“Ascension” by P.L. McMillan – 2.3
Apex, February 2026 Sam is a competitive climber who lost their left arm in a factory accident — distracted by a voice note from their partner Abithe while initiating a…
“The Sea Child” by Justin Wesley Ferguson – 3.7
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2026 On the second anniversary of a storm that claimed her son Gunter, his wife Liesel, and their two young boys Rolf and Willi, elderly Gerda…
“This Obituary Has Been Redacted” by P.C. Verrone – 2.8
Strange Horizons, March 2026 Told entirely through the pages of a fictional gay magazine called Ganymede’s Men, P.C. Verrone’s story unfolds across a series of obituaries, letters to the editor,…
“When Things Went Bad” by Stephen Graham Jones – 3.4
Uncanny, March/April 2026 Braden, a farmer, is in the middle of an ordinary chore — shouldering a bag of seed corn from truck to shed — when an alien vessel…
“What We Mean When We Talk About the Hole in the Bathroom” by Angela Liu – 4.0
Uncanny, March/April 2026 A woman and her husband discover a two-foot circular hole in their bathroom wall, emanating cold wind that smells of wet soil and river water. Their argument…
“Welcome to Heroism” by John Wiswell – 2.7
Uncanny, March/April 2026 In a near-future world where superhumans exist alongside ordinary people, a viral app called The Dare quietly rewires the relationship between spectacle, power, and collective action. Every…
“The Woman Who Stole Flowers” by Theodora Goss – 4.0
Uncanny, March/April 2026 The story is narrated by an American academic on sabbatical in Budapest, researching changes in the Hungarian educational system in the post-Soviet era. One spring morning, she…
“The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” by E.M. Linden – 4.0
PodCastle, Episode 879, February 2025 The dead of Tawlish Island watch from the shore as the last thirty-seven living inhabitants evacuate their remote, failing community. The freshwater has gone brackish,…
“Chimera” by Anjali Sachdeva – 4.3
Uncanny, March/April 2026 Savita, a sixty-five-year-old Indian-American woman, has long dreaded Thanksgiving — not merely for its excess, but for the grief that has shadowed every November since her youngest…
“Terms of Enlightenment” by Patrick Hurley – 3.9
Lightspeed, March 2026 Jay Bender — born Jaime Arvind Chicao, a serial nonviolent offender who has spent his life exploiting loopholes and shedding identities — is sentenced by his judge-counselor…