The Mermaids’ Tea Party
by Samantha Henderson
Cassandra’s frozen hands slipped on the on the slick rocks and she kicked her legs weakly. Salt water filled her mouth, chilly and bitter. Unable to lift her head, she gagged.
One of the mermaids — the blue-eyed one with the sharp nose and the straw hat with sodden paper roses — noticed her and grabbed her by the back of the neck, pulling her up over the wet, rough rocks. She felt skin scrape off her knees, but was too cold to register the pain.
The mermaid dropped her on the sharp wet rocks of the little islet, which surely must be submerged at the high tide. With a graceful flick of her blue-green tail she turned back to her companions. One, with dark red hair to her waist that matched the rippling highlights of her tail, was perched on a nearby outcrop. She wore an officer’s cap on her locks and a jet-beaded pelisse about her shoulders, her red-tipped breasts peeking out. The sight of the pelisse gave Cassandra a pang. It was her mother’s. And Mama was dead.
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Monsters of Abiding Grace
by Samantha Henderson
Three days after the foothills started to burn the power failed, and this time they knew it wasn’t a temporary outage, or even the typical hiatus until the light flickered on and the wires hummed with the faint crackle no one had ever noticed until it was gone.
This time it was finished.
They stopped gathering and began packing, and there was the anticipation of things new and uncharted, although all had been mapped and measured and asphalt-paved years and years before. That was from another lifetime.
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Starry Night
by Samantha Henderson
At the crest of the last foothill I stopped and rubbed at my left shoulder, where the pack’s strap bit. Shadows lay like dregs of wine in the valley below.
I shifted the walking stick back to my right hand and limped towards the village. This was a job for a younger man.
Montverdu was a hamlet of 300 souls, at least last census-time. Whitewashed cottages and their moss-green roofs sat at odd angles to each other. A few had smoke curling from their chimneys. In the center squatted the great white church, like a mother cat between her kits.
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Mahmoud’s Wives
by Janis Ian
When the rains came, Mahmoud packed his wives into a large canister and loaded them onto the truck.
The eldest wife, of course, complained loudly. It was dark. It was dank. It was crowded. She could not breathe.
Mahmoud bore her invective in silence. Truth be told, the exceptionally good soya harvest of last year had allowed him to afford a third wife, and in all likelihood it was getting crowded in there. Still, if Fatimah would only exercise more as he’d suggested, instead of just dragging around all day like a landsnail, she would probably lose some of that extra weight and fit in there quite comfortably. There were plenty of air holes.
He sighed and closed the hatch over her protests. Glancing sheepishly at the neighbor’s empty window, he mused to himself, “What does woman want? Is it not written that to serve and obey is the greatest of all blessings? Why can she not be content?”
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Hi! This is N. K. Jemisin. If you’ve reached this page, you’re following an old link. Sorry; I had to remove these stories because they’re going to be coming out soon in my short story collection, How Long Til Black Future Month. Read them there!
