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 takes a strange toll on a man’s sense of humor. Anna would have laughed to hear me describe it. Rolled her big brown eyes, then flashed that crooked smile that only ever showed a dimple on one side, as she told me I was worrying for nothing. The orbital repair mechs are safe. Astronauts have been ri...

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 to my instruments, I jumped dimensions six weeks ago, but the receiving end of the Interdimensional Bridge is glitchy in ways Jones, Croft and I never accounted for. Every time I activate the Bridge, it should bring me back to 00:00°, back home.

I rest my head against the sofa and check my position....

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 restored before the bridge shuts down, I will receive a secondary letter of condolence for my loss.

It’s so coldly polite. People have been lost in the subdimensional bridge before; all the researchers sign more than a hundred digital pages just in waivers.

Quinn showed me some of the paperwork when 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 pull together as much data as I can from the sensors that remain: my hull is pierced in a hundred and twelve places that I can detect, the exact number likely higher. Nowhere inside me is still pressurised or oxygenated, every room exposed to vacuum. All the air, and presumably the crew, have been dra...

Many summers ago, there was a lake in Mattie’s backyard. Now a bowl of cracked earth dips from the parched rim. The blank expanse presses on for miles, summer homes abandoned along the shore.

The hulk of an old data processing plant looms above all.

Mattie barely remembers when she used to fish with her grandfather. She was so young, hooking bass and pike, catfish schooling in black clouds beneath their dock.

Once, they sold their catch to visitors. Now only scaleless skeletons bleach white on exposed silt.

Mattie and her grandfather search for once drowned treasures. Sunken sailboats. Old ou...

Ten-Point Buck

Kaye dreams of killing his father. When I am not terrified of this dream, I am so jealous that I wish I could steal it through his lips. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever saw my father again. Kaye’s certainty calms me, violent as it is. Now, as Kaye stares down the sight of his rifle and the tremendous buck we’ve been tracking for three days comes up from the brush, he is closer than ever to achieving it. In the Sierra Nevada, mosquito-bitten and muddy, I am not jealous. My tongue tastes of pennies, and more than anything, I am sorry. I want to take Kaye in my hands, run his c...

We were boys when we met by the seashore. He threw a stick at me and called me ugly. I tackled him into the sand. We became inseparable.

His name was Angelo. For fourteen days, Angelo and I met as if by preordination at dawn, on the beach behind my family’s vacation rental on the southern Maine coast. The tide in the bay went out, out, out, and so did we, scouting across the massive expanse of wet, freshly revealed earth, hunting in the tide pools that formed between the rocks, seeking out belligerent crabs and docile sea stars, collecting stones and shells and sea glass. Decades ago, a hotel...

Edwin was an enthusiastic lover, eager to please and to pleasure. He kissed Briar all over, even the strange red bumps she’d first noticed on her skin that morning. His mouth was slow, then teasing, and he brought her to her peak—once, twice—as they made love.

After, they fell back on the mattress in a sweaty, sticky-sweet tangle. “You taste like honeysuckle,” he whispered in her ear before dozing off.

Those would be her husband’s last words.

Briar roused in the morning to find Edwin staring past her head, pupils blown wide yet unseeing. Unmoving. Unbreathing. She clasped his clammy shoulder ...

They’re monsters, the combines and threshers inching along the highway—I’m almost to Saskatoon when they surround me. I drop my speed from 110 to 15 km/hr, and my GPS recalibrates to say I’m an hour and fifteen minutes from downtown.

I look for the end of the vehicles but there’s only smoke and metal. My pulse picks up. Remember to breathe. I make this mistake every year, driving into the city when the ag-show is ending. I want to smash my head against the glass, but that won’t get me to my hotel faster.

I check in ninety minutes later. My phone buzzes, and it’s my partner, wanting to know if...

This is a trick our uncle teaches us before he leaves. When the rumbling from the mountains makes our homes shake and we are scared or anxious, he calms us by forcing us to focus on our immediate environment. “Look for colours,” he says. “Something red, something brown, something yellow. Listen, really listen, to the space around you. This is your home and you are safe here.”

Our uncle teaches us many things as kids, my sister and me. We learn how to make a fire, which plants are edible and which can heal a wound. He takes us just past the edge of the woods outside of town, farther from home ...