Up in the branches of mile-high trees, a cartographer maps the routes between greenhouses. For the last great mapping exercise, a cartography team of twenty had swarmed through the treetops from greenhouse to greenhouse. But that had involved sketching everything by hand, followed by hours upon hours of laborious copying and compiling. She, however, has […]
In a place where the dead are never really gone, a hairdresser carries out his complicated profession on the deceased. Because just as the dead have to wear their specialized robes, flowing in some places and wrapped tight in others, their hair must be styled in the distinctive styles of the deceased. It takes cutting […]
The old kilns are being converted into cozy living spaces. The only problem is that they’re haunted, and not by ordinary ghosts. Officially, it’s just chemical residue on the walls and ceiling that glows with phosphorescence at night. But I know how well-scoured everything is by the time the refurbishing is complete. I see all […]
An ecologist spends a summer in the dark and silent embassy as the honorary spy for the season. The isolation wore her down, watching gaggles of glad-handing politicians parley, posture, and passive aggressively bicker over trade and borders while none of them knew she was even there. She found days upon days of all that […]
A worker in an ordinary-enough looking office has a secret vocation as a yam curer. This leads to some unexpected consequences. Although the last page of each briefcase’s printout is a map with instructions for where it should be left, the office workers leave the briefcases with additional flair that afternoon and evening. Not just […]
An accountant begins to frequent a secret, or maybe not-so-secret, place. The prevailing culture in this region is resolutely practical, which may be why the people here find the folly so irresistible. They have to visit once to prove to themselves that it really exists. Then their memories nag at them until they come back […]
Some years after an apocalypse has come and gone, a receptionist walks through a desert full of abandoned roads and becomes very aware of all the times that are not now and all the places that are not here. Under the underpass, she plays with hearing her own voice go out and the echoes return. […]
In this episode, we travel to a depot on the edge of a continent and follow the journey of an X-ray technician, for whom it’s the edge of much more. There was a kind of dance the depot-keepers did, leaping aside as the crates glided past with slick momentum, then landing on the spiked toes […]
About visiting the library in the woods and finding something to read. Also about diagrams, birds on quests, and a strange fish. For all the times the babysitter has been there—all the Tuesdays, most of the Thursdays, the occasional Mondays and Fridays—it still looks more like the ghost of a door than an actual door, […]
This episode, we go to an archive, complete with various birds, diaries, and instructions for saddling your sea creature. She’d traveled by flatboat up a canal of stagnant water and was restless as they drifted toward the mooring. She kept trying to count the buildings and kept coming up with different numbers. She could have […]