe for Ronny’s charm belonged to Mr. Chen, some retired chef who used run a cheap Chinatown restaurant. Truth be told, when Kaifeng first met Ronny at Venue in the west side of downtown, the part of the city filled with rich white folks, they did not expect that they would go so far for him. Yet here they were, seven months later, driving a beat-up Camry from Vancouver to San Francisco just to keep Ronny on this earth.