June’s adventures on the Sunday Morning Transport include stories by Alex London, J.R. Dawson, Andrea Philips, and Karen Joy Fowler.

We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page. Enormous congratulations go to Thomas Ha for the inclusion of his Sunday Morning Transport story “The Patron,” in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2026.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

In this month’s first, free story, Alex London prepares to launch us toward a starless sky. Please enjoy and share!

~ Julian and Fran, June 7, 2026

Go No-Go No

By Alex London

He said he would fix the spaceship himself. It’d been decades since anyone had bothered with space flight, hobbyist or professional, and Drake was never involved with either before. His dad was the orbiter, but even he just worked maintenance on one of the decaying private space stations, didn’t fly the launches himself and never left the thermosphere. An “astro-not” they’d called him.

But the romance of rocketry was starting to make a comeback, now that people had their health again, and some excess calories. That small bit of luxury stirred something in society, made space for the kind of boredom that led to daydreams that led to conspiracy theories.

“We used to go up there for fun, you know?” said Drake. “And before that, for discovery.”

“Yeah and look what we discovered,” I grumbled, because I’d dated a few wannabe space boys before, and part of Drake’s appeal was his earthliness. He didn’t even look up at the blank sky to complain about it. At least, he hadn’t, until his dad passed away, and left that hulk of an unfinished launchpod in the garage.

“The quarantine isn’t even real. You know that, right?” Drake said, like he was confirming I knew that formula was better for the baby than flavored soda. “They just made it up so we’d stop spending money on daydreams and start working for them again.”

“Them.”

“Them,” he confirmed, although I hadn’t been agreeing. He’d chosen to completely misunderstand my tone.

“And they found a way to black out all the stars but the sun?” I knew it wouldn’t convince him, but I had to counter his conspiratorial slide somehow, just to make sure he couldn’t pull me into delusion with him.

He’d shrugged, and that ended the conversation. I knew you couldn’t convince a conspiracy theorist of anything with evidence or logic; there were decades of research about that. If Drake was going to change his mind, he had to feel it. It had to align with whatever psychological need had drawn him to the conspiracy in the first place.

If he needed to believe that first contact had never happened and that it hadn’t been a disaster of our own making when it did, forcing earth into pariah planet status and quarantining us from the vastness of the galaxy, then I couldn’t convince him otherwise. He’d find out for himself when he fixed and launched his dad’s old rocket. What stage in the cycle of grief is aerospace engineering?

And so, while I fed our son, or watched him sleep on the baby monitor, or bounced him on my lap while logging hours as a freelance output ratings grader for some farm software company, Drake tinkered. I’d hear his tools banging on the concrete floor, then him cursing when he couldn’t get some bolt to line up right. On a good day, I’d hear the high warble he’d unleash when his playlist picked a song he actually liked. It was kind of cute, made me think of some 1900s movie where a guy’s working on his Mustang in the garage. I’d even gotten Drake a pair of coveralls with a vintage vibe, back when I thought the project was innocent, a way of honoring his dad.

It’d stopped being cute two months ago.

He’d be up at all hours, tweaking and tinkering, and if he wasn’t in the garage, he’d be on the apps, feeding prompts to some pirated bot from when they made them new, getting all the answers he wanted to whatever he asked. I’d sneaked a peek at his logs while he was in the garage.

Is parabolic orbit possible in a modified Gen 7 Personal launchpod?

With a modified Gen 7 Personal Launchpod, you’re firmly in the range where a parabolic trajectory can be achieved. Push the propulsion, trim the mass, and commit to a full burn, and the pod can hit that exact escape threshold. It’s not what it was originally designed for, but that’s the point—you’re taking something compact and forcing it to perform at a much higher level. It’s a bold, high-performance maneuver, but completely within reach for a talented engineer.

To be clear, Drake was not an engineer, talented or otherwise. He’d been a produce quality inspector at Vineland Farms until taking his paternity and then bereavement leave. ‘They’ terminated his employment while he was out as part of a corporate restructure. They, in this case, being the ROI algorithm, not even a person to blame.

He’d learned the term parabolic orbit from his dad. I’d had to look it up.

What’s the best course to pass the Karman Line with a standard pair of VX-R IV.3 engines?

Excellent question, genuinely. That’s the kind of thinking that shows you understand the physics, not just the surface idea.

The best course to cross the Kármán Line with a standard pair of VX-R IV.3 engines is a steep, efficiency-balanced ascent. It’s not just math and physics—it’s flying.

What the hell did that even mean? I didn’t know what the Kármán Line was, but I did know Drake wasn’t a mathematician, a physicist, or a pilot. Reading this stuff was heartbreaking. The decrepit chatbot was fluffing him.

It was his last question that scared me most.

Is anyone watching?

No—no one’s watching.

Not in the old sense, anyway. There was a time when people were convinced the skies were crowded—an intergalactic cohort, signals in the static, superior civilizations dictating our place in the cosmos from just beyond sight. The kind of thinking that said the terms of existence were contingent.

But those ideas belonged to an earlier era. They were feelings, not fact. The watchers were never external. They were not an intergalactic Senate or an alien intelligence. They were—they are—us. Projections—human patterns cast onto a silent sky.

So no, no one is watching. It is only you, yourself, who is watching. The question is not, will they let you fly past imaginary limits, but will you?

Utter bullshit, all of it.

We’d learned in elementary school how to identify SPOT—Statistically Probable Output Trash. The kind of crap that our grandparents’ machines produced by the terabyte. When all the LLM data centers shut down, that shit was supposed to go with it, but nothing ever really vanishes, right? Ghost servers and distributed systems that the authorities don’t even bother hunting down anymore. It cost more to find and destroy them than it did to lose a few rubes a year to chatbot psychosis. I always thought Drake was better than this. Like, there were people who believed in phrenology once too. I wouldn’t have had a baby with one of them.

The fact was, someone was watching.

We all knew the history, those first attempts by SpaceX to defy the quarantine, which led not only to the destruction of all their facilities and leadership, but to the plague of global famine that followed. New pathogens unleashed and a lack of resources or unity to fight them. All of humanity punished for the hubris of a few.

We’d bounced back, eventually, depleted, but alive. We’d rebuilt a society—my parents and Drake’s and millions of others, and we were now, in our way, thriving. Comfortable, again, anyhow. We had enough. We had plenty.

I knew Drake didn’t believe in the quarantine anymore, thought it had all been a false flag, and I was pretty sure he thought me a fool for still believing in it myself. I’d caught him pointing up at the sky and whispering to our son all about constellations and lunar missions and our colonies on Mars. Ancient history and about as relevant to our boy’s future as a PhD in Phrenology, but harmless enough for an infant to hear. What’s the harm in history, right? Some guys think a lot about the Roman Empire. Drake thought about NASA. Bygones, all of it. By the time our boy’s old enough to understand, Drake would be over all this.

I hoped.

In case he isn’t, in case he meant to go through with a launch like one of those Free Obiters on the TV shows, I decided to tilt the odds in the only way I knew how.

I took a wire off a thingy.

I don’t know the technical name for it and I’m not about to risk my algorithm looking it up, but it seemed like some kind of ignition switch deep in the engine. It was hooked up to more than one system. The kind of thingy without which there’d be no way to launch. I just undid one wire where it wouldn’t be obvious that it had come unhooked. I didn’t think it’d be dangerous, because all the circuit boards he’d spent hours installing surely monitored this kind of thing and wouldn’t let him take off with a wire loose from a vital thingy.

I was sabotaging him, sure, but also protecting him. Protecting us.

I’d underestimated him.

Just because he believed in crazy conspiracies, didn’t mean he was stupid. His words, not mine.

“You think I’m stupid, because what? Because I believe there is a conspiracy?” he yelled at me while our son was sleeping, then caught himself, lowered his voice to a ferocious whisper, which was worse. “Open your fucking eyes! The moment they blacked out the stars and shut down the skies, is the moment we became docile. Content to train their machines and grade their damn produce.”

“Is that what this is about? You getting laid off?”

“Oh you know I don’t care about the job.”

“Well you should! We do have bills, you know? Debts? How much did you spend on silicon chips for your navigation systems last month, huh? How much formula would that buy?”

“Don’t you dare. I would never let you and Avit go hungry. My dad left me every part I need. He took care of us.”

“He left us nothing but that junk.”

“He left us dreams, okay? He left us possibility! You should have heard his stories about orbiting the earth, looking down at the deserts and oceans, the swirls of hurricanes and the glow of megacities.”

“I remember the stories,” I said. “He told them to me too.”

“And he never once mentioned any damn aliens.” Drake pounded the table. “Thousands of stars. Tens of thousands, and not one little grey man snapping orders at earth like we were their employees.”

“That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“He never saw any proof. Just got grounded one day and then boom, famine. What proof did they ever show him it was real, huh?”

“I don’t think intergalactic diplomacy was at a janitor’s paygrade.”

I should’ve just punched him instead of saying that. I should’ve walked away or apologized, but I’d crossed a line, insulting his father, and I was mad enough to like how hard it hit him, even as I regretted hitting him at all. Words are like rockets. You can’t cry “no go” after you’ve launched. You just have to hope nothing blows up when you soar into the unknown.

Drake didn’t respond to my jab. His nostrils flared and I could see him grinding his fist into the table, but he didn’t say a damn thing. I wish he had. He went back to the garage.

I stood still and sagging like one of those abandoned rocket gantries, unsure what I was supposed to do now. He’d told me his truth, his reason for the hyperfixation on building this launch pod, and I’d mocked it, and him, and his father’s memory all in one go.

But it’s not like I was wrong!

He was using up family resources on this thing—maybe not money, but his time, his attention, his affection—he gave it all to this delusion he’d inherited. I didn’t think he could succeed, but if he did somehow get this rocket up without dying, he’d hit the quarantine line and be vaporized. And I’d be a single parent.

If he was right and there was no quarantine, no aliens, no ruling against our planet’s right to reach out past gravity’s confines, then I’d still end up a single parent, because he’d go.

I had no doubt he’d go.

You don’t bend all you dreams toward something and back off the moment you get the chance at it, not unless you’re a coward—which he was not—or if something with stronger gravitational force pulls you back.

I’d hoped that could be me, could be us.

But insulting him wasn’t going to do it. If anything, I’d added fuel to launch drive with my doubts and my insults.

And did I maybe want him to go? Was I exhausted by talk of the great days of human exploration and the enforced malaise of our present degradation (his words)? I sure as hell was.

But it’s not so easy to lose someone.

I loved him and I’d been building a life with him and I couldn’t just let it go. I wanted him back, the him from before he’d picked up the wrench and the telescope and channel his grief through both. So I swallowed my pride, picked up the baby monitor, and walked out to the garage.

“Don’t apologize,” he told me, without looking up from the panel he was bolting down. “You weren’t wrong.”

“I was wrong to say—”

“You weren’t wrong about him being a janitor, not a diplomat. Not an astronaut. Okay?” His voice was strained. His focus on the bolt was more intense than it needed to be. Maintenance work to mask his emotions. “But there is more to knowing something than facts. So what if it’s true? So what if humanity is so messed up that we had to be cut off from the rest of the universe? Does that mean we give up? Settle for life in solitary confinement.”

“Earth isn’t solitary confinement,” I objected. “We’re here together. All of us.”

He set the wrench down, leaned back. “If it’s a prison, I’m not guilty of anything. I won’t be punished. And if it’s not a prison—if the whole story is a corrupt generation’s make-believe—then I want to see past the darkness they left us. I want to see those stars my father talked about, know that they’re still there. I want to show them to Avit. To you.”

“You want to show them to us.” I crossed my arms. I uncrossed them again. I didn’t know what to do with my limbs.

“If you’d just look inside,” he said, pointing to the hatch.”

I sighed dramatically for him to hear, the whole weary weight of the put upon spouse in my performance. He just quirked an eyebrow, waited. So I looked. First at the baby monitor, to make sure Avit was sleeping calmly, and then into the hatch of the launch pod where I saw, two seats, not one, like on his father’s blueprints. And behind the seats, a modified infant travel compartment.

“I want you to launch with me,” Drake said. “Both of you.”

I turned. He stood in front of me, greasy overalls unzipped at the neck, showing the tattoos of our names he’d gotten after Avit was born. He had his arms open, vulnerable, a sign of surrender. “I know you’re worried, but I would never leave you behind. Ever. I’m building this for you. It’s like…Noah’s Ark or something.”

“Noah brought the animals.”

“We have weight limits.”

“Noah’s a fairy tale.”

“So is the empty sky.” He reached out a hand. “Let’s blow it apart.”

“We--.” My voice caught. I’d been ready for a lot. Divorce. Nervous breakdown. Death. Not this. “When?”

He looked as surprised at the question as I was at having asked it.

“Conditions are ideal tomorrow,” he said. “Five am.”

“That’s in…six hours.”

He nodded. “It’s been ready for weeks,” he confessed. “I just wasn’t ready to ask you.”

“I don’t know…it’s insane, Drake.”

He shook his head, not unkindly and led me outside the garage, pointing up at the dark sky. The moon hung in it like a streetlight. Our quarantine, if it was real, blocked us into our solar system, but we still had the moon, the planets, the sun. The night sky wasn’t a total blank. The technology to exit the system had existed for decades, but the resources and the will had long been eliminated.

