Fading Light

by Simon Strantzas

Read by Nerraux

It reminds me of the place Jackson and I lived in during our final year of university. The corridors are filled with the partial light of forty-watt bulbs, and the walls look soiled and gummy — the odour of cooking meat and bleach sweating from them. Only three straight corridors, one on top of the other, each end marked by a staircase: the building feels decidedly utilitarian. Unlike our old apartment, however, there’s no telling how long Jackson will be here for.

“I feel like I’ve been robbed by myself,” he says, surveying the scattered boxes. “She only took the things I cared most about. Gilbert, she even took my cat. My cat!” He shakes his head. “All she left me was this.” His trembling hands unwrap a framed photograph of Janet and himself in Africa on the trip they had planned over a year to take together. In it, Jackson is adjusting a safari hat too large for him, trying to keep it from falling over his eyes. Janet has her brown cheek pressed up against his, focused on something beyond the photographer. Both are smiling. “I know I should throw this away,” he says. “But I can’t. Why can’t I throw it away?” I shift boxes around, wondering how I’m suddenly supposed to know the answer.

The Tamga

by Maura McHugh

Floating above the earth, Kulin checked the boundary around the graveyard. To his relief the hungry ghosts were contained, but the binding charms showed signs of deterioration. He cloaked his lifeforce so the dead would ignore his presence; a chill settled over his heart. He could not maintain the illusion for long.

He slipped into the sacred grove. The pallid forms of the dead, some still, other agitated, moved around the confines of the graveyard. The outlines of the grave huts loomed above them: little wooden cabins on fragile stilts, where the soul dolls resided. Underneath them lay the grave boats in which the bodies were interred.

Anger and grief saturated the atmosphere, and Kulin restrained the violent shaking that threatened to overcome him. The living were not welcome.

The Tamga stood in the middle of the cemetery. Its skinny arms stretched upwards, and its black hair flared out. Kulin shrank into himself, and concealed his life’s pulse.

Turning the Apples

by Tina Connolly

Getting infected makes your brain rewriteable. Surviving makes you able to rewrite. Not everyone gets it; most natives are immune and even many tourists are. One half percent is a low enough number that tourists flock in by the thousands, through the major port city and down south to the waters. The adults that get it are in a coma within 24 hours.

It’s only kids who sometimes survive.

By the time Szo saw his mother, he’d turned nineteen minds for Hawk. He remembers the first one particularly, like you remember a first girl or first trick. But he remembers all the others, too. “Don’t know why you would,” says Jonny. “I don’t remember all the men.” But Szo does, and he clings to each one, proof that somehow he is not like Jonny, not like Hawk, not like himself. This is all temporary and therefore changeable, rewriteable.

The Blessed Days

by Mike Allen

What finally saved him at the not-so-tender age of fourteen was a book about lucid dreams he found at the community college library. He
followed the recommended exercise out of desperation, repeating until he fell asleep: “I will know when I am dreaming. I will remember what I dream.”

Just as his first encounters with the morbid plunged him into nightmare, his first attempt at lucid dreaming introduced him to unlimited power. He again found himself in the City of Mazes, pursued by a crowd pulled on fleshy strings. You are all inside my head, he thought, and knew they were. He commanded, Stop, and they did, collapsing to the ground as their severed strings thrashed like loose hoses.

The Primakov

by R.J. Hobbs

It was a Tuesday night when the Primakov received an emergency transmission on the ICT radio from The Bakapor, a distressed fishing vessel from Petropavlovsk. The captain translated the Russian slowly, word by word, with a phrasebook. The night was completely calm, and the ocean lapped up against the hull with gentle rhythmic intensity. The Bakapor had lost fuel after a storm, and required additional petrol if the sailors were ever to see their wives and mothers again. The Primakov wouldn’t even have to change direction to give them assistance.

Bophuthatswana

by Lavie Tidhar

It was just before the referendum, when white people voted on giving black people the right to vote. The skies were clear, the African sun was hot on my young face, and the wild scent of earth, of renewal, was in everything. All the Stop signs had F.W. sprayed on them. Stop F.W. Stop De Klerk.

Eugène Terre’Blanche was king.

I watched the Boer Nation on TV. Eugène, big and red-faced, a barrel of beer full of righteous White-Christian indignation. Eugène and his boys. I watched the bombs flower over Johannesburg in brilliant reds and yellows, fire and blood. Eugène and his boys valiantly rode to battle with pipe-bombs and guns, and I watched it on television. I felt like I was locked up, bound within the confines of the house, the garden, the walls, the barbed wire.

The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft

by Nick Mamatas and Tim Pratt

I thought about the brittle old letters in my briefcase, which included (among genial advice on writing and cranky complaints about publishers) a few passages of deep loathing about “the niggers and immigrants who fester and shamble in the slums of our fallen cities.” Ah, Lovecraft. I always wondered how my great-grandfather’s letters back to him might have read. I doubted if old Cavanaugh Payne ever told his idol that he was a “miscegenator” himself. Three generations later, I was fresh out of white skin privilege myself, but I had enough of Cavanaugh’s legacy to clear all my debts, assuming I could ever find the isolated country house where this collector lived.

The hand-drawn map Fremgen had mailed me was crude, and obviously not to scale, so it was a little like following a treasure map made by a pirate with a spatial perception disorder.