Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies
Author: Brooke Bolander
I was playing at being mortal this century because I love cigarettes and shawarma, and it’s easier to order shawarma if your piercing shriek doesn’t drive the delivery boy mad. Mortality is fun in small doses. It’s very authentic, very down–in–the–dirt nitty–gritty. There are lullabies and lily pads and summer rainstorms and hardly anyone ever tries to cut your head off out of some moronic heroic obligation to the gods. If you want to sit on your ass and read a book, nobody judges you. Also, shawarma.
Running the Snake
Author: Kage Baker
“Mocking the bards, faking divine possession, and poaching! Can it be you haven’t a great deal of respect for the gods?” said Scorilo.
“That might be the case,” said Will sourly. “Yet see, gentlemen, the wages of impiety. I’m as talented a man as you’ll find in a long summer’s day; I can pull your tooth, cure your fever, paint your likeness, sit in judgment on your small claims, sing you all the lays of old Rome, foretell the hour of your death, and recite a solemn prayer over your ashy bones. And, thanks to that unwise moment of levity at High Bard Amaethon’s expense, I now scramble to earn my bread in the gutter.”
“What if impiety could be made to pay?” inquired Scorilo, with a coy leer.
“What if, indeed? I’m listening.”
Thundergod in Therapy (Audio)
Author: Effie Seiberg
It took three days, but he disconnected his entire condo from the grid. He smashed holes in the plasterboard walls and yanked out wire after wire—brute force was as good a method as any. Then, in a tangle of metal and plastic, he reconnected everything to the battery, which now sat in the middle of his beige living room instead of the shitty coffee table. The apartment was transformed. Once a beige box of sadness, it was now a rat’s nest of blue and red wire casings which covered the walls (and part of the beige carpet) like ivy with a faint snow of plaster dust.
He sat on his fake leather sofa, put a finger on each of the hulking thing’s contact points and shoved lightning in. The battery’s gauge on the side lit up red, then yellow, then green.