Fresh bones failed to sing for me, despite having six generations of necromancers in my family. I could only hear the song after the bones had transformed, over millions of years, into fossils.

Mom helped me discover this when I was 9. At every family gathering, the cousins would be given chicken b...

You first arrived in the woods when you chose a new name for yourself: Cindy. Cindy had no past, only a future. You cut yourself from your body like it was a diseased limb and left it to rot. When you opened your eyes, you were here, in the world inside the world.

There are many ways to do this, al...

In exchange for two large cod, the wise-woman extracts Minke’s first language and wraps it in a piece of sailcloth. Her milk-language, her mother-tongue. It’s only spoken here, on this chain of islands. Each of them a few acres wide, and each with their own particular accent and god.

The parcel shi...

Elizabeth finds the bur in Alex’s bedsheets and somehow manages not to completely lose her shit. It’s just a bur. It could have come in with Georgia, their border collie, or on a sock or pantleg. Epizootic dispersion. Plain and simple. It doesn’t have to mean anything. It doesn’t have to mean the w...

“Once, now, and always,” begin all of her Zaza’s tales. Bren knows every one by heart, but she still loves the rise and fall of every sun-drenched, salt-crusted story, Zaza’s rich voice rolling like waves. “Three children drift on a cold, dark sea.”

This is Bren’s favorite. Even her brother Walt, w...

The anomaly was narrowband, centered at 1.3 gigahertz. Our automated minder had flagged a layered whisper of static from the Goliath system. I yawned and tipped back coffee dregs before I keyed a command to slew the telescope off-axis. If it was interference from our own satellites or aircraft, lik...

Dear Reader,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the myth of the genius—that monumental achievements come from monumental minds. Picture him at his typewriter, clacking out the great American novel. See him there with hands reaching skyward, leading humankind to its rightful place among the stars. My eye...

The following comments are made by Associate Editors here at Haven Spec. Associate Editor is the name we give to our first-tier readers, and, in many cases, they serve as champions for those stories recommended to the Assistant Editors, and finally, to the Editor-in-Chief. Below, we gave those Asso...

You’re tired.
Lonely.
You lost someone.
Someone lost you.
There was something you forgot, then you remember but wish you didn’t.
You’ll try anything once.
You can’t tell the difference between love and sacrifice.
Your room is cold and you’d prefer a passionate death to hypothermia.
You are older than yo...

I can feel the swelling of a fish head
cresting the lip of my front pocket. I
stuff my hand inside, trying to push it
back down to the seam. It doesn’t stay
put. The catfish wriggles through my
fingers, its whiskers tickling my palm,
and slaps wetly on the kitchen floor.

I've clicked the Zoom link ...

I tell myself I’ll write a sestina and then be done—
keep it clean, controlled, a little deep
but not too much. I choose a bench of warm concrete
by the shore. My phone is at home. Blue
crushed cans float in the shallows like liferafts. You are gone,
or at least elsewhere. I refuse to say moon.

T...

Awareness returns to me in ragged bursts. There is a heaviness to my thoughts as my systems fight to come back online.

I’m severely damaged, paralysed, my drives shattered and splintered. Life support systems for the crew are just functional enough to tell me that they’re no longer functional. I pu...

Quinn gets lost in voidspace while I’m headed home from work.

I’m on the train when I receive the ping from the Institute for Dimensional Exploration. The communication line with Quinn Valentine has been disconnected in the subdimensional bridge. This is a courtesy notice, and if contact cannot be r...

Hope is seeing that tiny muscle in Abdi’s jaw move when I lean against his shoulder and breathe him in. Patchouli and oil paints. Garlic and rosemary. Home. I lay a hand he cannot feel on his arm and whisper memories into his ear like a prayer.

How long has it been since we held each other?

According...

It’s a funny thing, telling folks that my astronaut daughter was lost at sea—funny, like slowly pulling up a weed with a taproot anchored in my heart; which is to say, not very funny at all. But then, watching one’s flesh and blood descend from the upper atmosphere to scatter into a billion pieces ...

Dear Reader,

I’ve been thinking a lot about damnatio memoriae. In the ancient world, if the wrong person was mad at you, they’d scratch your name from the history books. This mostly involved chiseling chunks from stone inscriptions and blotting out faces from statues and murals, and the whole proces...

The following comments are made by Associate Editors here at Haven Spec. Associate Editor is the name we give to our first-tier readers, and, in many cases, they serve as champions for those stories recommended to the Assistant Editors, and finally, to the Editor-in-Chief. Below, we gave those Asso...

I’m sick of AI and artificial "intelligence" that is more plagiaristic and environmentally degrading than intelligent. I’m even more sick of tech billionaires using the warnings in classic sci-fi novels as inspiration instead (see the “torment nexus”), but at least their ideas largely seem to only ...

Sasha was not always going to be an astronaut
She much preferred
floral arrangements (natives, not gardenias)
and coffee (robusta, a dash of oat milk)
and cinnamon (a light dusting, ochre snow)
in the café at the end of her street.

But the government decree passed into law
and the testing (aptitude an...

A golden shovel on Jorie Graham’s Fission,
but also after Douglas Kearney, tbh

Spacetime changes now
beneath and to the
right of you, your theater’s
shroud of film, dead presidents, and skylight—
all sources of white, I mean, all sources of light—cosmology is
hushed, flayed, opened
silent before a new ...