by Elizabeth Walker My sire was a dragon held to be greedy even by the standards of our breed. He drugged my mother and stole me before my shell had even had a chance to soften. He sold my egg for gold to a witch. The witch, Otha, wanted a tame dragon, and Father wanted more treasure for his hoard. He should’ve remembered hatchlings can hear through our shells, and Mother had whispered her love to each of us. I was born knowing the wrong that had been done to me. As my egg opened, and I tumbled into Otha’s waiting arms, I set her hair afire.

by Rachel Ayers Puss is magnificat, terrificat, fantasticat. He is all that is feline grace and modern machine. He is IntelliCat09 (patent pending). And pending it shall remain, for his dear master, Mr. Mark Carabas, has passed on, leaving his greatest work unrecognized. The inventor left the cat to his youngest son, Tom—of course Puss knows who belongs to whom, but he’ll watch out for the lad. The boy was quite put out. Thought he’d be better off with the house or car, like his older brothers got. He’ll know better soon. “What am I supposed to do, skin you and eat you?” young Tom asks. “I’ll starve while my…

by James L. Steele Five monitors on the desk took up three sides of the tiny room. Behind them dangled a mess of wires, power strips, and CPUs that generated so much heat Tech had disconnected this room from the heating system months ago. Tech sat in the chair, turned to the right-hand desk. The brown rat wore no clothing. His clothes, phone, wallet, and car keys had been stashed in a drawer elsewhere in the building, and as long as he was on the job, he was not allowed to wear them. Nobody wore clothes in here because Alpha said this was a place to shed civilization. Tech’s fur…

by Elinor Caiman Sands A: You haven’t eaten for two months so you creep up slowly through the steaming manhole, claws grasping the concrete, and step out onto the busy sidewalk. Here the lights of Manhattan are overwhelming, as is the stinky traffic and horrible indigestible donut smells. It’s really not a nice place to be. But you’re soooo terribly hungry. Got to try something; you’re way too young and too little to go to the great swamp in the sky. So what do you want to do? Choose B if—yay!—you want to try nomming a passing tourist. Their tasty-looking ankles scurry in every direction. They smell soooo delicious. Choose…

by Christine Lucas On the morning of the Seventh Day, the Garden of Eden was calm and peaceful. The Serpent stretched. She had to fix that. Perfection was very, very boring. She crawled through the tall grass to the pride of lions sunning their fur in a clearing by the Euphrates’ bank. “Hey, did you know what lambs are made of? Meat. Fresh and juicy meat. Why would they be made of meat if you weren’t supposed to eat them? Go on, give it a try,” she whispered to a lioness, her scaly tail pointing at a herd grazing close by. She had never liked lambs.

by Mari Ness The fox hires children to bring him coffee every day. He had discovered the wonders of coffee, and the even greater wonders of handcrafted espresso drinks, quite by accident, when a human woman had left her single sourced Kenyan blend with soy on a bench without a lid, and then, followed this up by leaving a vanilla soy latte on a neighboring bench – again, without a lid. It was quite safe to say that the fox became obsessed, and equally safe to say that it was a difficult obsession to indulge. Humans, as it turned out, did not deal well with foxes trotting into their stores…

by Slip Wolf I’m in a small part of heaven.  My delicate feline nose picks apart what my eyes already feast on; inside the glinting glass hull of the French press, the coil-rimmed filter, carrying grounds from the toasted gold above, descends. A caramel head of froth crowns the results.  I pick up the press by its warm stem, pour with care so no drops escape the bone-white mug with its silver-leaf logo reading Kypris on its flank.  Steam rises as I set the press down and stir the cream upward.  I delay the moment with bated breath, then another. In heaven there’s no need but I do this because…

by Emily Randolph-Epstein The dragons have a direct line to my mind. Their voices enveloping, filling, as though their warm, scaled bodies are at once wrapping around me and within me. They pull me now from deep dreams. “The Red Dragon passes. Attend at dawn.” A check of the weather app warns of snow today and dawn in an hour and ten minutes. There’ll be no lounging in the dark, warm bed this morning, not if I’m to clear the snow from my car and make the half-hour drive to Ashport. If I’m late to the Passage, then the Red Dragon won’t be able to reach the Eternal Sky. I…