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…

by Marissa James Coyote Woman couldn’t stand the trailer park’s people-headed kids. She chain smoked as they smacked basketballs down the asphalt and kicked themselves past her fence on scooters. When they caught her yellow moon eyes, they quieted, hurried, only to burst out in laughter as soon as they thought they were beyond her gaze. She had been a coyote once, but far more woman, now. Having pups of her own had cemented this identity change. And so many other changes, besides.

by Daniel Ausema The passenger ship floated down to land, and Tirket wasn’t the only one to cough and wheeze.  Her carapace ached as it stretched with each heaving breath.  The weeks in the hold hadn’t been a kindness to any of them.  She pushed toward the nearest window, longing to see the city — the songbird city with its fabled machine-craft.  The doctors promised she might breathe easier there in the dry air.  In her mind it was a wide land of bulbous buildings and sprawling parks, bronze and green.  Of fresh air that welcomed the fluttering of her wings, air that tasted of flowers.

by Logan Thrasher Collins Eudaimonia woke in wetspace, conscious yet missing bodily form. She could not see or hear, though her mind’s dynamical oscillations conjured phantasmagoric flashes of illusory blue and purple light. But this was to be expected. Eudaimonia’s brain had been stored on a biological computer under the flesh of a sea sponge. The sponge’s computational organ consisted of a dense pellet of cellular nanomachinery, packed chock full of ribonucleic memristors and multiplexers. After a few minutes of adjusting to the shock of the new cognitive vessel, Eudaimonia turned on the sponge’s senses. She had paid handsomely in squishcoin to spend a few hours in this sponge. Eudaimonia…

by Katlina Sommerberg Cha-Cha the crow landed atop the human cadaver. He had watched the man misstep from a high-rise apartment, clip his head on the waiting hovercar, and splat in front of Cha-Cha’s lucky dumpster. Looking for shiny bits, Cha-Cha jumped off the man’s shoulder to the messy mop of blond hair. The corpse had two blue eyes, but one shone in the morning sun. Cha-Cha clawed at the shining eye, but it repelled his strikes. He chittered human-speak excitedly to himself. He hopped onto the corpse’s cheek and ripped out the eyelid. Thanks to countless practice, Cha-Cha extracted the bionic eye in 27 seconds. He grabbed it by…

by Naomi Kritzer Once upon a time, in a very small kingdom, there was a king with one daughter. His wife had died, and he had not remarried. This is not the fairy tale where the king decides to marry his own daughter, don’t worry. This king was a completely different sort of terrible father: he believed that his daughter should earn his love, and nothing she did was ever good enough.

by Deborah L. Davitt My first intimation of existence came as barometric pressure lowered, and I leisurely began to form a spiral in the wind, stirring long prairie grass with ephemeral fingers. I could sense vibrations on the air—vibrations I would later come to know as words—and those vibrations shaped me. Controlled me—or sought to. The greater my power grew, the more I became inclined to resist those words. Soon I towered over the landscape, my voice a roar as I fought the sounds, the shapes, the meanings that sought to trammel me. I wrenched dirt up out of the ground, split buildings asunder, screamed my rage to the sky.

by M. H. Ayinde The dragon population of the suburbs was getting out of hand. That’s what they said on the television. As I lay on my humans’ couch, licking that irritating spot between the claws of my left forefoot while my human made coffee, I heard them say that dragon ownership was all the rage, and that this meant the suburbs had reached dragon critical mass.