Harry the Crow
John Kratman

“A CONSTRUCT IS NO CROW!” Tommy shouted, the ridiculous war bonnet he’d worn to my father’s funeral slipping off his head. He pushed it back with an angry swipe of his hand, glaring at the gathered members of the tribe, daring them to laugh.

“Harry can do everything a man can do,” I said. There were many people in the lodge that I recognized, but there were many more, ghosts of my past, who should have been there and were not. “He can hunt, write poetry, sing a song. He can think and he can feel. I taught him how to shoot and how to track, how to read and how to write. No matter that he sprang from my brain instead of my manhood. He is my son, the only one this old man will ever have. He is a Crow.”

“What can a machine know of tradition and honor?” Tommy asked, his lined face veiled in the shadows cast by the fire. He drew a pipe from his pocket and packed it with angry jabs of his age-spotted hand.

“He knows more of honor than you do, you stupid old fool—to hold a grudge over a woman for twenty years!” He had never forgiven me for that girl, so long ago. I don’t recall her name, but it had been a simple thing: a man, a woman, a bottle, and a cold night. Tommy’s jealousy still rode him like a demon. Stupid to throw away a lifelong friendship over something so small.

Fitzwell’s Oracle
Lawrence M. Schoen

HE FOUND “CASSANDRA” JOHNSON slumped at the end of the bar of a hotel lounge on the city’s south side. She didn’t look like an oracle, but what did one look like anyway? Fitzwell almost walked back out, right at that moment. Then he remembered the stony faces of the tenure review committee and how they’d sneered at his feeble preliminary application. If he didn’t do something then he’d already lost. At thirty-five, he’d already been denied tenure at two other universities. No matter how well his students rated him, he wasn’t quite playing the game right. The ivory tower continued to elude him. He needed a new perspective, and his desperation had led him here.

She sat swirling a thin red straw through the icy clumps of a half melted strawberry margarita. Fitzwell figured her for about nineteen, and either the bartender didn’t care or couldn’t tell. Fitzwell could tell. He knew nineteen, saw it every day at the university, endless variations of sophomores stumbling through his classes. She was slender, with flowing ringlets of dirty blonde hair that turned her plain face into something vaguely pretty. Her nose was crooked, and reminded him inexplicably of something out of Hemingway, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. She wore one of those ubiquitous black cocktail dresses, shorter than most, revealing long, toned legs. She turned slowly as he eased onto the adjacent stool, and as she looked him over he realized her eyes were different colors, one blue and one green.

“You want a metaphor,” she said.

Toys
Dev Agarwal

SHE CROUCHED IN A long, smooth trench with soldiers to her left and right. The trench ran through a housing project that had been hit by something early on—the giant fist of a screamer or a pillar-of-fire. Concrete chunks the size of cars littered its streets.

The Salusa had bombed first, then attacked with huge land machines and subsurface burrowers whose tunnels ran for miles and miles, exposing Mannheim’s underside. Man-made drains and cellars and jumbled fibre-optics gaped within the channel’s smooth bore. They looked clumsy and misshapen compared to the tunnels’ flawless curves. The tunnels wound through Mannheim like the arc of a circle of infinite length.

Hiding inside this one, Rebecca stood face to face with the war. She had to remind herself that this was what she wanted. She'd fought to be ringside, front row. What she'd got was raw sewage and vivid injuries and her bowels loose with fear. She was trapped behind the enemy’s lines, too scared to sleep, suffocating under an endless, sickening noise.

Salusan engines churned through her. Their drone and pitch shook her body and burned her head with migraine.

Rebecca had never seen any of the machines up close. They were just black shapes in the air, or giant pyramids shaking the city apart as they rumbled on the horizon. But she knew what they were. They were Salusan warmachines—all trying to kill her.

The Butterfly Man
Sarah L. Edwards

ONE OF THE BUTTERFLIES brought the message that a stranger had come. The messenger was still resting on my hair, whispering, when the master and the strange man drew near the garden where I was tending the flowers of my kin. The master said nothing to me but only gestured toward me while talking to the other man in low, muffled tones. Twice the man’s gaze drifted to me while he nodded in agreement. Soon they went away again, and I sent a few kin discretely after.

