Author
Tim Pratt, Jenn Reese, Heather Shaw, Greg van Eekhout
Jenn Reese lives in Los Angeles and is currently writing a middle-grade adventure series for Candlewick Press. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons and the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Paper Cities, among others. Follow her adventures at jennreese.com.
Heather Shaw is a writer, editor, gardener and aikidoka living in Berkeley, California with her husband and son. She's had fiction in Strange Horizons, Polyphony, The Year's Best Fantasy, Escape Pod and other nice places. She just finished her first middle-grade novel, "Keaton T., Junior Gene Hacker" and is looking for representation. For more, visit heathershaw.org
Greg van Eekhout's fiction for adults and children includes the novels Norse Code and Kid vs. Squid and stories published in Asimov's, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and other places. He lives in San Diego, CA. For more information, visit writingandsnacks.com.
Z is for Zoom
Anna runs. Down city sidewalks, leaping over trashcans, into alleys, on top of dumpsters, bouncing off brick walls and scrambling to the roof. Feet pounding. Heart singing. Across the rooftops, jumping gaps, tumbling the force away and rolling up again. She didn't always run.…
Y is for Yellow
The room is really quite pleasant, with a neat and solid floor and a window that commands a view of the grounds. When we got here, the lawns shimmered, dark green in the sun. But John had the gardeners kill the grass with acids and salt, and now the yards are bare yellow. It is…
X is for Xylomancy
The xylomancer answered the ad he found in the paper. He arrived at the warehouse dressed in his finest robes of midnight black, bearing a satchel of meticulously gathered sticks. Several teenagers bustled around the dusty empty space, setting up a drum kit and tuning acoustic…
W is for When
The warden found me in some dusty little town in 1897. He wrinkled his nose with distaste. "You smell awful." I glared. "A whore, hmm? With your intelligence you were expected to at least achieve a..." He consulted his notes. "School 'marm,' or seamstress position." "The…
V is for V�monos
The Explorer hacked her way through the dense jungle foliage, the ruins of her riverboat smoking and sinking beside the rotting pier behind her. Night was falling, and only the fire from her burning ship provided illumination. The Explorer's brown skin had darkened further on…
U is for Ubiquitous
As I made love to my wife, with the windows open and evening air cooling our sweaty skin, glowing thumbs popped up around our bedroom. Six thumbs up, four thumbs down. "Sweetie," she said, as I panted above her, "I think we need to adjust our privacy filters." A few comments…
T is for Terpsichore
She'd stood on line for fourteen hours, since midnight the night before, freezing in the late winter air and bitter winds that whipped in from Lake Michigan near the Olympian Theatre where the auditions were being held. It was a popular TV show, one of the better ones in the…
S is for Solipsism
Encephalon watched from the center of his brain-shaped techno-lair as the outer blast doors were breached. The reinforced steel crumpled like paper, and the notoriously violent antihero vigilante Deathdrive kicked the remnants aside as he strode in. His costume was a black so…
R is for Raffle
The raffle at the spring fair always had the usual sort of prizes--canned hams, dinner for two at Monty's, a new black-and-white TV for the grand prize--before Serena Draffin came in last year and said she wanted to donate her life. "It's perfectly good, and there's still a lot…
Q is for Quit
When I arrive at Heorot, it's worse than I'd imagined. I knew they'd been beset by a monster named Grendel, but I'd underestimated the amount of damage the creature had done--not just to the hall, but to once-proud warriors within. King Hrothgar sits meekly on his wooden throne,…
P is for Parade
A parade is still the very best thing. Mother and Father bring all us children out, the youngest infants still umbilicaled, and stand us in front of the shops of Main Street to watch the parade go by. It begins with the riders on horses trotting and dancing and bright ribbons…
O is for Obfuscation
I shoulda never wished for invisibility. That stupid genie thinks he's so smart. He explained how I couldn't be really invisible without going blind, on account of how light would pass right through my transparent eyeballs or something, but he said he had another idea about how…
N is for Nevermore Nevermore Land
The young woman sitting on Ember's windowsill was dressed in a black tinkerbellish leotard. A black raven perched on her shoulder. Ember regarded her with suspicion. The sun had finally set after a hot day in San Francisco, and she'd made an executive decision to leave her…
M is for Mall
The mall walkers would arrive an hour before the shops opened, when it was so quiet that all you could hear was the hum of the air conditioners and the soft clip-clop of their sneakers on the buffed floor. Decked out in their jogging suits, they'd stride down the concourses,…
L is for Luminous
L is for Luminous The main problem was, she got more and more luminous. My wife and I were one of the great husband-and-wife burglar teams: she circumvented locks and alarms, using social engineering to find codes for the simpler security systems, and composing devastating…
K is for Kinky
You've tried everything from sex toys to Kama Sutra, but all to no avail? Maybe you need to get some kink under your Skin. This latest in Skin technology never caught on in the world of high-fashion, but the underground world of kinky sexplorers have kept the market for smelly…
J is for Junk
We arrived in calm seas off the North Pacific Gyre shortly after dawn. I confess, when I saw that everything we knew about this place appeared to be wrong, my strongest emotion was delight. We had come in our chartered ship, O'Brien, to study the Pacific Trash Vortex, a great…
I is for Inertia
I see Millie at the bus stop every morning. She's there when I arrive, knitting something shapeless that she never seems to finish. When my bus pulls up, she glances at the destination ticker, shakes her head, and goes back to her yarn. She had cats, but they're all dead now. A…
H is for Horse
The old mare trots out into the valley an hour before dusk every night. The other retired horses are all show horses, or they used to be, when their backs were strong and their coats shiny. They still practice their prancing routines in the yard in front of the big red barn,…
G is for Graven
I worship Mal'llandri, God of a Thousand Tongues. When he first came to Earth, I thought that meant he could communicate in every language. But no. He literally has a thousand tongues. I know this because I'm one of the artists Mal'llandri chose to recreate his image. Working in…
F is for Forever
Welcome to Hell's all-new Resort and Spa! Please, leave your worldly burdens by the gate and let me give you a tour. No, you're exactly right. We've done away with such outmoded tortures as fire and brimstone, liver-eating vultures, and the like. Oh, Sisyphus still clings to his…
E is for Excrement
The new human who has inherited me is but a child. He also lives in the New World, in a single room he calls his "dorm" with another boy near his own age. They imbibe more ale than they ought, and when they're in their cups they like to cajole me into drinking with them. I have…
D is for De Gustibus
I'd never seen the little herb shop in the strip mall before--though the truth was, I smelled it more than I saw it. I stepped inside, because when you live in the blandest reaches of outer suburbia, spices more exotic than cinnamon or sage are hard to come by. The shop was…
C is for Crate
Once upon a time, I was a college dropout living in a studio apartment so small, I could use the oven to heat the entire place. I spent my time picking up odd jobs, bouncing checks, and avoiding my landlord. Or... maybe none of that is important. What I was before doesn't…
B is for Banyan Tree
Jonas was eight when his best friend, Tabitha (Tabby, Tabs, or the Tabster for short) climbed up the Banyan tree and disappeared into its branches. The ancient tree had been the setting for many of their childhood adventures, spanning as it did several backyards in their…
A is for Arthur
Will stood on the riverbank and lifted a sheaf of papers to the moon. "Here is Arthur," he thundered in the remains of his stage-seasoned voice, "the tragedy of the world's mightiest king, penned by John Shakespeare's boy, a humble Stratford mummer." Bowing deeply, he laughed at…