It was raining when Amarelle Parathis went out just after sunset to find a drink, and there was strange magic in the rain. It came down in pale lavenders and coppers and reds, soft lines...

Some stories aren’t meant to be told. The more they get told, the more they change from what they once were, worn down and smooth like pieces of sea glass too beautiful to have ever...

I went up on the hill and walked about until twilight had deepened into an autumn night with a benediction of starry quietude over it. I was alone but not lonely. I was a queen...

He’d grown unused to woods like this. He’d become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that...

He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet.

The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel.

The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening...