Fiction Excerpts

See the look away project for poetry.

The Dollhouse

A few months after Ashley's birthday, Angela woke up in an empty bed. A plow was beeping insistently as it backed up after dumping a load of snow onto the sidewalk. The snow had stopped falling, and the sun was out. She brushed her teeth. Stephen's side of the bed wasn't even rumpled. He must have worked late, and slept on the couch so he wouldn't wake her. That was sweet.

When she left their room to make coffee and breakfast, Ashley was sitting in front of the dollhouse, big tears spilling silently out of her eyes.

Read the entire story online at Stirring.

Harvest

A biologist speculates on CNN that the aliens couldn't be truly intelligent with such small skulls, and while she's still on the air, she turns into a small mammal later identified as a long-extinct species of Lambdopsalis. Several political pundits, after a roundtable on Meet the Press advocating total nuclear annihilation of the aliens, are transformed into, or replaced by, potted plants. (Brenda and I are watching when that happens, and think it's hilarious, and can't stop laughing even though we know we should be scared.) Half of the residents of an orphanage in Sweden disappear.

"Why would they want a bunch of unwanted kids?" I ask.

"Why would they want Ann Coulter?" Brenda says.

The President stutters a lot at a press conference reassuring the nation. Girls and Boys Town asks for help finding seventeen runaways. Kim Jong-Il retires and North Korea peacefully elects a female Prime Minister, and we can't decide if it's the aliens or just, you know, independently weird.

Read the entire story online at Strange Horizons.

Little Ambushes

"The glasses are here," she said firmly, indicating them as she pulled down two. "Help yourself to anything in the fridge." She handed him a glass, and he looked at it, and then at her, his chin raising a little as his nostrils flared. She poured juice in her own glass. "Juice?" she said. He just looked at her. She put the pitcher down next to him and walked away. When she heard him drinking, she turned to see him holding the pitcher to his lips. She showed him the right way to drink. "It is the custom," she kept saying, hoping he wouldn't take offense. Who knew what would happen if she offended him. The aliens hadn't been hostile yet—not when the Prime Minister had mistaken their leader for a child, not when we'd pointed our nuclear weapons at them, not when one of their ships had been covered in rude graffiti—but the program director had impressed upon her the need for civility. "With the technology they have," he'd said, "they could probably destroy our planet without blinking."

Read the entire story online at Strange Horizons.

The Purple Hippopotamus Wading Pool

"I shouldn't do this," she said, and they both ignored it. She'd said it each of the last two times, too. If anybody had asked, she would have said she loved her husband, and she'd have meant it. Frank was a good man. She had no reason to be unhappy with him. She wouldn't have been able to explain David. He was just something that had happened to her.

Read the entire story online at Strange Horizons.