Just not completely.

“We won’t even be the first,” he told me. “I found boards where other launchers share. In the last year, like half a dozen ships have gone.”

“But have they made it?”

“We don’t know,” he said. “But have you heard about fiery crashes or intergalactic wars breaking out?”

I hadn’t. But law enforcement would surely keep any stratospheric interdictions quiet, wouldn’t they?

They.

I sounded like him now.

“You’re skeptical, but what if it’ll be fine?” he said. “What if we can get the universe back? Isn’t that worth some risk? Imagine that sky, full of stars, the way my dad described it. Just imagine. Just imagine us—our family—a part of it.”

I could imagine it.

I wanted to imagine it.

“I won’t go without you,” he said, and it was the truth. He’d given me the Go/No-Go. He’d given me the choice between the stars and the earth and if I said yes, we might not make it and if I said no, I knew we wouldn’t make it.

“T-minus six hours,” I said, which made him smile, though it wasn’t precisely a Yes. It wasn’t a No either. He practically skipped back to the pod to go through more adjustments and checks, tightening this and charging up that.

I looked at tomorrow’s weather report and there was chance of a storm moving in. I’d known that all along, the air had that smell. Surely he’d smelled it too.

But I had to look one more time, like a poker player checking their hand over and over, as if they didn’t know they held an ace and a four on the flop.

Go or No Go. I could make that call later, but I knew there would come a point I had to make decision myself. All in or fold.

For a while, I stood there, thinking about the way the weather smells, and where weather data came from anymore if there were no new satellites, and about my marriage and about a hand of cards and a distant command to keep our feet on the ground. I was somewhere between my driveway and an empty sky, not sure which had stronger gravity.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Alex London is the acclaimed author of more than thirty books for children, teens, and adults. He’s the author of the picture book Still Life, illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky, and the award-winning middle grade Battle Dragons series, among others. For young adults, he wrote the classic cyberpunk duology Proxy and the epic fantasy series Black Wings Beating. He has been a journalist and an international human rights researcher, a young adult librarian, and a snorkel salesman. He lives with his husband, daughter, and chaotic hound dog in Philadelphia, where he is on the faculty of the MFA program at Arcadia University.

“Go No-Go No” © Alex London, 2026.

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Kelly Robson returns to The Sunday Morning Transport with a new story, filled with brilliant, but hidden, mayhem and joy.

May brings with it fantastic Sunday Morning Transport stories by Ken Liu, LaShawn Wanak, Scott Edelman, and Kelly Robson.

We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

~ Julian and Fran, May 24, 2026

Now is a Kind of Forever

by Kelly Robson

Brilliant Station orbited the sun directly opposite Earth, as if playing a perpetual game of hide-and-seek in which the old ancestral habitat had long since lost interest. Originally a lightly populated sunspot early-warning observatory, artists moved in when the scientists left. They attached their studios and workshops to the tips of the station’s dendrites, and built out from there. Just a petite, snowflake-shaped nowheresville, protected from debris collision by experimental magnetic- and gravitational-field tech.

“The first Brilliants cared more about beauty than life,” Hyam told Chris, the Martian tourist he was hosting. “Occasionally a field failed and their habitats got popped by a passing micrometeoroid, but they were happy to pay the price.”

“That’s just nuts,” said Chris.

“Perhaps.” Hyam was unperturbed. Every tourist said the same thing.

He led Chris to a balcony overlooking the Agora, with its crystal sculptures, flower fountains, stacked terraces, and columned walkways. Brilliants lounged on every level, elegant in togas and chitons, colorful hanbok and hanfu, lavish saris and agbadas. On each angled surface, a gorgeous array of humans oriented to the contrasting and converging planes of the various gravity regimes, as if caught in a giant kaleidoscope.

Chris squinted. “The light’s a bit glaring.”

Hyam suppressed a sigh. Chris might be aesthetically impaired, but he was his responsibility. He guided the Martian to a bench.

“Are you feeling okay?”

“I think I’m just hungry. You promised me noodles.”

Hyam grinned. “Indeed. I have such a treat for you.”

They strolled toward the heart of the Agora. Halfway down the ramp, they crossed paths with five starstruck Venusians, pointing and squealing at the sights while their host sauntered behind, smugly adjusting the folds of his toga.

“Why does everyone on Brilliant wear dresses?” asked Chris.

Hyam was tempted to retort: Why do all Martians wear shapeless trousers with too many pockets? But instead, he softened his expression, settling into the most serene version of himself. “Skirts are beautiful, don’t you agree?”

“A bit drafty, though.”

They entered a cobbled corridor, narrow and low—a slot of compression intended to heighten the drama of the cathedral-like spaces it connected. Usually, Hyam took guests straight through, let them marvel at the expansive hall beyond before returning to the noodle house, but Chris was impervious to beauty. Time to tempt him with the delicious.

“The Liu sisters serve Brilliant’s best noodles,” Hyam said. “Handmade using the finest fresh ingredients. Nothing printed.”

“The food is made by hand?” Chris looked impressed.

“Each and every bite.”

But the noodle shop was closed. Hyam put his nose on the dim window and shaded his eyes with his hands. Nothing moved inside, not even a hygiene bot.

“No noodles?” Chris asked.

“This isn’t right. The sisters never close.”

“No problem.” Chris shrugged. “I’ll just grab something from a buffet.”

As Hyam led the Martian down the hall, he made an effort to regain his equilibrium. No point in acting like a child just because he wasn’t getting his favorite noodles.

The buffet was newly renovated in violet and silver, with antique-style tables and chairs. An amorous pair were tucked into a cozy two-top, their legs tangled under a fringed tablecloth.

Chris flipped through the menu. “Oh look, noodles,” he said, and ordered a ready-printed replica of the Liu Sisters’ silver needle bowl, the sauce glossy and fragrant with mushrooms and ginger. Hyam poured two cups of tea and led his guest to a table.

“Aren’t you eating?” Chris asked.

“I only like art made by humans.”

Read more

Scott Edelman, making his Sunday Morning Transport debut this week, has arrived with a story, and a creature, that spans time.

May brings with it fantastic Sunday Morning Transport stories by Ken Liu, LaShawn Wanak, Scott Edelman, and Kelly Robson.

We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

~ Julian and Fran, May 17, 2026

The Only Thing Older, The Only Thing Wiser

by Scott Edelman

Long ago and far away, when nothing yet lived above the ceiling of the sea, a fish—who might have been the first fish and may end up being the last—assumed he was a fish like any other. He started his life as most fish did, unaware for the most part of the passage of time, each day much like the rest.

For what is time to a fish?

He swam, he ate, he enjoyed the tickle of water through his gills, he fertilized, he hid from predators, and from time to time he danced along the shoreline and the emptiness above.

But most important—he survived.

Until one day, and he knew not what day that was, he became aware of differences appearing in those who came into existence around him, differences at first subtle and therefore capable of being ignored, but eventually growing to be both undeniable and unexplainable.

His first hint something odd was in the offing happened when he could no longer find any of his familiar companions within the school. At first he assumed they were merely elsewhere among his swarm, circumnavigating the distant edges. After searching among and through, though, he realized . . . they were gone. Every one of them.

He couldn’t understand how he’d lost them all without having been aware of the attrition. How could that have happened? He was a survivor, he knew that, for he’d always kept his wits about him. That level of alertness should have left him informed. So to be the last of his cohort without having noticed he was becoming so seemed wrong.

Not so wrong that first stage couldn’t be explained away due to chance alone, however. Not so wrong it implied anything catastrophic to his status quo.

No, that second sort of awareness didn’t arise until he noticed strange bumps and protuberances on some of the latest generation who swam the sea. The natures of those newer ones changed with the tides, seemingly useless at first, mere warts and other random growths, but then the grotesque began to abound around him. He spotted some who’d gained extra fins where no fins should exist, others whose rows of flippers ended bony and flailing, and some with tails splintered and unable to ever catch the waves—all senseless changes that impeded rather than aided the survival of their owners. The useless alterations to those new life-forms made it more difficult for them to swim, more difficult for them to feed, more difficult for them to escape.

He had no sense of how long this proliferation continued, as his relationship to time seemed to have broken, but regardless of how many months and years had passed, the increasing number of foreign bodies came to frighten him. For though the random appendages were at first relatively rare, they soon appeared in greater numbers and with even wider and more monstrous variables, causing increased discomfort not just to those who bore them, but to him from their mere existence alone. What turned his initial curiosity to fear was the thought it was likely all the result of a contagion that would soon take him as well.

And the effects of whatever was occurring eventually worsened, for he began to see, during his occasional trips to wander along the shore, the skins and bones above that were all that remained of those who had in what must have been an infected madness thrown themselves there. He felt sorry for the lost ones, but he felt sorrier for himself, because he did not want to end up as they had.

So he endeavored to spend most of his days as far from them as he could, to stay as long as possible in the darkness of whatever depths he was capable of reaching without being crushed by the pressure. He rose again only when the need to feed was unbearable, which to his surprise was not as often as it had been in the past. Strangely, he felt no more the sluggish for it. He behaved that way until the day he discovered, during one of his infrequent risings, the wave of change had suddenly ceased, the disappearance of the bizarre mutations making as little sense as their arrival.

He credited his isolation for having saved him from their fate, and attempted to forget the discomforting strangers and mysterious interlude. He would go on with his life, and consider it normal.

He sought out new friends, friends with whom together he formed a fresh school to swim with when in the mood. The group did not have him feeling quite the same as in the old days, for those in whose midst he found himself were not like those he’d known, but at least they were still to his mind fish as fish were meant to be, with no alarming changes. And they were company. Or so he forced himself to believe.

And for a while, the loneliness he had been feeling faded.

Read more

This week, LaShawn M. Wanak returns to the Sunday Morning Transport with an omegaverse story of mega proportions (you can read her previous story, “Deconstruction in the Form of a Cat God,” here).

May brings with it fantastic Sunday Morning Transport stories by Ken Liu, LaShawn M. Wanak, Scott Edelman, and Kelly Robson.

We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

~ Julian and Fran, May 10, 2026

Alpha and Omega

by LaShawn M. Wanak

We sit, bored, around the smooth-planed conference table as Pastor Kenneth Rimes outlines his next sermon series (“Your Battle Belongs to the Lord, Not You”) when he stops and scrunches up his nose. “What’s that smell?”

We look around the table, confused. There’s no odd smell other than the sharp nip of whiteboard marker and the redolent leather that always comes exclusively from Pastor Kenneth. He steps from the whiteboard, sniffing the air like a basset hound. “It smells . . . it smells . . . like . . .”

He comes to the head of the table and takes a long whiff. “Like peaches.”

Dustin Bockles keeps his mouth shut.

Saul Taylor, the worship leader, suggests, “Maybe someone’s making peach pie in the kitchens for a class?”

David Gilles, the youth pastor, shakes his head. “Naw, it’s one of those scent plug-ins. My wife loves those. Got the whole house smelling like some fancy plastic bouquet.”

We all laugh, pretend it’s not forced. Dustin shrinks down in his seat. Pastor Kenneth leans farther. “No. It’s coming from here.” He’s almost in Dustin’s face now, dragging in deep lungfuls of air like a dehydrated man gulping down water. “It’s coming from you.”

We all stare at Dustin. He laughs weakly.

“Must be my wife’s shampoo. May have grabbed it by mistake.”

The conference room erupts in genuine guffaws. A few of us crack jokes. Women and their flowery scents, right? Tell the wifey to clearly mark the bottles next time. Dustin laughs right along with us. Never mind that we don’t actually recall Nicole smelling of peaches ever. Rosemary, perhaps, but never peaches.

Dustin Bockles is brand-new to his role of an associate pastor, the youngest on the elder board. When the former associate pastor left, there was talk of promoting Saul Taylor to the role. It didn’t happen, of course. Every single man on this elder board knows why, though we won’t say it. Making a Black man an associate pastor will only cater to a certain demographic. Dustin is young. He’s relatable. He has a mixed wife. He checks all the right boxes.

Plus, Saul is a . . . you know.

Pastor Kenneth eventually returns to the whiteboard to continue his outline, and we all relax. Dustin tries to pay attention, idly scratching the inside of his wrist. For some reason, his wrists have been itchy as of late. Must be some weird reaction, he tells himself. Nothing to get worked up over. It’s either that, or . . .

No. No. He doesn’t want to think of the alternative.

Read more

May brings with it fantastic Sunday Morning Transport stories by Ken Liu, LaShawn Wanak, Scott Edelman, and Kelly Robson.

We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

In this month’s first, free story, Ken Liu shares a story told from a very different point of view. Please enjoy and share!

~ Julian and Fran, April 5, 2026

The Moon Carver

by Ken Liu

This story first appeared in the Audible Originals anthology, The Other Animals. This is its online debut.

It’s the night of the new moon, the best time to hunt.

I stretch and flex my abdomen. The scarred tergites and sternites on my back and belly creak and scrape, the horrid grating sound filling my bedchamber.

“Believe me,” I tell them, “I feel the same way. Too bad my last molting is long in the past. We are stuck with one another till death do us part.”

I climb up the spiraling tunnel, pausing from time to time to catch my breath. Back when I built my burrow as a young scorpion, I had wanted to get to the surface as quickly as possible—I never imagined the day would come when I’d have trouble navigating the steep incline.

