HUNGER’S END, by Scott Shank   For nine days they had tasted no bread. For five days they had tasted no flesh. The last of their arrows they had lost to the sun-eating canopy, for the little blackcaps that flitted among the branches were too swift. Of other game, there was no trace. No creature […]

DRAGON IN AMBER, by Patrice Sarath   I raised my head and looked at the man who entered my iron prison. My captors had put rings through the once-supple leathery skin of my wings and at the base of my spiked tail, and threaded the iron chains through them so that even a small movement […]

GREAT POET EMPEROR, by Meg Moseman   The Great Poet Emperor sways on his throne, borne on filigreed pillars by twenty-foot djinn across the wide ocean the octopus roams– across the wild blue sea! The Great Poet Emperor ceaselessly scribbles the tower of paper he conjured from hell with a bottomless bottle of lavender ink– […]

BETWEEN SEA AND FLAME, by Evan Dicken Hummingbird ran. Branches whipped across her arms, the shouts of her pursuers eclipsed by the huffing gurgle of the thing tearing through the forest behind her. There was a loud crack as one of the Sea People fired his weapon, the shot tearing through the leaves nearby. Hummingbird […]

I AM BECOME DEATH, DESTROYER OF WORLDS, by Raphael Ordonez     Upheld by glee over an abyss of dread, the audacious, black-and-white-painted sacred clown raced up the big slope where blue grama and sagebrush waved beneath a turquoise sky. This night he would win the acclaim of his brother-clowns for generations. He would prank […]