Kisa wrapped her scarf around herself and folded her knees up against the window. The daytime roared outside like an endless fire, but the lights were coming soon. The black lights.

When will they regard the autonomy of a woman’s hard /
decision with the same religion of just looking up /
with the same faith and leaping to conclusions /
That they do to us?

In the autumn, we trek /
Into the Red Grove /
Where the little fox-fires grow /

Luce wiped sweat from her eyes. Her knees hurt from kneeling on the skyroof, nailing shingles where the clouds had fallen through.

In that time between interesting things /
We Rests flourish /
During the whirling wheel /

Lir tapped a rhythm on her leg, reading her magazine on extraterrestrial plants. The plastic rose hanging from her mirror redirected the sunlight, creating a pink gleam on her cheek.

We point at a field of cows as we pass and say “Cows,” for as everyone knows, the bovine population has a deal with all travelers. 

Yima acquired peoples’ broken feet, stuttering hearts, and even little things like their split ends and displayed them on her wall. Once collected and dead, they morphed into their true form of a curse, a clawed thing.

For our part, we love being discovered. Frieda matches us with the perfect reader, that one who holds us with interest and turns our pages with excitement. Sometimes, that person comes back to read us again, and again — for, of course, they can’t take us out of the café. 

The butterfairies and the ring-tailed dragons fled first. They buttoned up their fairy coats and looped scarves around their rings and traveled far, far into the North.

The purring rumbles throughout the cathedral room. It is loud, but not the horrible, bright kind of loud that bars or doctor’s offices have. This is a cozy loud.

The woman held her four demons back, leashed according to the law. “No, no, I meant exercise, m’dear! My darlings are quite tame, thank you.”

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.

Kodi had always known the distance between himself and the nearest pie.

Why do people ask, “When will you bloom?” 

The chainsaws do not stop.

Perhaps they can’t. Maybe hell contracted them to torture me, otherwise I might enjoy an average purgatory week working from home with just the yappy dogs next door to superimpose irritation.

The number creatures—the Ints—wiggled on her screen, wringing their serifs, and shuffling in the small spaces between themselves. Deana knew how they felt.