Short stories – Page 18

The Signal Birds

12/05/201612/05/2016 OJ

I’ve a new story out!

“The Signal Birds” can be found in the inaugural issue of Liminal Stories. It’s about women and war and constraint, and how conflict can change bodies for better or worse. “The Signal Birds” has been illustrated by Tracy Durnell.

Shift change was always marked by the same roster call. “Sugar-plum, feather-plum, come get your coats on! Fall in, ducklings all!”

There were minor variations. We weren’t always ducklings. It was “goslings” when the raids were high, with night-time Spitfires over the Channel, and “little magpie twits” when room inspections had seen too many rinsed out panties hanging in the dormitory bathrooms.

I don’t know what else she expected. The south coast in winter was not a place we could hang out our washing and reliably expect it to dry. It was knickers strung round the bath like bunting or nothing.

“I’d rather nothing than damp,” said Polly. We’d both taken shifts in front of the radar with underwear that hadn’t fully dried before, and it had been an unpleasant, squirming experience.

“Not what I imagined when I got my wings,” she said. “Somehow I thought there’d be more glamour with it.”

The rest of the story is free to read at the above link.

It’s a great first issue for Liminal, though I do say so myself. Also included are fantastic stories by A.C. Wise, David Tallerman, Trevor Shikaze, Joseph Allen Hill and Nazifa Islam. Check it out!

SFF, Short stories

The Sea Bank of Svalbard South

22/03/201622/03/2016 OJ

I’ve a new story out!

“The Sea Bank of Svalbard South” can be found in the March issue of Metaphorosis, and is based around the idea of isolation: how we make it, how we enforce it. It’s a riff on the actual Doomsday seed vault up at Svalbard, in the Arctic Circle, but this is a sea bank, not a seed one, and set in southern waters. It’s focused on the preservation of marine plants, specifically of algae.

I’m very fond of algae (they’re fascinating organisms!) so it’s no surprise that the story’s structured around it. In fact, pretty much every alga mentioned in the story is one I’ve worked on in the past, when I was looking at seasonal variations in mycosporine-like amino acids in seaweed – for which I still haven’t written up the paper (must get on to that).

Lizzy thought she’d be spared the burying of him. She’d looked for Bryan in the dark waters, in wind and rain until night fell and searching was useless. After three days she thought the sea had taken him.

He had thrown himself from the sea-cliffs. She’d watched him do it and hadn’t understood what he was doing until it was over. Even after, with time to reflect, it was barely comprehensible. South should have been a safe place for people like them. The isolation, the silence. The sheer relief of it all.

Why hadn’t he been grateful?

Anyway, it’s free to read up the link there.

SFF, Short stories

BONE LENGTH, WAVELENGTH

22/12/2015 OJ

I’ve a new story out today!

“Bone Length, Wavelength” can be found in issue 2 of Capricious, a new speculative fiction zine from New Zealand. It’s set in the same universe as some of my other stories – if you’ve read “The Mistress of Fishes”, for instance (or listened to it on StarShipSofa) then you’ll recognise the references to Carnival.

Like the other stories in this universe, “Bone Length, Wavelength” is set in a future New Zealand that is primarily concerned with ocean restoration after marine ecological collapse. This story looks at a family who, after death, use their bones to build a giant underwater organ to make music for whales. Enter Eli, whose bones are too twisted for song…

They’d been marked off, all of them, in the kitchen. On the door jamb, at every birthday, and every generation the wood would be removed to the shed to be nailed up along the wall and there they were, all of them, all of their large and extended family for the better part of three hundred years.

All of them but Eli.

There was no standing for him. He’d been born with useless legs, the bones all twisted and his femurs would go to the grave with him. He’d never stand, let alone walk, and when he died, it’d be the Carnival for him…

Novellas, Short stories

Pre-order SHORTCUTS and win!

13/09/2015 OJ

At the beginning of the month, Paper Road Press published my novella The Ghost of Matter. This was the last of their 2015 Shortcuts series: six titles by Kiwi authors, themed around strange tales of Aotearoa New Zealand.

All the Shortcuts stories were sold separately as ebooks. But that’s about to change! There’s a print collection on the way, just in time for Christmas. That’s six novellas in one book: Mika by Lee Murray and Piper Mejia; The Last by Grant Stone; Bree’s Dinosaur by A.C. Buchanan; Pocket Wife by I.K. Paterson-Harkness; Landfall by Tim Jones; and The Ghost of Matter.

You can pre-order Shortcuts now, and if you do, you go in the draw for free book vouchers! So check it out.

SFF, Short stories

“The Tree of Life in Lisbon”

09/09/201509/09/2015 OJ

My latest short story is out! “The Tree of Life in Lisbon” is free to read over at Luna Station Quarterly. It’s a fantasy story about what happens after the Garden of Eden – more gardening, basically, and golems and apples and earthquakes. So much of my recent writing has been science-based that it feels almost strange to dip back into fantasy for a while.

“You are turning into a shut-in,” said the Golem. “It is unbecoming.”

“It’s not a flaw to appreciate the comforts of home,” said Eve. “And travelling is so tiresome. It’s barely been two centuries since the last move. You cannot be bored yet.”

“I could never be bored with you,” said the Golem, honey-tongued and reproachful at once. “I lack the capacity.”

“I know,” said Eve, who had carved lack of imagination into his tongue, who would not see the same mistake made twice. “You should be grateful for that.”

“I am not grateful,” said the Golem. “And I am not bored. You have not left this garden for decades. I am disturbed.”

“I’ve no reason to leave,” said Eve. “I like it here.”

“I am disturbed,” said the Golem again. Eve heaved a sigh, and with her little carving knife sliced silence into the skin of a sweet, plump little grape and fed it to him, letting herself bask in the quiet. And the Golem did not speak and he did not nag, did not try to convince her to go out to market or to the hairdressers, to the puppet shows or the street musicians. The Golem was used to silence, had been fed it with olives and rose-water and seed pods, the muddy taste of mangroves, and he held the grape carefully on his tongue, carefully between jaws of clay, and waited to be told to spit it out.

He was not capable of boredom, but Eve was.