This is a very long article.
If you’re interested, we’re laying bare the juicy gossip, true delights, embarrassing truths, and the often painful realities of running a small magazine. It’s also about what we did right, and what we learned from Reflection’s Edge. It’s the result of my having asked my staff to tell me about what it was like here at RE, with little or no direction from me on how they should frame their thoughts. Not everyone chose to write something, but those who did[...]
I’d overslept that morning and had run from the house with wet hair and an outfit only one oatmeal-colored cardigan away from being everyone’s mental image of librarian-chic. My mad dash screeched to a halt only a few miles down the highway. And now I sat, trying not to let my frustration at the stalled hover-carts bobbing all around get the best of me. Somewhere up ahead, the dwarves had…
They were waiting for Haji on the platform. He squinted at them through the window grime. They were the only whites waiting for the train. The woman’s golden hair spilled [...]
Why, with everything prime, would I answer the goddamn phone? In the Ten it’s just me and my restaurant. A narrow world of one-way streets and alleyways, black hot concrete and steel. Not much room for the natural things. Hell, there’s barely air that’s fit to breathe. Roses live in tacky plastic pots, vegetables come wrapped in neon gumbands stamped with smiling company mascots. But I like…
A scribble of lightning cracks from the roof of the house to the weedy lawn. I bend down, light up a cigarette on the flaming patch, and stomp out the [...]
The Soviet artillery is a steady heartbeat above our heads now. Reminds me of a child stomping about the house inside his daddy’s oversized boots, moving from room to room. Footsteps instead of detonations. I rather like the image. So do a few others in here with me. It lessens the fear. And down in our hole, there’s a lot to fear these days…
“Piss off, Gillespie. I mean it.” Captain MacManus clutched the banister of the third floor landing, kicking the apartment door closed behind him. He swallowed hard as the faded, grime-crusted walls of the ancient tenement swayed before him. He took a deep breath, grimacing as…
Shooting this press conference is the first worthwhile thing Francis Thorndyke will do in twenty-three years of life, and if he buggers it up he’ll forfeit his right ever to shoot anything more worthwhile than country bumpkins chasing cheeses down hills. His editor has vouchsafed this to him with the aid of an evocative metaphor involving bollocks, barbecues, and bamboo skewers. From my cubbyhole in the back of his mind…
Three months after I stepped on the land mine, I saw my dead son. He was slim and dark-haired, serious-faced as only a twenty-year-old can be. Without a word, he stepped into my Rambam hospital room, lifted my truncated body into a wheelchair, and pushed me down to the sea…
My father, a compulsive liar, once told me that a person dies every time a leaf falls from a tree. If you catch a leaf before it touches the ground, you save a person’s soul. It’s early September in Chicago, and I’ve already let thousands of souls perish. I walk to work, from one graffiti-stained side of Wrigleyville to the other. The sidewalks, congested with foot traffic an hour before, are now clear. The only people I encounter are…
“Witches are born with only half a heart,” our mother used to tell us. “That is why you will never love anyone completely, and why your heart will break so easily.” She was right. My sisters and I were unable to commit whole-heartedly to anything we did. This included our long-standing estrangement from each other—those of us who remain still met once a year, without fail…
She grew aware of something nestled in her hand. It was thin, crisp, somewhat square. Its strange presence was accompanied by a sound she knew, even with her eyes shut. [...]
When they died, a toucan landed on his shoulder. He shook it off.
It was the type of bird that appeared in ads for ale, assuring you that the dark stuff [...]
Vampires like lofts. It’s a bat thing.
Roland de Courtenay lives on the third floor of the Wilcott Building, a crumbling faux-Tudor edifice shouldered on both sides by twin semi-detacheds. Vines [...]
The memory of the day he’d killed Larrimore came to Dante, as it always did, with a dizzy jolt – jarred, this time, by the dead guard sprawled in the [...]