Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold – Part One

by S.B. Divya

My parents taught me to lie as soon as I could speak. Before I knew the meaning of the words, before I understood heat or fire, and long before I felt the pain of singed flesh, I learned to tell strangers that I burned myself by grasping a hot iron pot.

Once a day, my mother would pour water over my bare hands, then bandage each one down to the wrists, first with cloth of gold, then plain muslin. She had a technique for winding them in a way that left each finger separate but fully covered, and at no point would her skin come into contact with mine. When I was old enough, she taught me how to wrap them myself. By then, I also understood the danger that she had put herself in.

My parents allowed me to transform small items and only rarely, usually before we approached a large city where people would ask fewer questions about our wares. They let me play with other children, never roughly. After all, if I had burned myself, I would find it painful to use my hands. Other boys my age would wrestle and scuffle. I always ran from a fight. (Continue Reading…)

A Most Lovely Song

by Albert Chu

It’s 1939, and the drone of piston engines fills the sky over Chungking. The G3M bombers are right overhead, close enough for people to see the red hinomaru emblazoned beneath their wings. They release their bombs, one by one, and the explosions rattle the earth, and they flatten the buildings, and in their wake, they leave behind the dead.

Now, a boy cries, “Baba! Baba!”

He’s crouched by a pile of rubble, trying in vain to pull a lifeless arm out from under it. Nobody’s around; only the shattered buildings witness his struggle.

He doesn’t notice the straggling G3M until its shadow passes over him. As he looks up in alarm, he hears the whistle of the falling bomb. He’s stuck staring, frozen, at the sky. (Continue Reading…)

Roti Time Travel

by Joshua Lim

You put a strip of roti in your mouth and chew —

— and now your living room is wreathed in shadows by the angry grey skies outside the windows. Your son crawls across the floor, chasing after the ball which rolls under the sofa where you sit. He looks up at you with large pearly eyes, saliva dripping from his lips. “Appa.”

From the kitchen you hear the clatter of utensils. Your wife is spooning baby food into a container. You attempt to move, but your body is rooted to the sofa. All you can do is stare at your son’s pure, innocent face, wishing you could remain like this forever. (Continue Reading…)

Publish or Perish

by Julia LaFond

Cynthia Blanche wasn’t credited as the first author on her own paper. She wasn’t the second, the third, or even the fourth. The Modern Journal of Phantasmology listed her as the last and least fifth author, which meant Dr. Redbud had screwed her over once again.

If Cynthia weren’t patient, she never would have made it through her candidacy exam, so she patiently barged into Dr. Redbud’s office.

“Could you please explain why I’m not the PI for my paper on the sulfur content of ectoplasm?”

Rolling his eyes, he swiveled away from his array of monitors. “The reviewers reached out to me and said they wanted us to determine the allotrope of the sulfur — when an element has multiple physical forms, each one is called an allotrope —”

Cynthia obviously knew what an allotrope was, but she also knew better than to interrupt Dr. Redbud when he was mansplaining.

(Continue Reading…)

The Third Wish

by Peter M. Floyd

I was in the middle of a pleasant little nap in the Seventh Sky of Severus when the summoning came.

Enfolded in a cloud bank, I was snuggling under the billows in a comfy-cozy fashion, all of the troubles of the sixteen quasi-pyramidal dimensions slipping away like forgotten dreams. This was my first real rest after four or five eternities spent putting out fires in the Red Chasm of Varsh, and I was looking forward to spending a nice long perpetuity indulging in some me time.

But no such luck. I had been there for only two or three eons when the all-too-familiar tingling sensation began in my phalanges and outer membranes and then spread in jagged waves along my dorsal limbs and then up through my carapace. There was no denying it; some fool on the mortal plane had successfully cast a spell to call me to them.

“Oh, by Crom’s back teeth,” I said to no one in particular. “Not now!”

But my words were in vain, and all too soon I felt the glorious softness of the cloud melt around me. For fifteen horrible seconds I slipped through the oily blackness between dimensions, fighting back the urge to vomit. (Dimensional travel always gives me motion sickness.) Then, with an audible pop, I landed in the mortal plane. (Continue Reading…)