by Chad Gayle If your child’s a dragon, there’s no need to explain your tattered clothes or the smoke rings round your eyes. We know how your eyebrows got singed, and we know you spent half an hour or more circling the parking lot because you really didn’t want to walk through those double doors. You didn’t want to take your place among us, to admit by your very presence that you’re afraid of your young dragon, nor do you want to acknowledge that the love you’ve always felt for the magical creature living in your midst is fraught, these days, with dread and disappointment. Most of all, you’d rather…

by Mary Jo Rabe It turned out to be a perfect time for saving the universe. Fortunately, Fred the resident farm opossum was paying attention, as always. After a long nap, some careful foraging activity, and resultant nibbling, Fred the opossum laid his moderately chubby body down on the brown grass and dipped the sticky claws on his front feet tentatively into the muddy duck pond. The ducks flew off, quacking loudly in protest but acknowledging the potential danger of Fred’s presence. Completely unnecessary. Fred would never bother trying to kill a duck. Too much effort involved. Duck cadavers, marinated in the pond for a couple of days and covered…

by Erin Brown The wolf had the brambles to thank for the extra few minutes of life.  He had chosen to sleep in the tangle because it had grown a roof of snow, keeping him nearly warm through the winter night, as well as completely hidden.  As a result, when the smell of meat and spices and the sweetness of song roused his body in the early morning, the thorns arrested his instinctive pounce before his mind awoke enough to remember caution.  Then he recognized the voice. The song was sweet as any sent to greet a morning’s sunlight, and the smell of the meat twisted his stomach into knots,…

by Rebecca E. Treasure The bastard left me. Kissed the first pair of pert red lips under a tiara he found. Not a care for our hundreds of children, some of them still without legs, if you can believe it. After all we’ve been through. After all I’d done for him. The jerk flouncing away with that princess is nothing like the frog I met. Found him moping at the side of the pond, his ribbit a pathetic ribbon of noise barely worthy of the name. When he hopped away from me, that wild look in his eyes, he nearly toppled into the mud sideways. I thought it was endearing…

by Ian Madison Keller With a thought and a wave magic flowed from Queen Seuan’s hand and into the wood of her throne, reshaping it to a more comfortable configuration. “Continue.” The supplicant droned on, and she stifled the urge to abandon her royal duties and merge minds with her bonded, Tukura, who was out romping through the ornamental gardens. The blossoms at the end of her vine-hair curled open in pleasure at the thought, but her duties… always her duties first. The sunlight tasted of autumn harvesting. Her seedling-children, growing tall in her hidden nursery plot, were almost ready to pull up their roots and become sproutlings. At least,…

by Koji A. Dae The pains start as little things. Stretching and hardening. Slow and steady and quite manageable. So I pass the morning breathing and walking. “Like a fly ‘at can’t find a spot to land!” Mama complains and shoos me from the kitchen. I’m surprised she doesn’t take the fly-swatter to my behind. Honestly, I don’t mind being shooed. Part of me wants my mama, especially as the pains start twisting and pulling, as if something rotten has settled low in my belly. But I’m determined to keep this secret for as long as possible. Mine. I put my hand over my abdomen and waddle to the porch….

by Gabrielle Steele Alana stood one step shy of the quaint stone bridge, gripping her sword as she stared at the furry red leg that stuck out from beneath the frayed edge of the giant’s shirt. The battered clothing suffered an abundance of arrow holes, and its original owner had clearly met a rather gruesome end. A shiny black nose was poking through one hole mid-torso. “I say, giant, can you hear me all the way up there?” “We– I can hear you just fine.” The voice coming from the shadows of a heavy hood was far too high-pitched for a giant. How had the villagers fallen for it? It…

by Spencer Orey It was late when she buzzed into my office in the shrub. This time of the year, I expected grasshoppers, maybe someone left behind in a migration. No such luck today. She was a mantis, same species as me, the kind I’d run away from before the cockroach war changed everything. These days, I didn’t see much reason to run. Better to sit still and let her eat. “I heard you can find anyone,” she said. Disappointing. But at least a job would give me something to do. “Sure,” I said. “When’s the last you saw him?” “Her,” she said. “She vanished last night. After…” She ran…

by Steve Loiaconi Whenever there’s a crisis in Action Cove, the mayor calls in these jamokes. Sparky is a labradoodle who tools around in a modified fire truck. Siren, the German shepherd, drives an excessively armored police car. Then you got Splash, a collie with a hovercraft; Slate, a boxer in a bulldozer; and Sting, a chow chow in a little yellow helicopter. They take orders from Cash, an inexplicably wealthy 15-year-old with a good heart and a quaint notion of justice. I got to hand it to them. Most days, those pups do a decent job of keeping the peace. Saving cats in trees, stopping petty crimes, putting out…

by Jessica Cho When the doors of the Universities across the world first opened to them, the cats, for all their sheddings and shortcomings, took to those academic halls the same way they took to sunbeams and soft places. They paced through their research with a hunter’s single-minded focus, ears high and alert for any sounds of interest, ferreting out facts like mice from the walls. The linguistics department welcomed their nimble voices, well versed in a wide range of sounds, but even more their subtlety of jaw and gesture, their ability to communicate across oceans of silence. From laboratories and lecture halls, they pulled strings from theories, tangled and…