Short Fiction
Signal-scent prickled Tulla’s gills and she ducked out of the fastest part of the current. The scent crested, along with the hum of motion on Tulla’s skin, as a group of reef sharks passed by. Dim shapes. She was far enough from the dimming edge of the world, where the ground sloped sharply up and hugged the lumpy dryworld, that the light was poor. Other senses took over.
‘Eat Prey, Love’ in the anthology Unnatural Order (CSFG Publishing, 2020)
Shortlisted: 2020 Aurealis Award for Best YA Fantasy Short Story
Dear Sami,
‘Elinor Jones vs. the Ruritanian Multiverse’ in the anthology Silk & Steel (Cantina Publishing, 2020)
Well, I did it. Contract signed, deposit paid, leaving on Friday.
My genetic material turned up a plum match for my preferences. This particular universe’s Ruritania has gender essentialism and heteronormativity at zero—thank fuck, and can I smuggle some back through on the way home?—and a moderately high Narrative Causality Index, which means events should play out more or less predictably, but with plenty of room for improvisation on my part.
Danger level: moderate.
When you inherit a house from your grandmother, it should be dilapidated, a word that sounds blue. Molly teases the adjective apart until she extracts lapis, minus lazuli, and then is curious enough to look it up on an etymology website—lapidare: to throw stones; to scatter like stones. The house is not—dilapidated, that is. It’s neither old nor new. It doesn’t live huddled at the end of a street, obsessively weaving a nest of overgrown lawn for itself. It’s not stuck way out in the bush at the end of a dirt track. It’s just a house, in a suburb, surrounded by other houses built more or less to the same tune.
‘Four’ in the anthology Consolation Songs (2020)
Later, when we were murderers, Val would tell me the full story of how her people came to put her in the egg. How she grew up in the corpse of a ship much larger than myself, large enough to house a city within its moss-furred bones, and how there was a story told among her people about a man who learned to take the killable core of himself, shape it into a needle, and hide it within a delicate eggshell.
‘What We Named the Needle’ in Analog Magazine July/August 2019
Shortlisted: 2019 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story
The sun danced off Carry’s eyelids as she lay in her grave. Down the hill they were singing the dirt-song for Rave, and the wind blew pleasant little bits of tune in her direction. Here and there, strong emotion carried the voices of the singers away from the melody. It was the first time this particular song had ridden the wind since the children left.
‘Hamelin’s Graves’ in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine Issue #69
- Chosen as part of 2017’s Best Stories for Andromeda Spaceways.
- Shortlisted: 2017 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story.
There were no spiders lurking behind the driver’s sunshield, but Lucy braced herself anyway as she flipped it down to use the mirror. You heard stories. Giant huntsmen that hid there and then ended up half a foot from your face when you were doing one-twenty on the highway, sending you veering into a tree. She was an hour out of the city, and there was nothing like realising that you couldn’t see anything but bush in every direction to make you really appreciate stories about spiders. And snakes. And scorpions.
‘Seeding’ in Mad Scientist Journal: Summer 2016
It took a violent leap to get me onto the coach just as it pulled away, so violent that I bit right through the toast in my mouth. I grabbed at it with the hand not clutching the nearest pole, and managed to save the severed portion before it fell down into the dirty half-puddle that surrounded my feet.
‘The Provenance Game’ in the anthology Fight Like a Girl (2013)