A Mindreader’s Guide to Surviving Your First Year at the All-Girls Superhero Academy

by Jenn Reese

The day you arrive at the academy, you spend just three minutes outside the car before begging your mom to drive you back home. There are too many girls. They’re too loud. They’re laughing. Some of them are flying. Even if you weren’t a mindreader, you’d be overwhelmed.

Your mother, who took a day off work and has driven eleven hours straight to get you here, refuses. She is the worst mother ever.

A girl approaches, her eyes so sharp you expect her codename to be DAZZLE or CHARISMA or SINGULARITY. You can’t stop yourself from reading her mind: she calls herself Meg.

You refuse to shake Meg’s hand and demand that she leave you alone. You tell her your superpower and that nothing she thinks is safe from you. You tell her you don’t want or need friends.

You’re grateful she’s not a mindreader, too.

Meg shrugs and tells you she can blow things up with a thought. She offers to show you to your dorm. Bewildered, you hug your mother goodbye, grab your duffel, and follow Meg, whose hair is brown and whose eyes are lighter brown and whose codename should be TEMPEST or HURRICANE or AVALANCHE based on how she’s making you feel.

For the next three weeks, the days are a blur of headaches and other girls’ anxieties.

I’m not strong enough to stop a train.

I’m too slow to defuse the bomb.

My witty rejoinders are not actually witty.

That creepy mindreader is probably reading my mind.

(Continue Reading…)

Mariska and Major

By Damini Kane

Mariska is not an Indian name. I think that’s what caught my attention. She looked Indian enough, but there was something otherly about her, as though she spent too much time reliving childhood fantasies in her head. Still, she was nice, and we were neighbours, so we became friends.

She was the newest addition to our town. You wouldn’t know where I grew up; it doesn’t exist anymore. The people who lived there have moved on, their children based in expensive countries with jobs like Doctor and Lawyer and Techxpert. Our town was on a mountain. It snowed in the winters and burned in the summers. The little houses there were like grit in a nail bed, clinging to nooks and crevices in the rock, held together by a thread of a road. Sometimes, a bus would come to take us downhill, but we rarely ever boarded it. I believe my town might have been the last idyll in India, my country now full of choking cities. Today there’s a shopping mall over my home. The mountain was blown to pieces and in the winter, it is ash, not snow, that falls from the sky.

But this is not about any of that. Those are big things, Development, Environment, The Passage of Time. God knows I’m too small for such big things. This story can fit inside a coin purse. You could spend it at the corner store. You might drop it on the street and not even notice. (Continue Reading…)

8-Bit Free Will

By John Wiswell

They exist, then don’t exist, then exist again. They are monsters where the game’s probability fields call for them, attached to every tile of the dungeon. They are invisible to the player, whether they are there or not, until combat. If they’re lucky, they’ll get the chance to die.

The player always gets to exist, has always existed, and may as well always exist. The Hollow Knight and HealBlob don’t exist again until the player starts struggling with the other enemies. Then the Hollow Knight and HealBlob are re-spawned, to die in battle and smooth out the difficulty curve. They don’t exist long enough to know they’re in love before the player strikes. (Continue Reading…)