You don’t exactly feel like you’ve won the lottery when you get cancer. But that’s how my doctor made it sound, when he called me into his office to discuss the test results for the lump on my right arm, just inside the bend of the elbow...
Quite a few people have written lately to ask, “What the [heck] is going on with Stupefying Stories and Rampant Loon Press?” I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, if your question is actually...
Political science was not his field, but Eugene McCarthy Bennett, PhD, developed a new political theory as he sat on the cat-clawed sofa in his living room, drinking lukewarm beer and watching the six o’clock news...
The Deep Ones, they called us. The High Priest of those, they called me—yes, and worshipped me as High Priest of themselves as well. You did. Well, some of your lowly, straggling, mortal kind. All around this tiny, tired rock; in South America, Hawai’i, in Africa, in Greenland, in dull, dank Dunwich, even...
The con had wound down. The fans were all gone back to their mundane lives, leaving the five of us in the con suite. Our host, the Gaming Director, passed around what was left of the free sodas. We drank and stared out the window as darkness gathered in the skies above the hotel...
Max plunged the sensor into the ground, waiting for the battered LED in the hilt to show if the decomp level in the grave made it worth digging up. If it was daylight, and if the cemetery management would cooperate, he or Jerry could have asked, saved themselves the trial and error. If, if...
Continued from Part 1 With SHOWCASE #11, we cut over to the “Crevasse” site design. It seemed like a great idea at the time. The original SHOWCASE site was, to be blunt, old, and very much a product of old-school browser-based desktop-oriented thinking. As outlined in “Show Your Work”, by late 2013 I’d concluded...
Wow. September already. First off, I want to give a shout-out to eagle-eyed proofreader Chris Pearce. No sooner did “Death Comes to Agratha” go live than she sent me an email pointing out a typo in “The Mission,” the story to which there is a link in the author’s bio. To correct this...
Henry Newman and I had been friends ever since his parents first brought him home from the yard sale. I didn’t care that he was older, and it didn’t matter to me that he couldn’t swim or speak seven languages...
Mrs. Sprague paused in front of the china cabinet when she heard a thunk. “What was that?” she called into the parlor. “Boys?” “Nothing, Mrs. Sprague,” they sang back in unison...
Lance J. Mushung has been one of our regular contributors for years. If you enjoyed “No Accounting for Taste,” you might also want to go spelunking in our archives, to find...
I sat on a bench on one side of the small, battleship-gray drop bay of my patrol cutter, Oliveria. The last month and a half of the patrol had been mind-numbing, but taking a ship of wasters into custody would soon make it all worthwhile...
Colin had a white birthmark on his blonde hair and one on his blonde lashes. Blindingly white and full of bones, he looked more like a towering birch than a teenage boy. “You want to know how white I am?” He whispered over the book stacks...
I answered the door myself, as I always did when the shelter had visitors after dark. The gaunt man on the doorstep swept aside his cloak with one hand. “I am Nikolai,” he said. “I haff come to take Lucy home.” More than his emaciated physique, the power of his stare gave him away...
Members of the Tri-City Literary Writers Group sipped green tea and waited in the farmhouse’s spacious kitchen. They’d been together for five years and recently switched their meeting location from a coffee shop to this rural dairy farm, after reading a newspaper article. This was their third meeting and they were excited...
Zantoinell reclined in her bath pool, enjoying total contentment. The hot salt water was divine, and so was being the Supreme One of the Zarkindell Realm...
Christ stepped under center and began barking out signals, his long, lank tresses hanging out the back of his helmet. McMullen, the Raiders’ weak-side linebacker, was on his toes as if to blitz, but the Lord saw through this ruse and figured Oakland was probably going to drop into a Cover-2 zone...
Kirima’s ice skates hissed as she glided across her frozen pond. Four smooth strokes, then three crossovers, her left foot over her right, then four more strokes. Her skates left gouges and a trail of ice shavings. Her hair clung to her temples, and her breath misted in the cold air...
Jackson always calls hyperspace the “waters of oblivion.” It seems an odd affectation, out of character with the rest of his carefree personality. His parents are both dead and he has no close relatives; he’s told me he plans to work the hyperspace runs until he’s thirty and then retire young and wealthy...
Unlike most of his brethren, the dragon Slagadune slept with both eyes closed, for he could smell any intruder foolhardy enough to stumble into his cave. A single blast of his blazing breath would turn the hardest steel to ash and melt skin and bones to butter. What’s more...
[Part 1 | Part 2] A great flapping of leathery wings overhead jerked Gris out of a sound sleep. Thomas was curled against his stomach, and they both looked up at the same time, catching a glimpse of green dragonhide through the branches. “Bloody hell,” Mac breathed next to him...
The little cybernetic gadfly popped up as soon as I logged in. “Dave Miller,” it dutifully nagged, “you are now 15 minutes overdue for your appointment with the company fitness consultant.” Right. I clicked the ‘ignore’ button to kill the message and then continued with my morning routine...
[Part 1] Dani woke with an unfamiliar weight on her hip, and she was reaching for her knife before she quite knew what was happening. “Of course,” a familiar voice said. “Kill first, ask questions once it’s too late.”...
The local dragon had made its annual demand for a new cat for its collection. Arms crossed, Daniella stared the village mayor down. She knew what he was thinking—that she was a silly little girl with no business undertaking such a vital enterprise. He’d turned it into a competition...
