The men knew before she did. Before this boy, before sophomore year, before even her twelfth birthday, they had jostled her on the sidewalk and hooted from cars, searching for something just past her skin. But now, with her panties stripped off and the boy’s eyes on her, Jackie felt a strange prickling. A warning pacing behind her ribs. A mouth about to drip.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
Mark was aware that he looked more dead than alive, so he did not have high expectations for his first, and last, night on the town. He had fled the hospital’s cancer ward fuelled by stolen methamphetamines, wearing stolen clothes, and armed with just his credit card.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
My ghost bled through the shadows, an icy wind stirring the leaves. Eyes like candle flames shuddering and crescent moon mouth, it had found me as a girl and never let go—the only thing that was really mine. It led me to an overgrown graveyard, pelts of moss eating like acid through fallen tombstones. In the haze of tree-shadowed dark, huge stone towers loomed in the distance, wrapped by vine and tree limb.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
By the time he went to reclaim himself, it was too late. As a young man, he’d realized there was a power to being alone. Relationships were tethers that held you back, sapped you of strength, of will. People were poison. And not all poisons were bad; sometimes the toxic taste, the caustic kiss, was a good thing. But too much killed you all the same. No matter how alive it made him feel in the moment, he knew that in the end, it would cost him.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
In its dreams, the thing they call “Kos” sleeps deep and drowned in the clutch of the ice-cold trenches, where the pressure is a loving clasp around its arms and tail, where it is near-disintegrate, more spirit than substance, more magic than meat. Then it wakes up in the bathtub. The deoxygenated water filters tepidly through Kos’s gills. It gasps, coughing through a windpipe and lungs that weren’t meant to be so exercised, even with the “humidifier” that pumps clouds of soft wet...| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
Dear Dr. Erzsébet Krajcsik-Nagy, I am contacting you as a member of the general public, and not as a fellow scholar, though I must say my chosen field of art history does have certain similarities to yours. I read the interview with you in the online edition of the Plains Dispatch with great interest, and went on to seek out your research article mentioned therein, titled “On an Unusual Kind of Spatially Distributed Haunting.” I believe I have additional information which could shed ligh...| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
Outside the cabin, there was snow. There had always been snow, far as the eye could see, and further still. It might be true that the snow extended forever in every direction, sitting heavy on mountaintops and green pines, on frozen lakes and frigid tundra. Asha hadn’t tried to go very far from the cabin. […]| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
I’m going to explain everything, I promise, but we don’t have much time. For now, you just have to trust me. In three seconds, I need you to raise your right hand. You know, like you’ve got a question in school. (Shouldn’t be too hard; I know you’ve got tons of questions.) Okay—wonderful. By now you must have raised your hand, or we’d both be gone already.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
One time at a convention I ran across the Man of Flowers, the Superman of Daffodils, a long-haired guy, indestructible (of course), who slept in his car and drank a lot of cough syrup and didn’t really fight crime, unless the crimes were happening pretty close by. He was old by then, maybe fifty years old, but with stubble and green eyes and that ageless Tom Petty So-Cal face, and we’d gotten used to the idea that this particular ubermensch was more super-hero vibe than actuality.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
Savannah the Librarian, long of leg and short of temper, got out of the city to do some killing. As ever, she rode her sly, dependable white mule, Seldom. As ever, the invisible swikehead demon, Boy, crouched on her left shoulder.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
Dad went out to get the milk and came back with two scars on his upper chin and a brand from the Druid King on his right thigh. He stumbled through the door like it was nothing; face scarred; eyes full of light. Mum and Tega and I were eating dinner. We didn’t notice when he stepped through the door. “Milk’s cold,” Mum said, not taking her eyes away from the TV. These days, she hardly seemed to care.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
What you need to know about the boy in this story is he is always hungry and the sun is always too hot for him, and he would save the world if he could. This is what he tells himself as he sits opposite the tailor’s shop, looking at the clothes sway in the breeze of the air conditioner within. Fawad would save the world, he would change fate itself.| Lightspeed MagazineRSS - Lightspeed Magazine
Muna shuts the storeroom door as quietly as she can. Holding a just-waxed bundle of letters to her chest, she sticks out her head to check the bookshop floor. If she walks between the shelves on the far right, she can slip out unnoticed in ten heartbeats. The main door of the bookshop is propped open, the sun shining after what feels like a year of sodden clouds and sludged streets---she can’t wait to feel its warmth on her skin.| Lightspeed Magazine
