There is a fire blazing in the ogre’s cave, and I can sense the heat by the way the smoke rises and the air shimmers like a snake, but I can’t feel it. I have no body to warm…

Minutes after the BART train pulls away from the platform, Lisa watches a ghost appear in a seat two rows up and on the far side of the aisle. It comes into being like smoke passing through a beam of light…

Lilita did not get her wings at ten, as expected. Nor at eleven. Doctors were called. Her parents paced in nervous circles. Perhaps a late bloomer, one doctor said. Perhaps she doesn’t have any at all, one didn’t say, but Lilita’s mother saw it in his eyes and saw the pity behind it…

The first time I killed, I felt his consciousness slide into mine, submerged under the dominant tide. Antilar Sosurdun kin-Sosurdun was a rarity, an Orator who was born the son of another Orator and thus grown up in privilege…

“There’s a dead bloke at the door.” Eleanor looked up from her darning. Nanna Kay stood in the doorway, a little mountain of curlers and blue flannel dressing gown. She didn’t appear to be joking…

August 28th, 1812. Lake Geneva, Switzerland. I pen these lines from the wine cellar of the Villa Diodati. I fear that they may be my last…

There was a time that I could stand atop the rock of Gibraltar, gaze upon the Bosporus, and bathe myself in the waters of the Indus in a single day. The world was full of voices and I burned with the ideas of untold masses of minds…

“In the Library of Rock” by Geoffrey A. Landis

“Virgins” by Richard Lung

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