Through our tears, we see rainbows. — Mescalero Apache saying See the scrawny kid with gimpy leg and cross-eyes shoveling bull manure into that rusty wheelbarrow? His name is Billy Roto. Other kids have mercilessly ridiculed his deformity since kindergarten. And early on, some classroom clown called him Billy the Kidded and it stuck. Billy’s […]
Blog
Domesday Earth
We will know what humankind was when the last person has spoken. – Wm James In the end, humanity became a sack of crickets emptied into a reptile cage. That’s how Jazzbo Barbosa summed up the Rupture, which had cut electrical power across the entire planet. Tawnee preferred to look on the bright side, adamant […]
Blood Creed
First Tenet Blood is the oath of dark nothing. Second Tenet Appalled witness of life, blood invents death. Third Tenet Blood is the strength of death. Fourth Tenet Dreams dissolve in blood, blood dissolves in dreams. Author’s Note: [The Blood Creed came to me in a lucid dream years ago. Since then, a story has […]
Pale Rider
The horse faces forward in a deep hour. Silent and attentive, it wears a ghostly mask that doesn’t hide the weary world of its gaze. The rider looks aside, all dreams fallen from those eyes. Darkness is their prism. On this side of the pale, we recognize who sits in the saddle. And we aren’t […]
Emptiness Visible
Higher atmospheres veil the coming night in vaporous blues and dusty indigo. Frail stars and celestial bodies leak through the fading light. By the time the sun has settled atop a grass stem too thin to carry anything else, the incredible depths of the sky open. Our galaxy tilts above the faint furnace-glow of sunset. […]
Stylophoran
While playing Poohsticks, they spotted the hideous thing in the water. Meemur saw it first, during their third upstream drop. Four-year-old Ru Shi didn’t notice and rushed to the downstream side of the bridge to see whose Poohstick won the race. The anthroid stood unmoving at the rail. It watched the odd creature skimming over […]