Hailey, startled, fell backwards on her rear. She was ten, and mushrooms had never deigned to talk to her before.

She wondered if she could transform into a bear, or an ant underground, something that could burrow into the depths of the soil or rock and stay there for months in the winter, unconcerned with the cold or with cages.

Every autumn, the billions of maple trees turned the entire surface of the 27^th moon a vibrant red. It had happened every year since the settlers of New Earth had landed 362 years ago. Except, this year, Tiradel’s trees had no leaves.

When Jan reached four years into sixty, his daughter and her son flew off into the glorious first exploration past the Milky Way to somewhere called Z-1.

The day that Maisy stopped believing in God, she began seeing the skeletons.

Aloe waited in the mailbox, shivering in the February freeze along with his three foster siblings, Cactus, Snake Plant, and Jade.

Every day, Niska climbed the rope ladder into the harbor of the sky to watch the cloud boats sail.

Let’s talk about science fictional concepts. Imagine a Utopian world where all creatives like writers get paid fairly for their labor. 

The streetlight blinked, and Laura fell towards it. The gravity on Planet F1SR, or “Fissure,” felt like dream falling, except you never woke up from the jolt.

Living in Nebraska isn’t so bad. The straight shot highways, predictable squares of countryside, and comforting warmth of the dimpled sun all have a kind of beautiful consistency. And though the air vibrates wrong inside my gills, and I gargle salt water to keep my throat from closing; safety keeps me here.

Rory slogged through the field of plastic, swinging her metal detector like a divining rod. If she dug up just a dollar fifty more in change, she could buy a full week’s worth of rations instead of three days.

The salty, pre-dawn wind wove through the cornfields, whispering of the sea, of tides and sandy shores. Arline breathed it in, and something seemed to open in her throat like the start of a question.

Her mother minced her steps like she did green onions, small and quick and determined. Her waist, trained the smallest in Faize to the width of an arm, showed the beating of her heart through her spine, and the rise and fall of her lungs, stacked atop each other.

Rayla discovered the jacket in the back of a Salvation Army sale. Its camo green had faded to a dingy brown. Good enough for 50 cents. She tried it on, shoving her gloved hands into the pockets.

She touched someone’s fingers.

“Can you believe it?” Est-L’s wife, Nen-L, twirled and pointed at her microscope. “There’s even smaller things called planets! They orbit those tiny stars!”

When Lissa drove the long stretch to work from Omaha to Lincoln the past few days, her iMind just fuzzed out, like a TV station gone staticky.

“He wanted to climb into the ground, reach into the soil. His green eyes had darkened to hazel, and the same urgency, that same tunneling desire, caught hold of her like a fever.”

Catherine didn’t much care for her job. It wasn’t that the squirrels gave her any lip. They had dental plans, 401Ks, and the whole caboodle after all. The Sound, though, that gave her the shudders.

Sometimes in the night, when the dogs stopped barking at the cars along Route 40, the house ceased settling, and the wind came to a rest in the branches of the old maple by the farmhouse, Rachel sensed them.