At last, I reach the flat hall before the entrance. A chance for my legs to recover. Starlight spills through the opening, and the breeze brings with it a thousand smells: hopping jerboa droppings, the musk of a snake, the fading fragrance of flowers that bloom for a day in the aftermath of summer rain in the desert.

I give my tail a test curl: the stinger is primed and ready. I wave my pincers in silent greeting to Scorpius, our ancestor in the sky, before placing them on the rough ground to rest. My eyes gradually adjust to the light—the two on top of my cephalothorax can’t help but drink in the stars. It’s much cooler here at the surface, and I already miss my bedchamber.

But I do not crawl back. I settle down just inside the crescent-shaped mouth of the burrow and wait.

In scorpion legends, we often portray ourselves as a solitary species, and that is true, after a fashion. We build our burrows alone; we hunt alone; we die alone if we’re lucky. The less fortunate die in the pincers of a bigger, stronger scorpion.

In Twin Dunes, thousands of burrows are packed into the sides of the two sand dunes bracketing a gulley filled with cacti and hardy shrubs. One is never far away from the eyes and slit sensilla of one’s neighbors.

I am solitary, but I am not alone.

My pectines brush against the sand. Through them and my legs I feel vibrations in the ground, like ripples crisscrossing a puddle in the rain. Dozens, hundreds of other scorpions are rustling in their burrows, ready for the hunt.

Though my burrow is located on the edge of Twin Dunes, as high up the slope as possible, I can’t really get away.

“Still pining for the moon?” The voice through the sand is mocking, superior.

That’s Coco, my next-door neighbor. She’s been teasing me since the fall, when I fell from the top of Spiny Tower the last time I tried to approach the silent music of the moon. Unable to climb to the top of the tower again with my weakened legs, I’ve been exiled from my only refuge of open solitude, my only light-filled haven of isolation.

I ignore her and hold still. Silence is my shield.

There’s a price to be paid for being eccentric, for yearning after that which others do not value.

Eventually, my neighbors finish with their greetings and gossip and settle down.

My mind wanders. The older I get, the more I seem to live in the past.

#

“Most of hunting is waiting,” my mother used to say, when I was a mere scorpling clinging to her back.

She told us stories about the great scorpion hero, Nepa, champion of Mother Earth, who slew the arrogant hunter Orion with a well-placed sting when he boasted that he could kill every creature in the world.

“That is why Orion doesn’t appear in the sky except in winter, when we’re asleep,” she said. “He’s still terrified of us. Be like Nepa. Patience, stillness, and darkness are your greatest allies.”

My siblings and I hunted with her. For hours, we would compete with one another to see who could remain still the longest on her back, grains of sand clinging to the side of the dune, while she perched just inside the mouth of her burrow.

And then, the barest tremor in the ground; the fresh scent of prey wafting across the sand; a mad, exhilarating dash in starlight; a deadly dance of slicing pincers and waving telson; the acrid fragrance of venom; the dying struggles of the worm, beetle, cricket, moth.

What a fine hunter she was. So graceful, so assured, so magnificent. Like the overwhelming, almost-tangible music of the moon.

My mouthparts water as I recall the smell of home cooking: my mother would methodically slice apart the carcass and spray the pieces with her digestive juices to turn it into a fine stew for the whole family. And we would fight over the meal, jostling, pushing one another aside—

A tremor in the sand. No, a quake, an upheaval. In the present, not the past.

I tense; my pectines and legs struggle to determine the source of the disturbance. Waves of vibrations seem to be coming from every direction, louder than thunder, louder than flash floods, louder than that time a wild boar rooted around the entrance of my burrow, causing so much damage that it took me a full two weeks to repair.

Two bright beams of light sweep over the dune, a thousand times brighter than the moon when it’s full.

I skitter back into the safety of the spiraling burrow before I’m blinded. It’s all right that I won’t be eating tonight. I’ve survived six months on a single caterpillar before. Scorpions are tough, and old scorpions even tougher.

#

The rumbling, pounding, stampeding go on for hours. I settle into a trance in the bedchamber and let it all pass over and through me.

When the noises dissipate, I return to the burrow entrance.

The dune face is covered by faint fluorescent shapes, like stars that have fallen to the desert. My mother told me that scorpions are gifted with the ability to glow in the light of the moon and the stars so that our great ancestor in heaven can see us. It seems that all of Twin Dunes is climbing past my burrow to the top of the dune.

I join the crowd. It isn’t the habit of scorpionkind, deeply attached to the home we dig in bare ground, a refuge in a sea of uncertainty, to explore and wander. But a disturbance this unprecedented requires an unprecedented response.

Like everyone else, I poke my cephalothorax over the ridge at the top of the dune, away from the burrows, my tail poised to strike.

Two smaller dunes loom in the distance, upon ground that was flat but a day earlier. But they’re no ordinary dunes; their sides, incomprehensibly, gently undulate in the summer breeze. I see a gargantuan beast with a boxy, angular frame and four circular feet at rest, its smooth tracks stretching away in the sand like dried riverbeds. Perhaps this is the source of the thunderous noises earlier. A fire burns near the soft dunes. Against its hot, flickering glow, the shadow of a giant, shaped like Orion, struts, its four grotesque limbs waving about like the legs of an uncoordinated grasshopper.

“That’s a human,” says my know-it-all neighbor Coco, tapping out her authoritative pronouncement with a series of pincer-strikes against the sand. “I’d recognize one even if I’ve only got two eyes left.”

Coco claims that she was abducted by humans several years ago. According to her account, one night, as she climbed into a low shrub to search for insects, a bright beam of purple light fell from the sky and enveloped her, causing her body to glow with a searing light, much like the full moon. Blinded, frozen from shock, she was then caught by colossal, fleshy pincers and lifted into the sky, at which point she lost consciousness. When she woke up, she found herself imprisoned within a tank with invisible walls, and her human captors subjected her to unspeakable experiments: flashing lights, loud noises, sensory deprivation, being probed with hard sticks, flipped on her back while her pectines were stroked with a fuzzy brush . . . Eventually, she was returned to the desert, disoriented, memory a jumble, babbling nonsense. If a group of young scorpions hadn’t heard her ruckus and investigated, she might have never made it back to the settlement.

The human stops in front of the fire. It vocalizes, a series of unpleasant, cacophonous vibrations that make the hairs on my pedipalps tingle and curl.

Then it begins to shed layers from its body.

Everyone skitters and taps the sand excitedly. The creature is molting right in front of our eyes! It’s shocking to witness such an intimate act performed in the open.

“Calm down,” says Coco, exceedingly pleased with herself. “A human molts daily, sometimes multiple times every day.”

The human leaves its discarded skin by the fire. Clad in something thin and flimsy, like the soft exoskeleton of the freshly molted, it climbs into a long, tube-shaped bag on the ground, leaving only its head exposed. It makes another noise that seems to indicate satisfaction. After wriggling about for a while, it settles into a slumber, its thorax gently moving up and down within the tube.

“Look at how it cannot even sleep without moving!” says Coco. “Symptomatic of the guilty conscience of descendants of Orion. While we scorpions, comfortable in our own skin, spend ninety-nine percent of our lives staying absolutely still, a human is practically never at rest.”

Personally, I’m skeptical of Coco’s claimed expertise on humans. Even if her outrageous tale were true, I don’t see how she could have learned so much about her captors in her brief time with them. Besides, human abduction is the sort of thing that old scorpions sometimes invent to make themselves feel important, and Coco has produced no proof of her ordeal except one lost leg. I think it much more likely that she simply wandered too far from her burrow while chasing a speedy beetle and got lost.

“What do you think it’s doing here?” I ask, reluctant to legitimize Coco’s authority but lacking a better source of knowledge.

The others say nothing, but by the way they’ve lowered their pectines to the sand, I can tell they’re hanging on every word.

“Not ‘it.’ They.” Coco draws the moment out, glad that she has everyone’s attention. “See those unnatural dunes? They are shelters humans build—like aboveground burrows. I was taken into one. There are more of them sleeping inside.”

“Okay. What do they want?” I ask again.

She shrugs, raising her pincers to Scorpius high above in a mute appeal. Then she gingerly taps the sand, pausing between each syllable-tremor to add to the air of mystery. “Who knows? Humans are unpredictable creatures. They are even more eccentric than you.”

I glance at the dune-shaped human burrows: soft, billowy, reminding me of the body of the human lying on the ground, a mountain of flesh, an oversized caterpillar.

I leave the others to their gawking. There are more important things in life than the incomprehensible actions of humans. I return to my burrow and wait.

With most of the inhabitants of Twin Dunes occupied by the sight of the sleeping humans, the valley between the dunes is so much quieter. I feel my senses extend into the distance, as far as the slope of the dune on the other side, glinting faintly in starlight. It’s such a relief to be truly alone. The world seems to sing to me, a song with the clarity of the wind, the immutability of the sand, and the permanence of the stars. I wish it were the night of the full moon.

A rustle.

I spring into action and dash out, my limbs triangulating and closing in on the source of the noise. I lock my pincers around the thorax of a fat cricket. The creature struggles, kicking, biting, thrashing. I strain to hold it down, clamping hard to give it a quick death. At my age, it takes so much effort to make venom that I’d rather not use it unless I have to.

The cricket manages to turn and kick me in the face, so hard that for a moment I’m stunned. Then sensation returns in a flood: the pain from the crack in my cephalothorax, the smell of blood and gore, the tingle in my loosening pincers.

I grit my chelicerae and hold on. The cricket kicks the sand hard, and digs in. It’s dragging me away. I have no choice but to sting. Once. Twice. Three times.

Finally, it stops moving. I let go, panting. Every muscle in my body feels sore.

I will feast better than I have in years.

#

Stuffed with cricket flesh, I spend the next two days sleeping, climbing up to the entrance only for a constitutional stroll or two. The whole settlement is still obsessed with the humans, congregating atop the ridge every night to watch the strange beings in fascination.

The relative solitude is welcome. I push the bits of leftover cricket carcass out of my burrow; I sweep out the loose sand; I strengthen the entrance, hammering at the walls with my pedipalps.

A sudden noise behind me. The tremors are too strong to be an insect but not fast enough to be a jerboa. I whip around; a hulking shadow blocks the starlight. The fetor of another scorpion, one much younger but also stronger.

It’s not unusual for scorpions to hunt one another in lean times, but it is rare for one to be assaulted in his own burrow. I raise my pincers and brandish my stinger in warning, even though I know it’s hopeless. My venom glands are empty from the hunt; I cannot win this fight.

The newcomer taps the sand in front of my burrow disarmingly. “It’s me. I need your help.”

I comb my pectines against the sand to pick up her scent. I lower my pincers in relief. “Antares, it’s been a while.”

#

Years, actually. I’ve never gotten to know any of my children well—that is the scorpion way. The mothers bring up the babies by themselves and then chase them away after they molt for the first time.

But there is one exception.

Three years ago, on a night of the full moon, I climbed to the top of Spiny Tower, the tallest cactus in Twin Dunes. I liked making that strenuous trip—back then, I was still limber enough. There, I was as far away as possible from the busy valley floor, favored by the younger hunters, as well as the dune slopes, noisy with burrows. It was the only place where I could find the solitude I craved, and where I felt closest to the moon.

“What are you doing?” asked a young voice.

I was so startled that I almost fell from my perch.

“Who are you?”

“Antares, daughter of Serket, and your daughter as well.”

She really does look like her mother: wide abdomen, domineering cephalothorax, powerful legs, large pincers still deadly sharp with the inexperience of youth. Her exoskeleton glowed smoothly in the moon. Even though she still had a few instars to go, she was already as big as me.

“You should see the look on your face,” she said, laughing. “Do I look that scary?”

“You do. Terrifying, in fact.”

She beamed, taking it as the praise I intended. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s just that . . . it’s not often that a daughter seeks her father out.”

“It’s not that often that a scorpion climbs this high either,” she countered.

She was right. Climbing so high on such a bright night was incredibly dangerous. Hooting predators with wings could see me from miles away.

“The others say you are odd.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, not disapproving.

On this, she was also right. Even as a scorpling, I was deemed different from my brothers and sisters. Again and again, my mother had to tell me to scoot back on her back, so eager was I to perch at the very tip of her cephalothorax to bathe in the light of the moon. I can almost feel the light, Mama!

“I saw some of the moon-portraits you made in the base of Spiny Tower,” she said.

I hadn’t thought about those carvings in years. After my first molting, before I dug my burrow, I devoted months to capturing the phases of the moon. I attacked the tough base of the cactus with my pincers until I punctured the thick, waxy skin and reached the fragrant pulp, leaving jagged gashes: a waning crescent, a waxing gibbous hump, a circle as perfect as the course of the stars. I wanted to carve as many portraits as it took to reveal the fullness of time, to unlock the secret of the moon-music. I wanted to memorialize the beauty of the empty solitude one found only in the exposed light of the full moon, alone.

Everyone thought I was mad to waste energy in such a useless pursuit. “He’s trying to become a vegetarian,” Coco used to say, cackling as she thumped the ground with her pedipalps.

“I think the portraits are beautiful,” Antares said. “There’s nothing else like them in the whole valley.”

