Awkward Robots

Deborah Bailey: In LOST MEMORIES OF AIR, the Festival for the Revered Dead draws to a close, and a young girl has to face what makes life—and the afterlife—worthwhile.

Eliza Blair: In L4G, a lonely thirteen-year-old gamer finds he can communicate with the future through the chat function on a forgotten server.

Lisa Bolekaja: NINJA FISHING follows two best friends as they partake in a fishing expedition that nets them a somewhat familiar creature on the eve of Hurricane Katrina.

Sadie Bruce: In SUGAR AND SPICE, popular girl Cherry uses the keen edge of a razor to slice away her self-loathing and the last of her rotting self-esteem, but no cut is deep enough to reach her secret or pierce the dead girl staring out of every mirror. 

Lara Elena Donnelly: Jonathan Bright is THE DIRTY AMERICAN: a terrible person and brilliant perfumer. When he hires a wickedly talented lab assistant, competition and sexual chemistry combine to cause a dangerous reaction.

Eric Esser: In FABLE OF THE BOX, two children play with a magic box that can raise the dead, and the living. 

Jonathan Fortin: In LOST RING, a man in a struggling marriage begins to hear a voice from beneath his bed. 

Chris Kammerud: In THE END OF THE WORLD, a teenage boy struggles to come to grips with his past in the midst of a circus equal parts melancholy and magic.

Ruby Katigbak: In THE SUGAR BEES, child-seeming creatures walk among the trick-or-treaters each Halloween, urgently taking their candy harvest so they can survive the harsh winter. But will their hive’s hidden unrest prove the greater danger?

Pierre Lienberg: Isolated, with cliffs on one side and an ocean on the other, a young boy and his siblings discover a token that once belonged to their missing father. But in THE RULES OUR MOTHER MADE ABOUT THE SEA, whatever the sea gives she demands in return. 

Sarah Mack: In PLENTY OF TIME, haunting your spouse should be fairly straightforward, but when she begins dating a physicist in order to go back in time and prevent your death—it isn’t.

Dan McMinn: In SWEETS AND SORROWS, a millennium-and-a-half-old trick-or-treater goes house to house, begging for a taste of his favorite treat: sorrow.

Sam J. Miller: In RENUNCIATION ORANGE, Nyx grapples with the guilt of what he might or might not have done in his work as an oublietter—an independent contractor who gets paid well to do jobs so secret that he has to take special drugs that make him forget them once they’re finished. 

Luke R. Pebler: EFFECTIVELY ABSOLUTE is a hard science fiction tale of repressed desire and frayed sanity aboard the first manned mission to Europa.