Translated from Portuguese by Toshiya Kamei The TV is tuned to the Worldwide News Channel. The reporter says, “The moment the idea of God came across our minds, we thought he was our creator, and a question began to haunt us – ‘How will we react when we meet God?’…

Day 1A youthful barista bounces at the register, overlooking the meager clump of customers eyeing the menu. A strange concoction of emotions wells within her, wondering if it’s appropriate to be angry at the ones responsible for her hours. They are, after all, outside. Suddenly she’s glad her family stayed…

Inspired by Alice Godliman’s poem Pomegranite Seeds Myth recounts that Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and taken as his wife to the Underworld. Her furious mother, Demeter, goes to fetch her daughter back, but all who eat the food of Hades are condemned to remain and Persephone has eaten just…

We hear rumours of her journey as she flies towards us through Europe. Her cloak covers towns first, the busy ports, then it grows outwards from the seams of main roads. It will cover us all in time. Father Matthew says it is Pestilence sent from above, punishing us for…

It is dark and red outside. Dark and red like the night our parents were killed. We sit together, bundled close against a rock outcropping, a few feet from the train track, a few feet from where we had been left. The train station that isn’t. Just a stop, really.…

A boy lived with his father and mother in the woods far from the city. There was a lake nearby, deep and clear, and when it was cloudy the lake shown silver like slick, wet metal. The boy and his father would play by the lake then, throwing sticks and…

The night I died, the cold permeated everything. The kind of cold that got into your bones.  My fur had thinned so much that I feared hypothermia may kill me, but that wasn’t how my story would end.   It was unusually dark at the edge of the forest. I could barely…

She remembered hardly anything from before. Certain colors hinted at larger things, but what exactly those things were, she didn’t know for sure. The boy tells her the world was a variation of purple before the Fathers disappeared. Like thistle or plum, she asks, but the boy is preoccupied with a wooden…