Deep in the night, after every tempting lamp and lantern had been doused, a moth settled at the edge of my window, folding his dusky wings, and told me what the master and mistress had said.

“She’;s too young. She’s just barely begun to bleed.” The mistress, masking her plea with firmness.

“She’s sixteen, and that’s more than old enough. You were hardly older when I took you.” The master, not yet angry at the mistress’s disagreement because he knew she would yield, eventually.

“But you were from the village. All we know of him is that they call him the Butterfly Man.”

A shrug. “I know he carries a heavy purse. He will pay a good price.”

“Renna has a fragile mind. So far, without friends—she’ll die, or go wild.”

“No word of that!” A slap. I felt the tingling in my skin as though it had been my own cheek. “And if she dies...” Another shrug. “It will not be our concern.”

Her Box of Secrets
Lisa Mantchev

IN THE BEGINNING, she told him everything. She detailed her day with bright butterfly words that he captured with laughter and smiles and nods of acknowledgement. Picking up the dry cleaning was an anecdote for dinner by candlelight. They discussed the world over the plastic shower curtain, their words flecked with soap and toothpaste. At night, with the lights out, the butterflies collected in her dark hair, and he brushed them off with a gentle hand so he could kiss the nape of her neck.

Time passed, as it does, with a baby and bills and gray hairs and clogged toilets and light bulbs that needed changing. The conversations didn’t stop, but the words became moths that fluttered out of her mouth and onto the kitchen counter.

“The garbage needs to go out.”

He nodded and opened the newspaper.

“Time to get a haircut.”

Cereal and juice disappeared behind the printed pages.

“I might run away from home today.”

More moths, just moths; easy to ignore until they got into the sweaters and ate holes in the yarn. They collected in piles and twitched until they died. She swept them into a dustpan and dumped them in the garbage.

Moonlight on the Carpet
David D. Levine

“VRRM, VRRM,” said Liam as he ran the little wooden car across the Persian carpet. It was summer, a hot humid North Carolina summer, and there was nothing else to do. Mommy and Daddy were away again.

The blue and gold pattern in the middle of the carpet, a thing the shape of the big black card in Mommy’s bridge deck, could be Laclede Island where they went every month at this time. Liam ran his car along the causeway—a long curve of blue and red and black—and through the stripe of bright white moonlight that crossed it. The babysitter snored in the armchair by the window; outside, in the darkness, seagulls called and the surf rumbled low.

Across the causeway and along the bay the little car sped, streetlights flicking past one after the other. But above them all loomed the moon, the full moon, outshining them all. Mommy and Daddy never took Liam to the island when the moon was full. Mommy said Esbat wasn’t for little boys.

Welcome to Oceanopia!
Katharine Sparrow

IT WAS ANOTHER PERFECT DAY in Oceanopia. The hot weather was tempered by the oscillators, which created the right amount of breeze. The Craven pipes cooled the breeze to 68 degrees. The sun rose at 6:02 and would set at 18:02. There would be twelve hours of uninterrupted sunshine: the same as every day. Nothing ever changed on the equator. Nothing ever changed in Oceanopia. Except for Zaria: she was getting older.

Trix had planned to “Find the Perfect Birthday Present for Zaria!” from 8:00 to 9:30, but it was 9:27 and she had come up with nothing. She stared up at the sky and made slow figure eights along the path as she rollered forward, then back to Ronnie and Winton.

“Melodious and fabulous showtunes about her life! I’ll put on a long black wig and slinky sleeveless dress. You can play Isaiah, Ronnie. It’ll be kinky-rific!” Trix trilled as she skated past her two friends and raised her right leg over her head.

Ronnie looked excited. He clapped his hands and flipped his bleached-blond hair out of his face. Ronnie was always excited about everything: he was part Labrador.