2024
The Ways the Woods May Answer
Haven Spec Magazine, 1550 words (Forthcoming Autumn 2024)
They would not bury her in consecrated ground. Her life was all the wrong forms of holy.
Sparsely Populated With Stars
Flash Fiction Online, 970 words (March 2024)
You are born on the last day of autumn on a planet smothered in oceans, and this time, somehow, I know it is you. I dream your life in fragments: your slow sleeping growth inside the egg sac, the darting hide-and-seek with other fry, the way you laugh and tremble the first time another girl touches your fins.
But the shadow finds you eventually.
Stolen Berries (non-fiction)
Woods Reader Vol7 Issue1, 800 words (Spring 2024)
We like to pretend that the Anglophile world is one place; one long, bland scroll of well-understood flora and fauna. Grass is grass, trees are trees, and robins are most decidedly robins.
None of this is true.
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)
Flash Fiction Online, reprint (March 2023)
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.