Mystery. The Door That Remembered Her Name Mara Vale kept the museum's night kitchen as if it were a living thing. At midnight she sharpened the knives, polished the brass handles, and set out one plate for every door in the building. The Museum of Doors had three hundred...
Speculative Fiction. Rows Through the Ruin Dr. Ilyan Vey rowed beneath the shelves of the Central Archive, where the water had risen to the height of a seated child and turned every corridor into a drowned avenue. The librarians called the aisles lanes. They propelled themselves...
Adventure. The Clock Beneath the Rib Every morning, beneath the village of Vey, the watchmaker Mara wound her clocks before sunrise. She wound the one that opened spring with a thread of green wool, the one that loosened summer with a bead of amber, and the one that rang autumn...
Weird Fiction. The Hinge Shop Mara Venn kept her forge beneath the abandoned cinema, in the room where the projectionist had once stored reels. The roof leaked. The bellows worked. Every morning she gathered iron filings from the carpet and hammered them into hinges for doors...
Hopeful Science Fiction. The Whale at Evening Elias Vale had spent forty years learning how to leave rooms. He left dressing rooms through narrow doors, stages through trapdoors, hotel suites while the phones still rang. As a retired actor, he had thought the skill would become...
Magical Realism. The Seedhouse Mara kept the seedhouse cold enough for breath to bloom on the inside of its windows. Beyond the glass, the planet below was a blue-black basin, nameless from orbit, while the greenhouse curved around a single seed no larger than a thumbnail. The...
Speculative fiction. The First Upward Drop At 6:17 on a wet Tuesday, the rain stopped falling and began rising. Mara saw it happen from the kitchen window, where she was burning barley water for her father’s cough. The drops struck the porch roof, hesitated, then lifted into...
Dee Carson is driving her last load north when a girl with a suitcase too heavy for her is standing at the turnoff. Over the long climb, two strangers trade the only loose change either of them has.
The shop closes at the end of the month, and then a woman brings in a black umbrella forty years old that belonged to her dead son. Mona mends it, and in doing so mends a small piece of the time between them.
Vera has cleaned the night ward for thirty years and asks nothing of anyone. A dying man in room 14 starts talking to her through a half-open door, and by the summer she understands what he saw.
Oona processes repossessed hours for the city until she opens a drawer containing an entire Tuesday—and the brother who died inside it eleven years ago.
After their mother dies during a flood, two former wives have six days to empty the family house. The water has exposed letters, debts and an old betrayal that neither woman managed to bury.
Lorna has repossessed cars for eleven years without carrying anybody home. The next blue Ford on her list belongs to Sasha, who once taught her how to kiss and then disappeared.
Paradise Bingo has survived bad roofs, smoking bans and thirty-four years of Ruth Bell calling the numbers. On its final night, Evelyn Cross returns in green sequins with a letter from Ruth’s dead husband.
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