“Absence of light played over life-sized strawmen and creaking shelves. A door flew open, a fugitive rushed in from the street, candles flickered violently. ‘You must help me!’ The shopkeeper looked up behind her counter: ‘Must I?'” Published in: Fantasy Shorts (April 2020)  

“The Mountains of Oblivion grew higher at the horizon with every passing hour, and ironically, they might have been the only thing that one couldn’t forget in this desert made of snow. / The leaves and branches slapped him, scratching his skin with raw nails and, where he was covered with oiled leather or rusting…

“Welcome to the carnival city, most extraordinary of visitors, our highly distinguished patrons.” The words reverberated from the house walls in a chorus of echoes, emanating from the gills of somber gargoyles and from murmuring water pipes. The city was a maze of fog and bridges, gondolas drifting over canals, their punting poles stirring up…

“Marcus smiled when he was happy and also when he was sad–he smiled when he made people laugh and when he made them cry. Every day at work, he changed people’s lives with a smile: when he sold them new costumes to slip into, consisting not of seams and fabric but of intangible concepts, of…

“We require the Tirani correspondence from the archives. Do not open it. Do not read it. Bring it to us.” The instruction came from the fax machine line by line, accompanied by toneless buzzing. M. watched the paper, searching for a way to escape this assignment, but there was none. The instruction was in writing,…

“an empty bottle blinks from the canal small people dwell in the murky water   at night they mend sandals and wash laundry gut fish and string up their scales they scrub the washrooms and pull the towels leave little gifts on the doorstep a bowl of milk for the disappeared rice and sambol for…