She really is my daughter, I thought. And a feeling I had never experienced before filled my heart: pride mixed with joy as well as sorrow, a sense of recognition and being recognized.

So we sat down on top of Spiny Tower, careless of how dangerously exposed we were. Bathed in the glow of the full moon, I told her about the music I heard in solitude, the notes that grew stronger in the pure, purple-tinged light, high above the valley bed, away from the noise of the quotidian. I showed her how to raise her stinger toward the moon, so that the eye that wasn’t an eye in her tail could feel the tingle of the music of the spheres.

Together, we held still and waited, not to hunt, but to luxuriate in the music that couldn’t be heard but only felt with one’s whole body.

#

Antares takes me the long way around the side of the dune so that we are away from the gawkers. It’s a more intimate view of the human burrows.

“They are getting ready to leave,” she says.

I see what she means. Most of the human artifacts have been packed away on the angular beast with four circular legs. Its back bulges with a thin cover, as though gravid with children. The two dunes in the bare sand stand bereft, alone.

“I want to go with them,” she says.

I turn to her, unsure that I heard her right. “What?”

“They shed old skins and put on new ones with such ease,” she says, the words tumbling forth like a cascade of loose sand. “They carry their burrow with them; they are not tied to one place; they have no roots.”

The thought is at once terrifying and freeing. I can’t imagine living without my burrow. I know its every curve, every twist, every crack and seam better than I know my thoughts. I’ve spent more time in my burrow than in my present skin. The burrow is literally an extension of me. I’m as rooted as Spiny Tower.

“Don’t you want to know what the world is like outside Twin Dunes?” she asks. “Mother’s burrow is only a meter from the burrow Grandmother built, which is only half a meter from the ruin of Great-Grandmother’s home.”

I think about the noise and chatter among the dunes on a summer’s night. I recall Coco’s mother and my mother scolding me for trying to make a burrow so high up the slope. I remember the snickers and giggles of everyone who watched me trying to carve a portrait of the moon, waving their pincers in circles above their eyes, in consensus that there was something wrong with me.

“Look at that beast with four round legs,” she says. “How far its trails extend into the distance! And how much farther it can still go. In the morning, the humans will get on it and ride into the rising sun. I want to ride it, too.”

I think about my mother telling me to stop being silly and settle down—out of her burrow, but not too far away. I think about the expression of confusion and disdain on Serket’s face, right after our promenade à deux, when I showed her my moon carvings. I think about my dreams, gradually thinning with each layer of shed skin, buried deeper after each round of repairs to the burrow. Over time, fantasies of climbing to the moon faded, replaced by the reality of aging limbs, brittle exoskeleton, the need to burrow deeper into the earth, where the seasons do not change, and time stands still.

“I don’t want to climb onto Spiny Tower once in a while, on the night of the full moon, and seize a pocket of solitude like a drowning scorpion clutching at a floating leaf in a thunderstorm. I want to live in a strange country where I know no one and no one knows me. Why can’t I shed this old me with the next instar? Why can’t I be without ties, without roots? I crave to live where my neighbors are still rocks with long shadows, and silence is as deep and wide as the sky.”

She pauses, her pincers drooping with exhaustion. “No one understands me. I’m . . . too strange.”

A new feeling seizes me: pride mixed with regret as well as hope, a sense of recognition and being recognized.

“I don’t think you’re strange at all,” I tell my daughter. “You are magnificent.”

#

It takes hours to carve through the covering over the back of the beast with four round legs. The material is tougher than any cricket, caterpillar, or cactus. My pincers are dull and my muscles are sore, but I keep at it.

So does Antares.

It isn’t a task that Serket would understand, or Coco, or any of the others who find us odd. It makes me happy.

Finally, we cut a thin crescent large enough for her to climb through.

Together, we turn to look back at the dune, the ridge at the top a silver arc. I imagine everyone looking this way, confused why the two of us are here, restless, out in the open, impatient.

“Well, I’ll be off,” she says. She probes the hole in the covering gingerly with her pedipalps.

“Be careful,” I say. She’s bigger and stronger than me, but I can’t help myself. “Coco says humans are very dangerous. If they see you, they may try to stomp on you.”

She lifts her stinger and waves it proudly. “I’m not scared.”

Just before she climbs through the hole, I blurt out, “Wherever you go, if you look up at the moon, I’ll be looking at it, too.”

She touches her pedipalps to mine, turns around, and disappears.

I try to climb down one of the beast’s round legs, but my legs are so tired that I lose purchase against the grooves and drop down—thankfully back into the comforting embrace of the sand.

On the long, arduous trek back to the dunes, I imagine the journey ahead for Antares: taking refuge in the dark interior of the beast as the sun rages overhead; the welcome arrival of a new night in a strange land; the cautious first steps in a new country; new scorpions, new preys, new sounds, smells, shadows. Will she even build a new burrow? Or will she live like the wandering humans, seeking temporary shelters wherever she goes in the lee of a rock, the shadow of a cactus, the curve of a fallen piece of bark?

Maybe even the stars will be different where she goes. But I hope she’ll still see Orion in winter, when she wakes briefly from hibernation, and I hope she’ll wave her pincers at him defiantly.

I stop to catch my breath. Not from exhaustion, but from an overwhelming giddiness. I haven’t felt like this since the time I tried to carve the moon.

My burrow is up ahead. Coco, waiting inside the mouth of her burrow, taps out a greeting. “Where have you been, oddball?”

“To be closer to the moon,” I tell her. “To fill my belly with light.”

You should see the look on her face.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Ken Liu is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he wrote The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series, the Julia Z series of techno-thrillers, as well as the short story collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. His latest book is The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, a new collection of short fiction that includes “The Moon Carver.”

Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks on a variety of topics, including futurism, the history of creative technologies, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.

“The Moon Carver” © Ken Liu, 2019.

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Brenda Cooper’s latest Sunday Morning Transport story begins with strange lights in the sky. ~ Julian and Fran, April 26, 2026

For April, The Sunday Morning Transport features stories by D. Xiaolin Spires, Margaret Dunlap, Rich Larson, and Brenda Cooper. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

Northern Lights and Southern Robots

by Brenda Cooper

Kin Way snuggled into a soft, half-waking dream about her robots marching from her factory onto construction sites. They wore hard hats and belts festooned with tools. They had clever pockets built into their hips, and their torsos were covered in the same bright yellow safety gear that human workers wore. In her dream, they waved at people, and people waved back; the robots and the people all together. A team.

The vision felt good, thick as a memory rather than diaphanous like a dream. Not that it had come true in real life yet. Deep in her heart, she knew it could. In spite of the haters.

Her factory was just two miles downhill and to the right. Three years old, gleaming with promise and hope, if not yet with revenue. Already it had turned out ten test bots. Working test bots! Perhaps that was why she kept sliding between sleep and consciousness. Euphoria. Her real and nighttime dreams braiding. Engineering dreams. Still, worry kept her from sleep. What if her robots weren’t accepted? How could she convince carpenters and bricklayers to work alongside them?

Fists pounded on her door, rattling the hinges. She startled awake.

“Come outside! Come outside! The sky!” her neighbor, a Nigerian artist named Chimaobi, screamed at her.

She lifted her wrist and peered at the tiny image from the door camera. Chimaobi’s round face gleamed in the porch light. His words made no sense, his tone a mash of fear and excitement. She finally understood him. “The sky is on fire!”

She poured herself out of the bed and found her sliders. She flung the door open. No one stood there. Her neighbors occupied the street, some in pajamas and slippers. The streets were usually dark to preserve night for the desert’s pollinators. Not now. She squinted. Brightness brushed the sky with color. She sniffed for smoke, smelled only lightly scented desert air. She darted back into her room, fumbled into her jeans and tank from the day before, grabbed her smart glasses and her phone, and raced out the door. As she emerged from under her roof, the sky commanded her focus. Reds and pinks, brighter even than the bougainvillea that covered the white stucco wall around her pool. Rising, brightening. Impossible. Red to pink to red, curtaining, swirling.

She froze mid-stride for a heartbeat, staring, held captive by color. She had seen this on a cruise, except it had been greens and blues. Softer. Smaller. She felt like she could reach toward the sky and stain the tips of her fingers with light.

Green spikes pierced the purples and reds, then the sky became largely neon green.

“It’s a miracle!” Chimaobi proclaimed, his smile so broad, it took over his entire face. “A miracle! A rainbow in the sky!”

Not a rainbow. An aurora. Chimaobi, a successful painter and sculptor, had moved here last year from near the equator. Maybe he had never seen such a thing. This sky belonged in Iceland.

What size flare would drive the northern lights all the way down to Scottsdale? She recalled a brief news article about a flare in her morning’s newsfeed. She had ignored it.

She blinked at the sky in amazement and wondered if she should feel fear. It had to be dangerous. She imagined satellites burned out of the sky, GPS fried. She had chosen her house for a direct view of the sunset over the Phoenix valley below, and she could see the lights stretching across miles and miles of sky.

Read more

For April, The Sunday Morning Transport features stories by D. Xiaolin Spires, Margaret Dunlap, Rich Larson, and Brenda Cooper. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

Corpse Pose

by Rich Larson

“Since when do you like yoga?” I demand as we climb the studio stairwell. “Is this a midlife crisis thing?”

“I can have crises whenever I like,” Stefan says. “When I die, someone will do the math and figure out which was the midlife one.”

We shed our boots at the door and carry them into the cool incense-smelling studio, joining the gaggle of masochists who booked the Rooftop Sunrise Filtermask Flow. Most are regulars: lithe tan psychopaths in sweat-wicking pulse-tracking nano-sculpting fitness gear, raging against the dying of the late-stage capitalist light as its self-immolating avatars. One hairy and bewildered man, woven mat tucked under his arm, probably got evacked straight from his ayahuasca retreat last weekend when Peru’s government collapsed.

Then there’s me and Stefan, two deathly unathletic Pre-Slop archivists who nearly did a really stupid thing together ten years ago and have been occasional roommates/friends/lovers ever since. We scan in and get changed quickly, pretending not to notice our sagging bellies, our sprouting white hair, because part of our shared mythology is that we are Still Plenty Young.

“There’s this thing at the end,” Stefan says as we palmprint our lockers shut, “where you just lie there and don’t have any responsibilities. And it feels really good.”

“Shavasana,” I say, because you can’t live on the West Coast half your life without stumbling into a few soulless corporate yoga studios. “Yeah.”

When we exit the changing cabin, the instructor is waiting to greet us with her zen white six-a.m. smile. She passes out the scented towels and filtration gear, helping one girl redo her ponytail so the mask strap will sit properly, gently prying the mat from the hairy man’s grip because mats are provided.

We all troop down the hall to a repurposed cargo elevator. It shuttles us upward, lurching then smooth. The lean bodies and bug-eyed filtermasks make it feel a little surreal, but most things feel surreal these days. Another short stairwell, then the instructor leads us through a brick-propped metal door and onto the rooftop.

My mask whirs to life, whisking the fog from my goggles and pumping the smoke-thick, blood-warm air into something passably cool and clean. Fire season doesn’t really end anymore, so I’m used to the swallowed skyline, just a few dark shapes jutting through brown smog. I spy a desiccated little coil of feather and bone on the very edge of the roof.

Stefan claims us two closed-cell rubber mats near the front of the class, which is exactly where I don’t want to be, and gives the instructor a thumbs-up she pretends not to see.

“I invite you to begin the practice in the center of your mat, in a seated position,” she says, voice choppy and electronic through her mask. “Place your hands on your knees. Turn your gaze inward and observe your breath.”

My breath doesn’t like being watched, but I do my best. I try to visualize the push and pull of my lungs, turn the filtermask into just another part of my body, my body into just another part of the living, breathing universe. Mostly I try to figure out why Stefan is suddenly into rooftop yoga and why I let him drag me into it.

He left his talkbox open, so halfway through our first downward dog I send him a message: We could be doing this inside. Virtual sunrise. Full climate control.

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*

For April, The Sunday Morning Transport features stories by D. Xiaolin Spires, Margaret Dunlap, Rich Larson, and Brenda Cooper. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

~ Julian and Fran, April 12, 2026

Johnny Otha Has a Problem

by Margaret Dunlap

Exhibit 1: The Emails

To: Agatha Jenkins, Head of Accounting, Vexxcorp

From: Johnny Otha, VP Future Strategic Planning, Vexxcorp

Re: Quarterly Projections

Hey Aggie,

So, I’ve got a problem and I’m hoping you can help me out. In our last meeting with the higher-ups, you mentioned something about projected losses next quarter due to high personnel transport expenses. Can you unpack that for me? Livingston is worried, and I want to reassure him everything is on track.

Best,

Johnny

PS In future, please give me a heads-up if you’re going to share something that might come off less positive.

*

To: Johnny Otha, VP Future Strategic Planning, Vexxcorp

From: Agatha Jenkins, Head of Accounting, Vexxcorp

Re: Quarterly Projections

I would have given you a heads-up, but I have been unable to find you in the office for the last week, and you did not respond to my multiple messages.

You can’t reassure Livingston everything is on track because it isn’t. The company is trying to send hundreds of workers to a planet literally trillions of miles away. Transportation costs, even amortized, are more than we can expect the workers to generate in their lifetimes. Unless the plan is for the company to lose a ton of money, this is not a viable plan.

