Storyfeather

There are people in this world worth saving.

Zoe repeated the mantra to herself as she gingerly pulled the sheet away from the skin of her back. Her back was aching, itching, burning, roiling, and wr…

The first sound that either one of them heard as they woke was the scraping of a chain on the stone floor. After a few heartbeats of stunned silence, they both remembered what had happened to bring t…

I reached out to the meteorite, a rocky mass with atypical glowing purple patches, knowing it might be the last thing I ever did on Earth.

It didn’t crash. It landed. It landed in a specific place.

R…

“It is a cold and vast realm to which I cast my distant eye,” the professor said, as he entered the western observatory, still dressed in his night-clothes. “And it was a warm and welcoming realm fro…

“Welcome to Melville Island, Doctor.”

“Thank you, Agent. Is it a heartbeat? That’s the last I heard. But that was hours ago.”

On an uninhabited Arctic island, something is stirring beneath the perm…

The baker and the blacksmith were gathered around the inn’s fireplace on a frozen blustery night. The fire was roaring and the wooden pillars from which the inn was built were stout and sturdy. Yet w…

“I should go first,” Azi whispered, wiping his brow and adjusting his cap in one movement. It was unnaturally warm in the dragon’s den.

The little brown mouse, standing on her hind legs beside him, t…

If we break the mirror barrier, we would have even greater control over the transformations between matter and energy than ever before. For this knowledge, we humbly ask our new friends from beyond t…

Cell phone cameras don’t work for many miles outside of the perimeter that the common lore has designated the “certain death zone” (or CDZ).

A photographer of the unusual is shaken by something in …

His person was bare of any adornment save the many rings that he wore on his fingers, and when he folded those fingers together and laid them on the table, the stones upon the rings aligned as if the…

It is said that just before a child is born, he is given every gift a person can possess in life.  But those gifts attract the attention of evil and greedy beings, who always steal them away one by o…

The visions.  I’d had them all my life.  They’re tricky to read, like tarot cards.  Vague sometimes, like dreams.  When I was a kid, I would tell my mom, and she had this way of pretending it was nor…

The kingdom was renowned for the quality of their spider silk thread and the many textiles that were made from it, gowns, cloaks, rope, and even armor.  The reason for the quality and abundance of th…

The secret ingredient in the biomaterial that had been used to treat, to cure, to advance the five volunteers lying in one of the most advanced burn wards in the world, was neither love nor magic.  B…

The surveyors found it when they went looking for a spot to put up a commercial office building. It was almost intact. Only the roof was partially collapsed. The basement was filled with dirt. There …

Three beautiful sisters were they, in those days.  They had eyes the color of jade with shades of honey flecked within.  They had hair like golden silk.  Their lovely smiles were made lovelier still …

She had told the police, of course.  But she hadn’t told them the whole truth.  They wouldn’t have believed her if she did.  They wouldn’t have filed the police report that she hoped would scare peop…

The man in the long dark maroon coat swept toward Mick.  The visit was expected, but not at that hour.  Mick thought the man would show up the next day.  That was, in fact, why he was in the lab at t…

Once, there was a fisherman who was dissatisfied with his wife because she was always complaining and frowning.

The fisherman’s miserable wife never smiled, but once she began, her smile hid a fantas…

It happened like this. On the first morn, the children who typically woke first anyway, began their day without knowing anything was amiss. As the morning hours passed, more and more children woke to…