2021
Birds Are Trying to Reinvent Your Heart
Baffling Magazine, 720 words (January 2021)
And as you lie there, replete, salt creeping ever nearer to your toes, she pulls her conch-carved blade from the tangled discards of her garments and slips it sweetly into your breast. Her eyes are still soft as moonlight. Her hands tremble.
You kill her, of course. Mortals are even more fragile than hearts.
2020
In the Salt Crypts of Ghiarelle
Silk & Steel, 6800 words (November 2020)
It has been twenty-three days since Queen Marielle and her Consort were laid to rest in the salt caves beneath clifftop Ghiarelle Palace. The few surviving gendarmes divide their off-duty hours between hammering dents out of plate armour and scrubbing blood from uniform tunics, now most of the funerals are done with.
You could probably say things were a little fucking tense.
Upon What Soil They Fed
Syntax & Salt: Final Issue, 800 words (January 2020)
The kid managed to get into the discards when I wasn’t looking. The room was claustrophobic with houseplants; there were tendrils crawling over the coffee table, twining with the furniture, disappearing into the seams of the upholstery like rivers vanishing into the earth. Before I noticed him doing it, he’d started draping ’em with meat. Half defrosted pork-chops hung from the vines like slowly dripping baubles.
2018
A Cradle of Vines
Cast of Wonders, 1700 words (July 2018)
Her mother always told her not to pester the wildlife–it was kinder to leave the plants and animals to live their lives undisturbed. But her mother smells different these days, of half-digested milk and new perfume, and Gyn walks to school alone. Her mother’s words have lost their power.
Thou Shalt Be Free As Mountain Winds
Skies of Wonder, 4200 words (June 2018)
The merchant ship was slow and fat against the setting sun, cargo hanging bulbous as a pelican’s belly beneath the silken carapace of her balloon. This one, at least, had armed herself. Clanking plates of mismatched metals rattled against her hull, the weight dragging awkwardly through the air.