It started, as these things often do, with neighborhood talk and a lot of good intentions. “You know, Kenji,” his mother said, “you ought to offer to do Mr. Pritchard’s lawn. Poor man’s yard looks like a wheat field these days.” Kenji Ito stopped pushing his mower and wiped his forehead. “I don’t know. I…

Apocalypse: A revealing of truth, reality, or what’s hidden. Happy New Year, and welcome to the apocalypse. I don’t mean that in the fire-and-brimstone, meteors-falling-from-the-sky kind of way. Not yet, anyway. I mean it the way you mean it when you wake up on January 1st with a dull headache, a dead phone, and the…

The Zephyr in Virginia City was a thing with teeth. It crept from the Sierra’s flanks and lunged into streets and alleys, scattering hat brims and brass fittings, finding the gap between collar and throat and pulling cold grit inside. In the spring of 1870, the town still smelled of the thing that made it…

Ginny had a way of asking questions that made people nervous. Not because she was mean, quite the opposite. She had this calm, polite tone that made folks realize she wasn’t going to let them wriggle away from the truth. So when she asked, “So, Mr. McMaster, you write about cosmic horror and dystopian futures,…

By the time Clara Ramirez turned twenty-eight, the desert had already taken most of what she had to give. The wind stole her husband first, then the years stole her sleep, her softness, and her hope for anything gentler than work. The year was 1870, and the New Mexico sun burned everything it touched until…

I learned early on that approval is a slippery thing. You can do everything right, hold the door, tell the truth, show up on time, help when it costs you something—and still end up on someone’s bad side. For a long time, that bothered me more than I care to admit. I thought goodness was…

It was the last day of Autumn, and you watched as the final leaf fell from the tree in your yard, towards the grass, and then everything shifted. You didn’t notice it right away. It began in the small ways, the quiet wrongness of air and light. The crisp scent of dying leaves faded into…

By the time the city began to collapse, the air had changed. A shimmer lay over the skyline, something almost biological, like the surface tension of water before it bursts. Helicopters hung over downtown like insects caught in amber. Sirens bled into the wind. The headlines spoke of “operations,” “raids,” and “data seizures.” But those…

You could look into the windows of the historic 1907 schoolhouse, but not enter. And if you knocked on the door or rapped on the windows, the children inside ignored you. That’s what everyone said about the place, though few ever bothered to prove it. The old school sat at the far edge of the…

Every December, millions of people sit around glowing screens, hot cocoa in hand, watching Santa fly around the world in “real time.” They track him as he hops time zones, dodges weather systems, and somehow delivers gifts to billions of homes without once asking for directions. It feels magical, like Santa finally got an operations…