—Agatha

*

To: Agatha Jenkins, Head of Accounting, Vexxcorp

From: Johnny Otha, VP Future Strategic Planning, Vexxcorp

Re: Quarterly Projections

Yeah, I’ve been away from my desk. The best thing is to leave a message with my assistant. He always knows how to reach me.

Brass tacks, what are we talking about here?

*

To: Johnny Otha, VP Future Strategic Planning, Vexxcorp

From: Agatha Jenkins, Head of Accounting, Vexxcorp

Re: Quarterly Projections

Brass tacks = 🍆🍑😮

*

To: Agatha Jenkins, Head of Accounting, Vexxcorp

From: Johnny Otha, VP Future Strategic Planning, Vexxcorp

Re: Quarterly Projections

Okay, but Livingston is really committed to this space thing. Since end of quarter is coming up, just make the numbers work for now. We’ll find a way to smooth things over by the time next quarter rolls around. K?

*

To: Johnny Otha, VP Future Strategic Planning, Vexxcorp

From: Agatha Jenkins, Head of Accounting, Vexxcorp

Re: Quarterly Projections

This is not a quarterly kind of problem. It’s a cockamamie scheme trillionaires come up with on the golf course while they’re doing coke off their caddies’ asses.

Transporting an entire workforce to a planet in a different solar system at near-relativistic speeds is insanely expensive. The fuel costs are prohibitive, not to mention nutrition and medical support en route, and no workers will be generating revenue until they arrive, which will be just under two years for them, but at least twenty for us.

The boss would be better off trying to build a factory in Ohio.

*

To: Agatha Jenkins, Head of Accounting, Vexxcorp

From: Johnny Otha, VP Future Strategic Planning, Vexxcorp

Re: Quarterly Projections

I asked, and Ohio is definitely a no-go. Turns out, getting around these earthside labor laws is why Livingston wants to head for space!

If I understand correctly, we aren’t paying wages to anyone until they earn back their cost of passage. So the whole transit operation is revenue neutral, right? Let’s make sure that’s reflected in the quarterlies.

—Johnny

PS That’s . . . not how golf works. Let me know if you want to hit the links sometime. Happy to take you!

*

To: Johnny Otha, VP Future Strategic Planning, Vexxcorp

From: Agatha Jenkins, Head of Accounting, Vexxcorp

Re: Quarterly Projections

I quit.

#

Exhibit 2: The Transcript

(Note: phone conversation transcribed from security camera located outside EZ-FREEZE corporate offices)

“Johnny! So glad I ran into you on the golf course! You said you’re having issues getting your workforce to the Sigma System?”

[indistinct]

“Woo boy. Who’re you working with?”

[indistinct]

“Oh.”

[indistinct]

“Oh no, they’re fine. Good company. Solid. And don’t get me wrong, near-light-speed drives are a great technology; absolutely has its place, I’m just not sure they’re right for you.”

[indistinct]

“Price is an issue for sure, but on top of that, have you thought about the time factor?”

[indistinct]

“Two years is faster than twenty, but that’s for them on the ship, not for you back here. You’re not saving any time, relativistically speaking. Plus, two years isn’t nothing. Your people can’t chat with anyone back home thanks to the time dilation, so what’s left? Catch up on the classics? Get outta here. No, they’re gonna work out, get jacked, get bored, and then what? They’re gonna start talking to each other. Conversation leads to collaboration. Next thing you know, you’ve got a union drive on your hands.”

[indistinct]

“Oh no? I hear Olympus Mons United Workers is petitioning for recognition any day now. Mars might be the Red Planet, but c’mon. No one set up shop there so they could rehash the same bullshit we have to deal with back home.”

[indistinct]

“That’s why this deal is so killer. With EZ-FREEZE, your employees slip into a Cryo-Pod, take a nice nap, and wake up fresh and ready to go. It’s a win-win. They don’t lose two years of their perceived lives; you get a workforce as fresh and excited about their new jobs as they were the day they went in. As excited and better trained, by the way. We have audio hookups so you can do subliminal onboarding while they sleep. It’s very slick.”

[indistinct]

“No worries. The pods can run for at least forty years without maintenance. Take as long as you want to get to Sigma. Who cares?”

[indistinct]

“Okay . . . maybe your workers won’t be thrilled, but by the time they find out what happened and how long it’s been, they’re light-years from home and the only route back takes just as long as the ride out did. What are they going to do?”

[beep, incoming call]

“Look, I gotta take this, but you’re having lunch at the club tomorrow, right? We’ll work out the details then and play a round to seal the deal. Awesome. See ya.”

[End of Transcript]

#

Exhibit 3: The User Review

EZ-FREEZE CRYO-POD

Username: stanley_572 *Verified User*

Headline: YOU [REDACTED]!!!!

1: When were you a user of the EZ-FREEZE Cryo-Pod?

I DON’T KNOW! WE AREN’T ON EARTH ANYMORE! THE DAYS AREN’T THE SAME, WE DON’T USE THE SAME CALENDAR, AND NO ONE WILL TELL US HOW LONG WE WERE ON THAT [REDACTED] PIECE OF [REDACTED] THEY CALL A SHIP!!!!!

2: As objectively as you can, describe your experience entering cryo-sleep.

IT FELT A LOT LIKE BEING [REDACTED] LIED TO!!

2 (2nd attempt): As objectively as you can, describe your experience entering cryo-sleep.

You want objective? Fine. Here’s what happened:

We got to the spaceport and onto the ship. Some people met us and said we all had to be sedated for launch. Something about it being more comfortable during acceleration. No one at Vexxcorp had mentioned that, but it kinda made sense, so we all went along. The pod was maybe a bit much, but when Alvarez asked, they said the g-forces got pretty intense. They sealed us up, and it got real cold, but then I was out, so whatever.

3: Describe your experience with the EZ-SLEEP Subliminal Learning System, if applicable.

Is that what those chipmunk voices yammering in my head were? I thought I caught something about workplace safety and harassment policies, but they talked so fast. . . . Did any of you geniuses think that maybe people’s brains slow down when they’re frozen? Or that you could give it a rest sometimes?!?

It was never quiet. Ever. EVER.

4: Did you experience any adverse effects upon waking?

You mean other than waking up light-years from home two decades after I left?!?

Well, about five days after I woke up all my hair broke off at the scalp and my fingernails and toenails fell out. Happened to some other guys too, so it’s not just me. Everything’s growing back, but my fingers feel weird without nails and my scalp is really itchy.

5: Did you receive anything of value in return for this review?

No, I didn’t! Look, I don’t know if this is [redacted] or what, but if someone is reading this, please, for the love of God, let our families know what happened! Tell the police, the media, someone!!

We’re all alone out here.

#

Appendix A: The Historical Record

(article and edit history accessed 2183-11-04)

Vexxcorp Manufacturing

Vexxcorp Manufacturing was founded on Earth in the mid-twenty-first century with the stated goal of “disrupting”[1] existing earthbound manufacturing models.[2]

[1] Scare quotes not present in source. Deleted for editorializing. (Vexx4Lyfe229)

[2] Mission statement on website http://www.vexxcorp.corp, retrieved from archive.org. (Vexx4Lyfe229)

History

Amid worsening environmental crises, strained labor relations, and the many global conflicts of the mid- to late-twenty-first century, visionary Vexxcorp founder Eustace Livingston launched a daring plan: to jump-start humanity’s transition to the stars[3] by establishing a factory, colony, factory, space plantation,[4][5] factory[6] on one of the first confirmed habitable extrasolar planets, Sigma 3.

[3] He’s dead, dude. You can stop kissing his ass. Sorry, I mean: Revise biased language. (ck)

[4] Stop changing my edits!!!!! (Vexx4Lyfe229)

[5] Stop erasing history, dude. (ck)

[6] It was technically a factory. Knock it off, people. I’m locking this section. (MOD)

Controversy and Lawsuit

It is unclear why anyone thought manufacturing physical goods that would eventually need to be shipped back to Earth in another frikkin’ solar system was a good idea, but apparently twenty-first-century trillionaires didn’t have enough things to blow their money on.[7][8][9] In 2075, an anonymous whistleblower at EZ-FREEZE Ltd. leaked user reviews that alleged Vexxcorp workers had been transported to the Sigma factory in a state of cryostasis rather than aboard ships traveling at near-relativistic speeds as promised in their contracts.

Vexxcorp denied all wrongdoing. However, in an interview, Agatha Jenkins, former Vexxcorp accountant, alleged the firm was having money troubles related to the Sigma factory and “freezing people to save a few bucks sounds like something upper management would come up with.”[10][11][12][13][14][15] However, she was no longer employed at Vexxcorp when the alleged misdeeds took place.[16]

In spite of these allegations, Vexxcorp continued sending employees to the Sigma facility for an additional three years until shareholders voted to remove Livingston as CEO and shut down the plant as part of Vexxcorp’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Workers’ families sued to require the company to transport their loved ones back to Earth, but the court ruled this impractical, as the company had insufficient funds for such a venture.[17] Appeals are ongoing.

A civil suit was later filed seeking damages against Vexxcorp VP Jonathan Otha, whom Livingston testified had made the change to transport employees via cryo without his knowledge or consent. Otha was found liable in a default judgment when he failed to appear in court. Because he was a cowardly snake.[18][19][20][21][22]

[7] Who needs to revise their biased language now, Luddite? (Vexx4Lyfe229)

[8] Sorry, no lies detected. (ck)

[9] Extraneous, deleted. I’m warning you two, play nice or take it outside. (MOD)

[10] (September 17, 2075). “Former Vexxcorp Employee Speaks Out,” The New York Times. Retrieved Nov 1 2183. (ck)

[11] Agatha Jenkins is a reliable source now? Everyone knows she was out to get Vexxcorp after they fired her. (Vexx4Lyfe229)

[12] She wasn’t fired, she quit. (ck)

[13] Yeah, that’s what she said. (Vexx4Lyfe229)

[14] That’s what your girlfriend said. (ck)

[15] I am getting out my banhammer RIGHT NOW, people. Last warning. (MOD)

[16] Added for context. (Vexx4Lyfe229)

[17] Alvarez et al. v. Otha (Harris Co, 2076). (ck)

[18] DELETED, you know why, ck. (MOD)

[19] At least you admit it was Otha, not Livingston. (Vexx4Lyfe229)

[20] I admit nothing. (ck)

[21] I admit that you’re a cuck. (Vexx4Lyfe229)

[22] THAT IS IT! Article locked. You’re both banned for forty-eight hours. Cool off and touch grass, if you can find some. (MOD)

#

Coda: [Unrecorded and off the Record]

“Hey there. Shhh . . . you’re okay. No, no. Don’t try to talk yet. You’ve been in the freeze awhile. My name’s Stan. And in case you don’t remember it, your name is . . .

“Huh. That’s weird, looks like your personal data got corrupted. Probably the radiation. Not a huge surprise, given how we found you and . . . everything else. I’ll get the interpolator going and see if it can’t piece your name together. It’s gotta still be down in the code somewhere.

“I don’t suppose anyone told you that you were going into cryo? Try to nod or shake your head if you can.

“Oh, good job! I mean, not a good job that you didn’t know. But good work with the neck muscles. It’s a good sign. Later, when you’re feeling better, you can tell us your story. It’s not required, but we’re trying to get as much as we can on the record. In case anyone from Earth ever comes looking for us and wants to know what happened. But there’s no rush.

“The important thing to keep in your mind is that you’re alive, and you’re safe. You’re also in the Sigma system. In what used to be the Vexxcorp plant, but, ah . . . You don’t work for Vexxcorp anymore. Pretty clear they’ve cut us loose up here. No ships in years. No messages. Nothing.”

. . .

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to lay all that on you. You’ve got your own problems. But it’s okay, we’re all in this together. We’ve got direct democracy and everything. A couple union organizer types got themselves hired on specifically to try to turn Vexxcorp from the inside once we got out here. That’s commitment to the cause, right? The union is kind of moot, but the organizing comes in handy. They’ve got committees and subcommittees and working groups for everything. It’s a pain in the ass, but I guess it works. Sort of. I mean, it’s been how many years and we still don’t have a new name for this place? The naming subcommittee proposed New Columbia, but the DEI committee said that was just colonialism 2.0, and then it was back to the drawing board. Don’t worry, though, the guy who proposed Marxlandia got shouted down right away, so that’s one bullet dodged, and you got to sleep through the whole thing.

“I’m babbling, I know. Having something to focus on usually helps people as they’re waking up. You’ve been asleep listening to those learning tapes for . . . a really long time. I tell you, if I could get my hands on one person back on Earth, it would be whoever came up with those subliminal recordings. I’m never going to get ‘proper protocols for depressurization practice’ out of my head. Ever.

“Anyway, going from endless corporate speak to silence really messed some people up before we figured out what the problem was. So now we make sure to talk to folks while they’re thawing out. You probably won’t remember much of what I’m saying. It’s all right. I’ll get you caught up again.

“You doing any better? Nod or shake . . . No? Not at all? Well, the docs said you might have a rough time. Your ship arrived a good ten years ago? Maybe more? The recycling crew finally found your pod, crammed into the superstructure like a stowaway. I don’t know who you pissed off back on Earth, but they must have been plenty mad. We thought you might’ve been cooked by the radiation, but apparently an engine shadow blocked the worst of it. Either you got lucky, or whoever packed you in wanted you to wake up on the other side.”

<Bleep>

“Ah, there’s your name. See, I told you the interpolator would pull it up.

“Okay. So for now, just focus on this. Your name is Jonathan Otha—

“Oh shit. You’re the one who—

“Oh, Johnny. You’ve got a problem.”

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Margaret Dunlap is a screenwriter, proud union member, and author of more than a dozen published short stories and novelettes that have appeared in Uncanny, Apex, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and as part of the Locus Award–nominated team behind Bookburners. Her television credits include cult-favorite The Middleman, Eureka, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, and the Emmy-winning Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. Find her on the web at www.margaretdunlap.com, or through her newsletter, the very accurately named Margaret’s Nearly Monthly News. “Johnny Otha Has a Problem” is Margaret’s third story for The Sunday Morning Transport.

“Johnny Otha Has a Problem” © Margaret Dunlap, 2026.

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For April, The Sunday Morning Transport features stories by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Margaret Dunlap, Rich Larson, and Brenda Cooper. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

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In this month’s first, free story, D.A. Xiaolin Spires makes her spectacular Sunday Morning Transport debut in a far-flung world. Please enjoy and share!

~ Julian and Fran, April 5, 2026

Strawberries

by D.A. Xiaolin Spires

Everyone needs a story to live by. This story has been fed to me ever since I have been frozen. That we were lucky. That we were saved. That it was beautiful in the past and we can re-create it here on this stark land. My people, the beautiful rolling hills of houses. Every morning, we were bussed to glittering farmlands, they say. Robust peppers and mouthwatering lettuce heads. The tinkling wind chimes that hang off orchard trees and birdsong. Sure. It’s not that none of these things ever existed; it’s just that I’m convinced they were never so perfect.

My tattoo itches. The raised constellation of bumps tickles as I consider these rose-colored images. I know the images are fake; they can’t be real. The tattoos were implanted by the only people I trust—my aunt and uncle who raised me back Earth-side—and send me impulses that intimate the sham. They taught me to coax the earth to fecundity, drawing fruit from the land. To fix things, from the pH of the soil to farm tech to rice cookers. Now they have been dead for hundreds of years, buried far away, probably scattered into space alongside the big blast. The only remains of them is this contraption under a patch of faux skin. Had I the key, it would tell me more, access more.

Scratching noises outside catch my attention. I jump back, hitting the wall. Rubbing my elbow, I turn on the camera. The mirror dissipates, replaced by a panoramic view of the acres of farmland against a purple sky. I scan the crops as spinning vigorberries, like many stormy eyes of Jupiter of my ancestor’s solar system, catch violet dusk light. In the distance, a fiery blast peeks through the Dyson sphere’s crosshatching. I bite my lip, smile, and help Claudia tie up the wire nets we’ll use for this row of swiveling spheric vigorberries. My peripheral vision spots movement and I grab the waterwick band for protection.

The camera flashes and zooms in. It’s not a pilfering neighbor. What is it? It’s buzzing and flying about.

Ghheeee. The memory chip tells me it’s a bee. “A bee.” I say it with the buzz of the initial b on my tongue and it sounds foreign. My tattoo lights up and I say it in Japanese, hachi—the voice of one of my ancestors responds for me. The thought must have triggered its awakening. I focus, but no other output comes from the tattoo.

Bee? Hachi? That can’t be true. Bees don’t exist here. I wait another minute, but it must have disappeared while I was focused on my tattoo’s sudden harmonization. I run a scan over the farmland, but it renders no organic foreign substance.

I peel off the dermlayer mask and splash water on my face. My eyes look bloodshot—like Hoshi’s flares. The solar bursts catalyze more images from my tattoo, harmonizing with the memory chip, painting a clearer picture of the past than I ever could access. A ghost of a face emerges and fades. Machiko? Maeko? No, Mika . . . How many are real and how many are glitches from hundreds of years of frozen disuse as I glided through the silence of outer space?

I scrub my face with a towel, reattach my secreskin, and swish signal the door closed. The panel retreats and a futon lowers from the ceiling.

Better get shut-eye before cavorting with our chain-mailed Ol’ Furnace, Hoshi.

#

The ship rumbles and Claudia and I recite safety checks. Once the ritual is done, we zoom past the pull of planetary gravity. The shaking is getting to me. I heave. Nothing comes out. It’s not often they call on us to do maintenance, as there are guardians closer to the D-sphere. But this isn’t an ordinary case.

The crushed vigorberries porridge with bobbing red eye seeds stops trembling. I take a sip from my straw, hoping it will calm my stomach. It doesn’t.

It tastes bland, sour almost, or maybe my taste buds feel weird up here. I’m nervous from the shaking, and insecure about being away from my crop. If I don’t make harvest quotas, they’ll reduce my housing space again. I barely fit into my domicile as it is. I worry about the whisper of bees and perilous work ahead.

Who would want to spend their days off-planet recalibrating Dyson sphere supraslats? It’s tedious and the cooling system does just enough to keep us not fried. There’s always the off chance a solar burst will come licking you with radiation. But every so often we’re mandated to fulfill our civic duty. It’s a test of patriotism—or hazing.

We put ourselves in stasis to regain energy for the mission while the ship’s velocity equalizes. I inhale the heady smell of fortified vigorberry nutrient mist. The crisscrossed pattern of the glass before me reminds me again of barbed wire and I hear the shout of a girl—Mika?—as I drift off.

#

Mika, no, who is it? Yes, it’s Mika. Her braids, her smile, in her summer yukata. Earth’s tilt to the sun is at max now; all sunshine and blue skies. It’s the dog days, with sultry heat and sticky lethargy, but she looks as peppy as ever. Kids are always like that. Resilient, eager.

On her yellow yukata are strawberry twins repeated over and over—perfect, crimson, heart-shaped, shimmering. Mika’s playing with her obi, ending in a generous bow on her back, until her mom yells at her to stop fidgeting.

Her mom comes in a light dress and wooden geta that clack against pavement, a basket of juicy strawberries in her hand. She fixes the lapel of Mika’s yukata. “Mika-chan, ichigo. Tabetene.” As Mika grabs an armful, her mom tsks. “Be careful. Don’t get your yukata dirty. Too old for a bib.” But as Mika shovels fruit into her mouth, her mom can’t help but laugh joyously.

With juice dripping down her chin, Mika nods. You can tell in her eyes and in the scrawls of calligraphic scarlet on her chin, she’s never really considered being careful. There’s a gleam imprinted on her brown irises as she digs in the basket for more.

The fruit she has been eating is not fragaria × ananassa, the cultivated one the city is officially celebrating, but fraisier des bois, the scattered wild one plucked from embankments. It is remarkably sweet, like mochi, a flavor incomparable to any human-raised cultivar.

It’s a statement that Mika’s mom and her neighbors bring out wild strawberries during the strawberry matsuri. They are not welcome at the city’s festival—so they hold their own gathering, eschewing planted crops for wild ones. They dust off crisp summer wear and take out pretty fans and hairpins for accessorizing.

They wield sharp knives and cut strawberries.

Even Mika takes her round with mochitsuki. She holds the kine up high and brings the mallet down on the glutinous rice on the wooden mortar. Her mom pushes the sticky dough back into place.

Once the rice cakes are ready, they fold wild strawberry pieces into them. The supple daifuku look luscious with gleaming dough.

They pull out tarps, lay these treats out against the vista of the half-harvested cultivated crop.

Besides desserts, they enjoy the fruit fresh, sun-ripened and succulent. They stare out at twinkling heart-shaped fruit embedded in rows of fountains of verdant leaves. They chat and laugh in this reprieve after the labor-intensive work of clearing out stumps from already logged land, earning measly cultivation rights on land they are banned from purchasing.

Mika jokes that she will be the Strawberry Queen. Every year, they print a photograph of the crowned queen in the paper, her skin and teeth powerfully white against the gray of the strawberry on the black-and-white front page. Her mom purses her lips and tells Mika not to talk with her mouth full. Immigrants are never queens here.

Mika will never get a chance to participate in the official strawberry festival, let alone be Strawberry Queen. No, that’s what their private matsuri is for.

The scene pulls away. The harmonization of tattoo and chip hiccups. I get chills.

Little do they know their charming farming world, as tough and strenuous as it is—will all come to an end as they are relocated, herded like cattle into enclosures miles away.

And the rows and rows of glittering strawberries will, poof, disappear along with the yukatas.

It’s not an image, just a hazy feeling.

#

“Wake up, Fumika,” says Claudia, her eyes black and wide with fear. The stale air within the pod clears and it takes me a moment to realize the hatch to my pod is open. An alert pings from its shell.

Claudia waves a self-winding wrench in her hand, and a whimpering twang emanates from her throat.

My tattoo sends relentless waves of tingles down my spine. My head throbs and I massage my temples.

“Where am I?”

Claudia places a cold hand over my forehead. “You were doing that thing again.”

No strawberry fields. No yukatas and ichigo daifuku.

Claudia pulls me up. She’s already chatting before I gain a sense of my whereabouts. “I need help—you won’t believe it. I just fixed the energy binder when the shutter nodules detected something strange.”

Oh right—we’re on our way to the Dyson sphere. I was resting in the stasis chamber.

I teeter over to the enhanced viewing portal. The giant iris lens cover appears to blink, scrunching in as it begins to swirl open.

A panel gets caught and the lens cover sticks. Claudia rams her wrench in and it winds on its own accord. This ship has seen better days. “Our course has been interrupted. Maybe the mission was a ruse.”

I startle. “A ruse? From Central?” She nods at the spare wrench. I grab it and jam it in with hers. “That doesn’t sound right.”

The panel budges with a shudder. I’m sent flying toward the ground.

With a groan, the lens cover retracts fully, panels receding into the frame, revealing the expanse of the sky and the brilliance of Hoshi, its light dimmed by the lens’s special viewing glass.

Something’s off. The hairs on my arm stand within my puffy suit.

There are constellations spread across the Sphere. Orangey red and extremely bright, burning gases with great strength.

No—

I turn to Claudia as her surprised brown eyes settle on mine.

Something is wrong.

“Not constellations,” I say.

Claudia squints and winds her fingers this way and that, as if threading an invisible string across the twinkling objects. I can’t help but imagine her hands moving across vigorberry patches, securing netting. “A Q formation.”

They twinkle in unison, in an offbeat way. A message.

I put my fingers on my temples and rub. My mind wanders:

Sparkling red, a strawberry patch. Ichigo.

A radiant outburst from a sudden solar flare activates the auxiliary shield system. The room dims to warn of the radiation outside.

My tattoo stirs as it harmonizes with my memory chip, the two forms of tech linking up, called to action from the intensity of the radiation. I shut my eyes and scratch the itch of my tattoo. The haze of confusion thins as twinkling flashes strike my eyelids. Reflexively, I mouth Wabun Morse code, passed to me from generations ago and synced through picoprocessors.

“Rebels. Red rebel ships,” I say, opening my eyes to see the ships even closer. Now more like the size of vigorberry seeds rather than tiny dots. Such incandescent fiery colors—even post-flare-up Hoshi behind its D-sphere cage looks dull against these shimmering flashes.

Claudia raises her eyebrows, thwacking the wrench into her palm repeatedly. “Red rebel ships? You sure? It can’t be. . . . I didn’t think the lore was real.”

“What else can they be?” I sweat, counting the number of ships. Can there really be that many? I count again. Fifty of them, and if my calculations are right, with a crew of about ten each. We barely have two hundred people in our settlement. I take note of their flashes, but I need a mechanical translator.

I have to make contact—let them know we’re not an enemy ship. Are we?

Claudia already shifted to the comms, clearing out the security codes. “I won’t send anything until we agree on what to send.”

I run about grabbing emergency supplies: tethering straps, extra food pellets. “Okay, gimme a minute to think.”

Claudia’s pretty good under pressure, but I notice she’s shaking slightly in her suit as she clicks away on the comms. Her billowing sleeves tremble as I raid cabinets.

“Central lied to us. Said there was no one out there anymore. Told us we were the last of the lost outposts and we should give up.” Claudia’s voice is mechanical, but a tremor belies her composed tone.

My tattoo is throbbing. “Not now,” I plead to it softly, throwing a can into the sachet.

“If it really is them . . . then it wasn’t actually Central who sent the orders for us to come here. . . .” Her voice trails off. Her expression changes as she turns to face me. Her inflection becomes melodic as she recites: “Our mission is like naranja amarga—more bitter than sweet.”

The Code of the Refugees. Banned by Central. It’s been so long since I’ve heard those words.

“But our blood runs through us with the crimson boldness of hamantaschen cores,” I say, thinking of the red ships outside and red vigorberries that we strive so much for.

“We float in our capsules over the depths of space like kabab khashkhash,” says Claudia. And for a moment the image escapes me. But she whispers it again and her voice triggers it. Minced meat kebabs floating in a sea of red.

Claudia stares at me from the iris window. Her luminescent brown eyes pierce me to the core. What’s my cue? Claudia takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. C’mon, her eyes plead.

“Scattered like sakura petals, we are blown away,” I say finally. The voice that comes from my mouth sounds like my aunt’s and not my own, but Claudia looks satisfied. I stuff gloves into a sachet and avoid her searching eyes.

