Fiction by Helen McClory

When I met the young Mr Turing, I had not yet ascended as Autumn’s King. Nowadays it has become fashionable for the sons and daughters of the lesser fey gentry to improve their position in the shif…

When I leave the kill floor, my legs are wasted. I shuffle to the women’s locker room. I can’t stand anymore, but I know if I sit, I’ll never get back up. At least, not for another hour. I prop myself...

It’s rare for someone to be born with a genuine gift. I certainly wasn’t. Only thing I ever saw in a crystal ball was my own reflection, not that it stopped me taking the coins off the hopeful and the...

Radiant mice tell me they want to live in my house. It’s night and I’m trying to sleep and I don’t think I want any roommates, not even when they glow and sing a cappella at midnight. You can’t stay here, I say. This is the wrong place for you. The mice show me their feet. Look, they say. We have clever mice feet. We will build temples for you. A wave of frothy mud fills my floor and the mice use their clever little feet to sculpt it into miniature Roman structures; a replica Colosseum, a small-scale Pantheon, a petite aqueduct. They hum ballads while they work and I wonder where they studied architecture. The mice pat the frothy mud into a bust of a scowling emperor. Not Caracalla, I say. He looks so angry. They re-sculpt him into a waterfall that tastes like sanctuary and cotton candy; and they create rosebud roads and starshine bridges and parks filled with velvet pillows; and they sing me disco songs that make my not-so-clever feet tap light, so I tell them it’s not the wrong place for them after all, they can live in my desk drawer, if they want, forever, if they want, as long as they don’t mind the stray paper clips.   --- Myna Chang is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain (CutBank Books). Her writing has been selected for Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and WW Norton’s Flash Fiction America. Find her at MynaChang.com or on Bluesky at @MynaChang. 'Paperclip Empire' was first published in Gone Lawn, Issue 40 in Spring 2021.

The white medicine cabinet hangs behind the tall laundry basket and the grey painted wooden chair. Even standing on the chair, on tiptoes, I can’t reach it. It’s like a magic box, filled with objects I long to explore. The bottom shelf is packed with bandages: rolled-up elastic fabric for twisted ankles, white gauze for bike crashes, band-aids for scratches. On the middle shelf, toothpaste-like tubes, iodine bottles, menthol sticks. The top shelf is nearly empty, just Mom’s headache pills. When I’m fourteen, I replace my thick plastic glasses with contact lenses. I stare at my exposed eyes in the mirror. If not for the red blotchy pimples under my bangs, I’d be beautiful. Each morning, I place the lens case and solution on the bottom shelf of the medicine cabinet, my acne cream on the middle one. In the evenings, I clean and store my contacts, scrub my face. There are fewer bandages now, up top with Mom’s pills.  Later, I move to the city. I keep mostly cosmetics in my medicine cabinet. Sometimes I drive home to visit Mom, by herself now, always glad to see me. I should visit more. One day, head throbbing, I open her medicine cabinet. There’s iodine, band-aids, but mostly the shelves are jammed with bottles, dark stained glass, white plastic, tall, squat, orange and purple vitamin labels, black and white prescription labels. Pills, liquids. Behind the bottles are syringes, cotton balls.  I click the cabinet door closed, wonder how I’ve missed it, what I’m going to say. How long we’ve got. --- Laila Miller writes about bougainvilleas and sea urchins and turnips, and sometimes about people who don’t get along. Her work can be found in Best Microfiction 2024, Flash Frontier, Cricket Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from Canada, she lives in Perth, Western Australia with her husband and son.

He spoke once, the words whispered by frozen lips on a face so frostbitten he looked like a porcelain doll. I found him below...

Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast. This page: The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video by Thomas Ha

You literally couldn’t make up recent events in the US. No one would believe you if you did

A new story from award-winning author Premee Mohamed about traveling so far from home.

Publisher's Note: Please enjoy this short story by Premee Mohamed, who, coincidentally(!!), has a book out from Psychopomp on February 11th. It's called One

A lonely navigator endangers her ship when the solitude of wormhole travel proves to be too much for her.