Airport Shoes
Strange Horizons.
Edited by Jed Hartman and Susan Marie Groppie.
Airports are about coming and going; they are never about being anywhere, except perhaps the bar. I paid out a lot more cash to bartenders and ticket agents than I ever did on rent that summer; mostly I stayed with people. When I wasn’t waiting for a flight, my yellow shoes keeping time to the Muzak, I was drinking in other people’s kitchens, or taking baths in their tubs. I chose my friends that summer for the size of their tubs and their taste in magazines.
It’s possible friends isn’t the right word.
Castoroides
Stone Telling Magazine
The Things in the Box
Fantasy Magazine
Python
Locus Review by Rich Horton:
Another highlight is Ursula Pflug’s Python, about a couple of Canadian girls who fly down to New Orleans and take lovers and do drugs and stuff. That’s a purposefully banal description of a story that instead of being banal shimmers with mysterious imagery — the prose is beautiful, the images evocative, and the main character is perfectly captured.
Sewing Forgetfulness
He had red hair. He said: “Here are two keys.” He gave me a piece of paper with an address. “Go up five flights of stairs. At the top, two doors. Unlock and relock each door.” I felt like the heroine in a spy novel, only I couldn’t remember my mission.
Isolde, Shea, and the Donkey Brea
Tangent Review by Scott M. Sandridge:
Isolde, Shea, and the Donkey Brea by Ursula Pflug is, on the surface, a heartwarming tale with a magic system that draws heavily on the Feminine Principle of Wicca. Isolde and Shea have dealt with five years of war and foreign occupation. With Isolde’s daughter, Bree, turned into a donkey by an evil sorcerer (or so Isolde claims), they set off to find the library built by their predecessors to house their greatest mystical lore. Along the way, they must hide from the soldiers. Finding help from an innkeeper’s daughter, they begin to discover some of their lost art during the journey while gaining more insights into the relationships they have for each other. But will they find the library, and will the donkey, Brea, get changed back to Isolde’s daughter, Bree?
Late For Dinner
I wanted my father to answer so I could tell him I’d done what he wanted me to do. It was he who’d first told me about the war, dragging me to a rally when I’d wanted to stay home and watch television: “This country is knee-deep in bones.”