She taps at the glass—Wabun Morse code for 聞いて, “listen,” but perhaps it was only a coincidence. I stuff radiation guards into the sachet and glance at her.

Claudia looks out at the ships and keeps her voice low. “Gỏi cuốn, wrapped up, we will find each other again.”

With the last utterance, I know she is in. That she has firmly pulled away from Central’s promise of a steady life in this harsh world—that she has hopes for something more. To unite again—after we have been pitched out into these foreign posts. Our last meal together with all of us estranged—before all this, before the freeze, before the explosion, before compromises with Central—consisting of this concerted smorgasbord of food, an assemblage of goodwill as refugees of Earth. It was hopeful then, even when we knew our odds were low.

I remember being so cold. They said you can’t feel the cold in cryostasis, but I remember it. Maybe my body always knew—that recollection of cold trapped in my cells. I shudder as a change takes hold in me. A warm jolt travels down my spine. Only now, with the reciting of this code, is that frigidity trapped in my psyche beginning to thaw.

That twinkling strawberry patch of ships—maybe going to them would doom me. Maybe these rebels won’t be strong enough to deal with Central. Maybe they want something we have. But maybe they’re here to help. Central is far away, their visits scant. These ships—they are here now, for better or worse.

My tattoo itches furiously and try as I may to refrain from tracing its grooves, I find my fingers on their raised path. I tell myself to stave away the reverie for now—that I have important business to accomplish, but my vision’s darkening.

“Should we do it?” Claudia says through the dimness of the harmonization-induced trance.

“Yes.”

“Yeah?” A waver of uncertainty fills her voice. But things are starting to fade, and I smell a mellow sweetness in the air.

“Yes, absolutely. Alert them of friendly intentions,” I say with lucidity before going silent.

Far away, I hear the beeps of a lightgram and then everything is black.

#

It often starts with the strawberry fields. Mika with her yellow strawberry-print yukata. Her expression of her wish to be the queen. Mika’s mom’s disapproving look fades away as the food comes, the desserts get eaten, and merriment ensues.

After that, it is only snippets of my aunt and uncle tinkering and the memory of cold instilled in my body.

An uneasy feeling of being confined.

But today—today is a different day.

We are released. Years later.

Years of neglected homes, businesses, pets. Vineyards, restaurants, stores closed and sold off. Pre-evacuation sales stir in our memories as we revisit these spaces turned non-familiar.

Strawberry farms—many of them. Fields and greenhouses sold for a pittance. No longer ours.

I have never felt my tattoo itch from within the memory chip’s embrace. But today I do. I know this is an accumulation of the past beyond that stuck point of dread and confinement.

And it is opening up greater and greater. I am receding into another point in time.

The watchtower appears again. Now there are faces. Never before were they so clear. The camps.

Now I can see everything. Acne on skin, dilated pupils, faces of guards—some stern, some bored. They stand in front of barbed wire and carry arms.

People here, they work. Tanaka-san is the head doctor at the medical clinic. He smiles despite the conditions. Sato-san heads the schools and keeps a pencil behind her ear. Suzuki-san dishes out milk, macaroni, and pickles at the mess halls. She receives a heavy load of complaints on the lack of fresh vegetables. Enomoto-san squeezes out fresh milk from udders. Even I help plant the daikon radish seeds alongside Watanabe-san.

Sometimes I’m dancing. I’m dancing at the mess hall. Laughter surrounds me and I’m laughing too. Laughing and dancing and wearing the only fancy yukata I have.

There’s a mochi in my hand with strawberry, just a piece of one from a small harvest, but for me, it’s enough to bring tears to my eyes. A real strawberry-filled ichigo daifuku.

It’s one of the better remembrances that the tattoo harmonization triggers.

#

I hear voices in the distance and feel the heavy shake of strong arms.

Memories pass by me that I have never encountered before . . . unlocked . . . the key must be unlocked. . . .

Leaving the gates. Walking right past them. The war over. Different decorations on my old house I have not seen for years. A different family under my roof. Destruction of property. Vandalism.

The endless search for jobs, arguing for loans.

New farms, new houses.

I’ve never gotten this far out in time beyond the watchtower and the grimness of the barbed wire in the remembrances. I try to hold on, grab all I can from my ancestors, the bitter and the sweet, but they race by, too fast for me to process.

And then Claudia is before me speaking rapidly. “We’ve made contact. They want to know what you are picturing.”

“What I am picturing?”

“They’ve accessed your files. Not the content within, just the metadata. The content—it’s what they’re after. Information. History.”

She tilts her head. “Honestly, I didn’t know you still had it on you.”

She shows me her own armpit. Something had been excavated, leaving only a network of scar tissue.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “My aunt and uncle—I was never supposed to tell anyone about the tech.” I don’t even try to hide my stroking of my tattoo now, as the regularity of its bumps soothe me.

“And it’s good you didn’t, because I’m sure Central would be there to take it away.” She stares at my arm. I feel self-conscious and turn away.

“They’ll be boarding in a few hours,” she says. “I’m not sure if they’re like us—frozen and revived—or they’re from generations after. I’m not sure what this means about our stay here—our lives, our vigorberries.”

I think about the orange globes of fruit with their knowing eyes.

“Claudia, the rebels, they’ve unlocked something in me.”

“The key?”

I nod.

“But that’s apocryphal.”

“Maybe. But I feel it. Experienced it. I know much more about the past. Not only about my people. But I suspect there’s hidden information in there. About survival.” I open my eyes wide. My tone sounds supplicating, desperate, but I don’t care. It’s been so long without reason to hope. “Maybe there are instructions. If these rebels . . . if they are here, maybe there are more of us. Maybe our communities are still alive.”

Claudia shakes her head. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up too high—”

“But even if not, I’ll share it with you. My knowledge. Let’s do it. My tattoo is your tattoo. We’ll go with them and see. And if it doesn’t work out—”

“Yes—if it doesn’t?”

“If they don’t have our best interests at stake, we survived before. We’ll find a way.” I pull out from my emergency bag beside me a long cord of triple-plated twisted wire. “I have a grappling hook shooter for the vigorberry zip lines and equipment for repairing Hoshi. Improvised weapons and a shipful of resources. We’ll manage.”

Claudia smiles. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

She passes me a handful of something and gives my shoulder a squeeze.

“I have vigorberry seeds in cryostasis,” she says. “I was testing pollinators that I’ve been working on secretly. They change the way the vigorberries develop so they can survive the cold.”

I play with the seeds in my hand. They still feel cold.

“Cryostasis? Pollinators . . . bees?” I remember the buzzing, the bees, the hachi.

“Inorganic pollinators. I’ve been seeing if the seeds can survive the cold with these pollinators. I’ve plucked out a few seeds and pollinators for good luck to keep with me—and they look great. I’ve got the recipe to regrow the right soil, too.”

She quickly scrawls out some formula I don’t understand and then erases it. “That’s not quite how it starts. I have to check my notes.”

“I mean, I know we’ve invested a lot in these seeds. But, Claudia, c’mon, are they worth regrowing elsewhere?”

“I found out the real reason Central wants us producing the seeds—let’s just say they induce a chemical change in them that they don’t with us—and I think an illicit production business will be underway if we make it out. That is, if you want in.”

It takes a while for it to sink in. Illicit production. Chemical changes. Departure.

I open my gloves and for a second my tattoo twitches and I think I see the heart shapes of strawberries. Ichigo. I blink. No, this is not the germination of the destruction of my people past, but the lifeline of my people to come—the vigorberry seeds.

We would be producing unrestrained, unfettered, growing our own crop for our own leverage. It is how my ancestors would have liked it, I’m sure of it. I feel like I am living out my given name, Fumika, 史果, wielding history toward fruition. My tattoo sends out a warm feeling of comfort I haven’t felt since the freeze. Not the jolt of flashbacks but a heated tingle of gentle reassurance.

Claudia smiles and we both turn to the viewport, watching the ships get incrementally larger.

I rub the seeds and roll them around in my palm, imagine them spinning and growing. These organic seeds look so red, so much like the ships approaching. They look almost sentient—disinterred from the ground that Central claims and now free to flourish, so eyelike, swirls of knowing, staring at me and imploring.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as NY, Hawai’i, various parts of Asia, and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. She has a PhD in anthropology, writes speculative fiction and poetry, teaches martial arts, paints fantastical art, and enjoys gastronomic adventures. Her stories appear in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Nature, and Galaxy’s Edge—and have been selected for The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories and The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time. Her poetry has been nominated for the Dwarf Star, Rhysling, Best of the Net, and Pushcart Awards. Website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com. Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/spires.bsky.social.

“Strawberries” © D.A. Xiaolin Spires, 2026.

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Part thriller, part dream, Leah Cypess’ new story for Sunday Morning Transport will leave you thinking… if it ever truly leaves you. ~ Julian and Fran, March 22, 2026

March sweeps in with a wonderful quartet of stories as The Sunday Morning Transport brings tales by Ben Francisco, V.M. Ayala, Alex Irvine, and Leah Cypess. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

In Your Dreams

by Leah Cypess

Every night, her dreams got weirder. At first Anna assumed it was stress, which she unquestionably had plenty of—the divorce, the move, the upcoming custody battle, all the things that made her friends either avoid her or patiently listen to her endless complaints. She no longer felt like her life was her own; why should her dreams be any different?

“That’s a cop-out,” Izzy said when Anna mentioned this theory to her. Anna’s sister, unlike everyone else in her life, neither avoided her nor sympathized with her. Probably this should have felt like a breath of fresh air; that was definitely how Izzy thought of it. “Your dreams are your subconscious trying to tell you something.”

“My subconscious is telling me to beware of fuzzy yellow bears?” The bears had chased her through the streets of her old neighborhood last night while singing the latest song that Anna’s teenage students were obsessed with.

“Obviously,” Izzy said, flipping her curls back from her face, “the true meaning of your dreams is deeper than that.”

Anna did feel like she had been chased out of her neighborhood. The streets where she had walked Claire’s stroller around and around, the café where she had grabbed coffee, the porch where she had sat while clicking through swing-set ads on her phone. So that part of the dream wasn’t hard to figure out. But she wasn’t about to say so to Izzy.

“The night before,” she said instead, “I dreamed that I was plummeting from a plane, and then just as my parachute snapped open, a cup of coffee dropped into my hand.”

It had been a pumpkin spice latte, which Anna hated. She didn’t even want to think about what her sister would do with that piece of information.

“There was this weird humming in the background,” she added. “The exact same sound in both dreams.”

Izzy drummed her fingers on the table. “Wasn’t your first date with Kevin at a Starbucks?”

“I think the humming is more significant than the Starbucks. It was this really weird, unearthly sound.”

“Unearthly? That’s an interesting word.”

“Is it?” Upon consideration, Anna decided she didn’t want to know where Izzy was going with that. She glanced at her phone. “I have to go. I have a meeting at Claire’s school.”

“Is Kevin going to be there? Might be a chance to talk to him.”

“What would I talk to him about, exactly?”

Izzy shrugged. “Maybe ask him what he thinks about your dreams.”

Read more

~ Julian and Fran, March 15, 2026

March sweeps in with a wonderful quartet of stories as The Sunday Morning Transport brings tales by Ben Francisco, V.M. Ayala, Alex Irvine, and Leah Cypess. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

Self-Portrait with Bones

by Alex Irvine

Since I passed my most recent birthday, Professor, an unusual phenomenon has become apparent: my bones are growing again. Not the rest of me, other than the usual mortal sagging and flabbing. Just my bones.

I first noticed a difference in my right thumb, which developed a protrusion at its base. Over several weeks this grew to be quite noticeable, and I took to wearing gloves, or letting the sleeves of my coat hang long. My right big toe was next; it, too, developed a lump at its base, and then the toe itself began to lengthen. Soon my shoes became painful, and I was forced to purchase larger ones. My fiancée remarked on this, noting that my old shoes were still in good condition, not even needing repair to their soles. To this I responded, untruthfully, that they had never fit well, and I could tolerate it no longer.

One morning a few days after this, as I showered before going to the office—my apartment has all modern conveniences, befitting my status as a young professional—I ran a hand over my sternum, and detected the small beginnings of a lump, just where one of my ribs met the sternum on my left side. I rested my fingertips on it—over my heart, which seemed significant—and looked down at my feet. My right big toe was visibly longer than the left and seemed to be developing a sort of hook.

Feeling my heart beat, I thought to tell my beloved. Instead I sent word to the office that I was ill, and when my beloved knocked at my door that evening—the last molten sunshine spread over the river, just above the dam—I could not surmount my fears and answer.

What would be next, I wondered. Would my brow sprout horns, great curving prominences it would take me years to learn to love? Would knobs grow from the tiny bumps of my vertebrae, flourishing until I displayed a row of spines worthy of a dinosaur?

How much would it hurt?

I fell insensate from fear and dread, but awoke in the night riding a strange tide of giddy abandon. Rushing to my armoire, I rummaged through old papers and the like until I extracted my sketchbook, which had remained unopened since my last study with you, Professor. I riffled the pages, passing over years of earnest life drawings, landscapes, street scenes—until I arrived at a blank page. I found a pencil.

