Featured · Episode 1 of 20
His finger hovers over the submit button. Marcus hesitates. On the screen, the Ares Frontier Application waits with patient indifference.
Scene 1
4 min · Ep 1 of MODEL COLLAPSE
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Looking forward
Five scenes that step half a pace off the real — a near-future job application that turns hostile, a daemon slumming it incognito, a hero in the country of his adoption, an anonymous dystopian dispatch, and a winter in a Chinese snow town.
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Scene 1
The Daemon Fyndraxis was slumming it. He was traveling incognito, and searching for a particular artifact that would improve his quality of life, slightly. This was a ridiculous thing for a creator deity to do, but he found it relaxing, and enjoyed the pursuit…
Scene 1
An old house with crumbling stonework, surrounded by greenery, and a slate roof still in good condition: this was the scene that lay before him. If someone had told him that the hero of his adopted country lived abroad, far from the city centre, he would never…
Untitled
People are not individuals. They have no true character. Society shapes a person’s identity. Grades, social norms, pressure. We stopped being human, we stopped talking, we stopped living and started merely existing. Focusing on deadlines, on surviving the next…
Snow Silkworm Town
Early October, intestines strung with snow, End of the twelfth lunar month, snow willow hangs like icy curtains. “Special snow sausages of Snow Silkworm Town! Come try them!” The peddler's shout at the town entrance cut through the blizzard, sounding strangely…
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Looking back
Eveline at the window. Chopin's Mrs. Mallard with the news of a death. A librarian whose archive has started inventing things. A granddaughter sorting through her grandmother's lies. Each one sits with what won't let go.
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She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.
Eveline
8 min · Standalone
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The Story of an Hour
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half co…
Index of Minor Events
Mara’s professional training had instilled in her a particular habit of mind, one that resisted speculation not because speculation was uninteresting, but because it was methodologically unsound. Archives, as she had been taught to understand them, were not sp…
Halmoni
My grandmother spoke three languages and lied in all of them. She lied in Korean to her sisters in Busan, telling them her American life was a palace of appliances and deferential children. She lied in Japanese to the dentist, saying she did not smoke, which s…
Prologue
The cozy half-light of the coffee shop smelled of freshly ground beans and cinnamon. I took a sip of my maple latte-my little weakness in this century-watching a couple by the window. They were so young, so diligently feigning nonchalance. The girl squinted at…
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