by Alice “Huskyteer” Dryden When you wake, you wait a few moments for your eyes to come online. You can manage without them, but it’s pleasant to lie in the dark warmth and purr while the blurred pixels slowly crystallise into your world. You stretch a striped arm and extend your claws until the pink quick shows, then pick up your other arm and lock it into position. Stretch. Extend. The joints move with ease and the claws, opaque white on this paw, click smoothly in and out. It’s time to begin. You’re a second-generation Bengal. Your parents were grown in the wombs of human women who needed the money…

by Anna Madden The moon is fat with silver the night men attack with metal teeth held in their hands. The stars are holes punched out of a black sky, arrows pouring down. I flee the torrent, the biting sticks like burrs between keeled scales. The air tastes of salt and danger. The nest is lost, but your egg is safe. I carry it within my maw. I fear you’ll be born a fool, like me. A mooncalf hatchling, or a shining new dawn? There are so few safe places left. Our world dies one wingbeat at a time, but still, I fly.   * * * About the Author…

by Amy Clare Fontaine Arthur dreamed an endless dream. He dreamed of sumptuous banquets with his comrades by his side, roast pheasants and bards and fire jugglers. Feasts where the wine and the laughter never ran dry, and the great hall rang with stories and songs all through the night. The hearth warmed his bones and the company warmed his heart… He dreamed of dancing with Guinevere in the courtyard in the moonlight, the fragrance of the flowers in her hair… He dreamed of chasing his falcon through the woods on a warm summer day, racing through the trees and laughing into the wind…

by Rebecca E. Treasure Harold was mostly a fish. Most days, at most times, he liked being a fish. Moving through layers of cool and warm, diving after drifting bits of this and that, spreading his milt over the sandy bottom. But there were times when he longed to stretch his fins beyond what nature seemed to intend, sprout feathers, and soar into the clouds. His fish friends both admired and avoided him for his strange habit of cultivating bird friendships. Susan, too, would sometimes chat with the birds — in particular a patchy pelican with the odd quirk of diving into the water for hours at a time. But,…

by Emily Randolph-Epstein “Flyflutterfly.” My body resists the calling song. Wings aching from flying lessons with my eggsitter’s mate. My tummy, bloated with spiders and seeds and sweet berries, makes me torpid. But the song acts as a crank, lifting my head from under my blue and black wing. Around me, my nestmates stir, blinking sleepy eyes. “Flyflutter.” The song, sweet and clear as dew on bunchgrass, drifts on the summer breeze. Not a war song or a warning song, or a mating serenade. The melody ensnares me as inevitably as any raptor’s talons.

by Marie Croke Grass! There is GRASS in my mosaics. Little spits of green jutting up between my maroon swirls, in my rocky piles, even on my signature. Little spits of greenery in the shapes of hoof prints trampling through my land. And I spent a long time on that signature. Oh, my fury will be known! I can see the interloper out there past the outcropping, her blazing white tail sparkling, her sleek black back shining, her head held up like she is proud of the destruction her wake has wrought. That’s the problem with other unicorns:  they are condescending, thinking everyone wants their obnoxious green sprouts that grow…

by P.H. Lee Once upon a time there was a tree that yearned to become some other thing, some particular thing that it could not put a name to. It turned the idea over and over within itself, but after only a few decades, it could not explain what it was that it yearned to become. “I should ask the rest of the forest,” the tree thought to itself, and so it prepared its words as best it could, coiling them through the capillaries of its root system, trying to explain that it wanted to become something else, but not just anything else, a particular something else that it could…

by Gwynne Garfinkle How it begins: a human girl with brown braids finds me sprawled on my back in the weeds. She stares down at me, and her bespectacled freckle-face bursts into an astonished grin. “Niko? It is you! Are you all right?” She helps me to my feet. I’m about a head taller than her. “I crashed,” I say. I remember hurtling towards a green and blue planet, then the impact. It should have killed me. “My space ship…” I look around. There’s no wreckage, though there should be. Just a little broken glass and some cigarette butts. How do I know what cigarette butts are? There are no…

by Gretchen Tessmer The first time I meet Charley Coavins, I’m sitting on a lichen-licked speck of rock, way up on the sunny hillside of an old mountain I don’t know by name. She’s leading her father’s unruly flock of sheep home for the night. She has a shepherd’s crook in one hand and a smoke-grey kitten squirming around the other, climbing up the sleeve of her dirndl on curious claws, exploring the paisley kerchief ties at the back of her neck. A kestrel flies above her, gliding in a sea of blue sky. “Hey, shepherd-girl!” I call out in a moment of impulsive fancy, too idle for my own…