Discovering that the baby you never planned to have, almost decided not to keep, but in the end kept and went back to a village not too near but not too far from where you came from, and claimed yourself a widow of the war--discovering that baby can spit fire is no small thing. Nobody asked what side your husband was on, of course, because dragons ( Read more... )

Scrubbing away a decade of bad karma is a lot harder than you might think, especially since that bad karma? Yeah, it messes with you. Makes everything harder than it should be. Ruins your best efforts, puts banana peels in your path, and sends drunk drivers veering straight at you. And sometimes I screw up, and I do something that darkens my karma ( Read more... )

The dice rattled and rolled across the velvet panel, finally sliding to a stop on top of death and taxes, and the king laughed a deep rumbling belly laugh. "Death it is!" he proclaimed. The court applauded politely, though the man in cuffs looked pained. "But wait," the prisoner insisted, "see there--the dice didn't lay flat. It's on its side ( Read more... )

The spires of St. Petersburg rose before him, the breath of the firebird hissed past his ear, the heavy iron of the gun weighed down his hand, and the blood of the tsarina throbbed against his heart. He lifted his hand to touch the handkerchief the spot of her blood had fallen on in salute, and then he strode through the snow across the square to ( Read more... )

Their chests ticked when they walked past her store, and the ticks dragged slower as they headed home at the end of the day, where their faithful wives would feed them dinner and put away their shoes and wind their stopwatch hearts. A gold chain went from their pocket to where there used to be a fob watch, but she knew that the chain went through ( Read more... )

Weary from their journey, they sat beneath the shade of the great banyan tree, squatted on their haunches, and chewed at the fruits they'd brought in their bags. Around them stretched the scrub desert, empty of any visible life. Then a small bird flew up into the sky from a bush nearby and they jumped to their feet, their hands reaching for their ( Read more... )

Sorry is where the story ends, or so I always heard growing up. You say you're sorry, and they forgive you, and the haunting unease that has made it difficult to sleep, that rears its head and comes back to bother you in any still moment, is banished. I didn't know what to expect when I found her and said, "I'm sorry." I knew that I had ( Read more... )

"Kill her ( Read more... )