To order at the restaurant under the sign of twin ibises, you need to write a menu no one can read. She felt the secret gravity of that gem-heart tugging at her every cut, guiding her as she shaped, the source of the steadily escalating rightness she felt as each refining polish brought her closer […]
Taking a break at the midpoint of the main Notes from an Imaginary Place sequence, here’s one of my first published stories. Detail from a Painting by Hieronymus Bosch Read the newsletter installment. Hear the podcast.
You grew up in a capsule like these–playing, learning. Now, all these years later, you’ve come back. Each capsule was a cozy, safe space for a child and once a child had chosen a capsule, it became their place, their refuge, and the door would iris open at only their touch. Some years later, when […]
A poem. A glass box. A voice coach. A heist. X is for Xystus. Why the party was being held in this particular garden mystified the voice coach. The space was cluttered with an abundance of topiary, follies, ponds both reflecting and lily, smaller trellised walkways that intersected the main xystus, three-level gazebos, colonnades in […]
Up in the branches of mile-high trees, a cartographer maps the routes between greenhouses. For the last great mapping exercise, a cartography team of twenty had swarmed through the treetops from greenhouse to greenhouse. But that had involved sketching everything by hand, followed by hours upon hours of laborious copying and compiling. She, however, has […]
In a place where the dead are never really gone, a hairdresser carries out his complicated profession on the deceased. Because just as the dead have to wear their specialized robes, flowing in some places and wrapped tight in others, their hair must be styled in the distinctive styles of the deceased. It takes cutting […]
The old kilns are being converted into cozy living spaces. The only problem is that they’re haunted, and not by ordinary ghosts. Officially, it’s just chemical residue on the walls and ceiling that glows with phosphorescence at night. But I know how well-scoured everything is by the time the refurbishing is complete. I see all […]
An ecologist spends a summer in the dark and silent embassy as the honorary spy for the season. The isolation wore her down, watching gaggles of glad-handing politicians parley, posture, and passive aggressively bicker over trade and borders while none of them knew she was even there. She found days upon days of all that […]
A worker in an ordinary-enough looking office has a secret vocation as a yam curer. This leads to some unexpected consequences. Although the last page of each briefcase’s printout is a map with instructions for where it should be left, the office workers leave the briefcases with additional flair that afternoon and evening. Not just […]
An accountant begins to frequent a secret, or maybe not-so-secret, place. The prevailing culture in this region is resolutely practical, which may be why the people here find the folly so irresistible. They have to visit once to prove to themselves that it really exists. Then their memories nag at them until they come back […]