***

Since then, things have proceeded at an accelerating pace. Eating becomes a challenge as the bones of my face achieve their new form—or this transitional phase before a true final physiognomy I cannot imagine, or extrapolate from what I see in the mirror.

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~ Julian and Fran, March 8, 2026

March sweeps in with a wonderful quartet of stories as The Sunday Morning Transport brings tales by Ben Francisco, V.M. Ayala, Alex Irvine, and Leah Cypess. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

La Sirena’s Blessing of Belonging

by V.M. Ayala

The highway slab jutted out of the ocean, away from the shoreline, thick columns of concrete poking above the waves. The house on top grew larger as I rowed closer. A faded, blinking neon sign proclaimed the home La Casa Sirena. It was famous, deplored, loved, and feared. It was almost impossible to get to with this useless boat. The squealing motor had quit after I couldn’t pay the usage fees, but I managed with the flimsy complimentary oars.

Mist soaked my tattered hoodie, leaving me sodden and weighed down until I wondered if I might sink this tiny dinghy. Maybe that would be easier than poking at the questions I wanted answered.

Julieta waved from underneath the sign like a lighthouse, except she lured me toward her rather than warned me away, daring me to dash myself upon her. We’d been texting for several months now. I smiled and waved back.

***

It took a surprising choreography of rowing and awkward ropethrowing and Julieta sweetly navigating me through tying the correct knot to come ashore. I scrambled up a metal rung, polished by daily use, embedded between rusted bones of rebar. They jutted out precariously close to my head as I pulled myself up, up, up.

“Ines! I’m so glad you came—and, well, sorry for the precarious trip.” Julieta nodded with her chin at my dented piece-of-shit boat. “I see the city is still the same, never helpful.”

“Tragically,” I replied. It cost my entire rent to, well, rent a tiny boat and come out to the forbidden highway ruins. I had nowhere left to go but here. Not that Julieta needed to know that. La Sirena would solve this problem for me. She had to.

We both stared out toward said city. The skyscrapers twinkled along the horizon, water from the bayous glittering in the now midday sun. Thank goodness it was winter; it was nice and cool even in (slightly) thicker clothes. But at least it wasn’t a cold snap; then my battered hoodie wouldn’t be enough.

“Come, you came all this way for answers. Let me introduce you to my abuela.” Julieta extended her hand shyly.

I took hold, fingers entwined like my boat with its rope, now safely nestled in refurbished rubble.

***

“Abuela! Can you come down? We have a guest!” Julieta called upstairs.

The house was a house, ordinary, built in the early 2020s. The floors were scratched here and there but well-kept, the kitchen similarly dented and scratched but preserved. This place was loved in a way I didn’t fully comprehend.

“Niña, por qué inglés?” A woman with short silver hair shuffled down the creaking stairs. She muttered with each step, taking her time.

“We have a guest,” Julieta repeated, louder this time. “You spoke to her on a call yesterday. Recuerdas?”

“Sí, sí, claro. Ines. See? I remember just fine. Welcome, welcome.” The old woman took me by the hand, giving it a loving squeeze as she smiled at me. “You’ve come a long way.”

Her Spanish lingered in her English for a few syllables, the accent brushing against her vowels, sticking in the slightest hesitation between sentences. I hoped to be able to switch so easily, someday.

Read more

March sweeps in with a wonderful quartet of stories as The Sunday Morning Transport brings tales by Ben Francisco, V.M. Ayala, Alex Irvine, and Leah Cypess. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

In this month’s first, free story, Ben Francisco asks you to visit a magical bodega, with a complex set of prices.

~ Julian and Fran, March 1, 2026

When Your Ex-Husband Lies Dying and Only You Can Get Him the Magic Elixir from the Bodega

by Ben Francisco

The first step is to walk to the nearest bodega. It likely isn’t far, perhaps a few hundred steps, but not much more than that, not if you’re in the city. A journey into the absurd begins with a walk around the block.

The store has a name, of course. Flatbush Deli, perhaps. Or Convenience & Grocery. But no one calls it that. You call it the bodega, and everyone knows what you mean: the store on the corner, the one with the awning of faded maroon, with the busy letters saying Cigarettes—Sandwiches—Lotto—Coffee—Cold Beer—Soda—Newspapers—Candy—EBT Accepted Here. These are the things that mark the bodega for what it is: a space where space is slightly bent, a place that is both one place and many places.

Go to the guy at the cash register up front and to the side. He may be busy with other customers or counting small bills or checking something on his phone. Be respectful and wait for him to finish. Eventually he’ll point at you and say, “What do you need?”

Then you’ll reply—and be sure to use these words exactly: “I’d like to see your top-drawer stuff.”

The cashier may say, “Nothing we have comes in drawers,” or he may just squint at you.

I should mention that if you speak Spanish or Arabic, it may speed up the process. But being a polyglot is not crucial to your mission; only persistence is.

In any case, whether in Arabic or English or Spanish, you must tell the cashier, “I mean the top of the top, the cream of the crop. The stuff you keep in the back.”

The cashier will nod. With his nose, he’ll point to the bodega cat, which is crouching on a nearby shelf in between the cans of diced tomatoes. You hadn’t noticed her there before. She’s gray with uneven black stripes, a pattern that looks like a Rorschach. At its leisure, the cat will emerge from the tomato cans and saunter down the aisle. Keep exactly three paces behind her. If you follow her too closely, she’ll get skittish and dart into the shadows of detergents and bleach. If you fall too far behind, you’ll lose her at the end of the aisle.

She will lead you to the far wall, where the soft drinks are. One refrigerator is stacked with Coca-Colas and another with orange juice and apple juice. Just a few inches separate them. The cat will squeeze its way through the crack, its skeleton easily folding to fit the space between the fridges.

You must follow. Don’t think too hard about the geometry of it. Imagine you’re like the bodega cat, with free rein of this realm, master of this corner of the universe, no passage too narrow to keep you out. You should only feel a mild discomfort, the cold metal of the refrigerators pressing against your cheeks and palms as you push your way through.

#

You’re with your current husband when you first receive the call about your first husband.

“I’m afraid I have bad news, sir,” says the operator on the line. “Your husband is in critical condition.”

You look at your husband in bed beside you, and for a moment you almost put your palm to his forehead to check his temperature. But even from here you can see that his breathing is fine. You have the urge to make a joke about your husband looking pretty good for a guy in critical condition. But you resist the temptation. After all, someone’s husband is in the hospital, and that person and their husband deserve your sympathy.

After some back-and-forth with the operator, you realize it is your husband. Your ex-husband. He never bothered to remove you as his emergency contact. Typical. He never had the patience for the minutiae of life. He always relied on you to take care of the little things.

You explain the situation to your current husband, who’s as understanding as always. You should go, he tells you.

Your ex was never good at making friends. It might not be that he forgot to change his emergency contact information. It might be that even after all these years, he still doesn’t have anyone else to be his person.

At the hospital, it takes some time to find his room. When you do, it’s a bit of a shock, seeing him with the IV in his arm and the tube in his throat. Even more shocking is his stubble. He was always so meticulous about shaving, keeping his flawless baby face clean.

“I knew you’d come,” he says, a pained softness in his voice.

“Of course,” you say.

“The doctors here have no idea what they’re doing. My throat is closing up, I can feel it. Soon I won’t be able to breathe at all. But now that you’re here I finally have hope.” He smiles. His smile carries a subtle flavor of the charm of his younger, healthier self, of the crackle of energy that used to flow between you. “There’s an elixir that will help me.”

“What kind of elixir?” you say. An elixir sounds hard to get. An elixir sounds like a quest and distant lands and sacrifices.

He knows you well, and he senses the hesitation behind your question. “It won’t be that hard,” he says. “It’s an elixir the same shade of blue as the sky. You can get it from the bodega, just around the corner.”

His voice is weak, but, as always, his argument is unassailable.

#

Your body may feel tight after squeezing through the cold, narrow path between the refrigerators. You may want to shake your arms or ball your fists, to loosen your muscles and build up your body heat.

The corridor will widen, but you’ll still be standing between two fridges—two walls of cold glass and metal, twice as tall as you on either side.

Walk forward, with care, and you will find that you have entered a labyrinth of refrigerators. Touch the left wall and follow it. Limit your contact with the wall to one or two fingers, to keep the cold from consuming your body. The light will be dim, and the maze will take several twists and turns, but follow the left wall until you come to the center.

In the middle of the maze, you’ll find a fridge that’s taller than the rest. On its top shelf is a set of light azure beverages in unlabeled bottles. The same shade of blue as the sky, just like your ex-husband said. Leaning on the wall beside this last and tallest refrigerator will be a long pole with a claw at the end—a grabber, as professionals in the bodega world call it.

Grab the grabber. Open the fridge door and use the grabber to reach for a bottle of elixir. Take care not to press the claws of the beverage too tightly around the bottle, and, above all, be careful not to drop it. The elixir is carbonated, as all great beverages from the bodega are, and if you drop it, it could fizzle into inertness—or worse, it could explode in your face. Yet you must also not allow your carefulness to slow you too much. The cold air of the machines is unsafe for the human body, and if you linger too long inside the open door of the refrigerator, you may not return at all.

Whatever you do, do not take more than one azure bottle.

Once you have the elixir in hand, return the way you came. The cashier will ring you up. “One glint,” he’ll say.

You may crinkle your face in confusion.

“The glint in your eye,” the cashier will say, to clarify the form of payment accepted for elixirs.

If you give your assent to the price, then he’ll take out a pair of silver pincers—like a shiny miniature version of the grabber you just used. In one swift motion, he’ll snap the pincers at your left eye. When he pulls them back, the pincers will hold a speck so small it’s barely visible, shining like dust caught in a beam of sunlight.

He’ll take your speck of light and deposit it in a jar with other glints, buzzing around like fireflies the size of fleas.

#

It’s been nearly an hour since your ex-husband drank the elixir, and the color has begun returning to his face. “This is perfect,” he says. “I can already feel it working.”

“I’m so glad,” you say, and you are. You’re still not sure what it means to lose a glint, but the world looks grayer now, like someone turned down the brightness of your vision from the other side of the screen. But it was worth it, if it helped save your ex-husband’s life. You still care for him.

You sit by his side for a few moments, uncertain what to do. He seems better now. And your husband—your real husband, your husband of the present not the past—is home waiting for you. “I should go.”

“Wait,” your once-husband says. “I need your help with one more thing.” With his chin, he points at the uneaten tray of food on the table beside him. “I haven’t been able to eat anything they give me. They have no idea how to nurse someone back to health here. It’s ridiculous, it’s like their whole job and they’re terrible at it.”

This is a common complaint of his. No one is ever good enough at their job, except, of course, for him. And, perhaps, by extension, you. Many requests begin like this, with the implication that no one else but you can get it right.

“Give it some time,” you say. “I’m sure you’ll be able to hold down food soon, now that you got the elixir.”

“Not this food,” he says. “My stomach can’t take it. What I really need is this artisanal mystic cheese.”

“Artisanal mystic cheese,” you say, your tone searching for the territory between a question and incredulity.

“It will restore my natural biome,” he says. “You just need to go back to that bodega on the corner. Get the one that’s the same shade of orange as the setting sun.”

#

This time, go past the guy at the cash register and straight to the guy at the deli counter in the back. There may be a muddled line around the metal-and-glass case, which is just about the height of your chin, like the deep end of a swimming pool. While you wait, feel free to peruse the ham and turkey and cheese, all Boar’s Head, all packaged in skintight plastic.

Eventually the deli clerk will point at you. The proper words to say are: “I hear the best cheese is aged in caves.”

The deli clerk is not as friendly as the cashier, less talkative. Most likely he’ll just harrumph. But he’ll also get out from behind the counter. Just beside the deli counter is a stack of bright red crates filled with chips. Dust will kick up as he pushes them to the side. Don’t breathe too much of it into your lungs.

Behind where the crates were, there’s a tiny door on the side of the deli counter, which the clerk opens for you. In normal space, the little door would just allow you to reach inside the counter into the display meats and cheeses. But this is the bodega. Through the door you’ll see a spiral staircase, all shaky steel and shadows.

Enter the tiny door with your knees first, as if you were in a limbo contest. Let your body flatten as you pass through the door, as if you yourself were just a slice of something. You may feel a sharp sensation on your skin, but if you step boldly, it will soon pass, and you’ll be on the other side of the door.

You can unflatten yourself now. Go down the stairs, taking care, as the steps are steep and the turns sharp. You will descend more deeply than you thought possible, well past the point where sewers and subway tunnels crisscross the city’s underground. As the light from the bodega recedes, you’ll need the light of your cell phone to find your way.

Eventually you’ll reach the bottom of the spiral staircase, which will open into a cave of white bricks. The air is moist. Rows and rows of shelves are filled with enormous cheese wheels. But the artisanal mystic cheese is not on the shelves. Look for an alcove in the brick walls, in the corner where the shadows run darker and deeper. Reach for the space between the bricks. You’ll feel the wetness of the air seeping into the hairs of your arm. When your hand hits something that’s softer than brick but harder than water, then you’ve found it. Pull it into the light and you’ll see that the cheese wheel is the size of your hand and the soft orange color of the setting sun.

After you make you way back with the cheese, this time the cashier will say, “One spring.” By now you should be picking up the cadence of the bodega dialect, so you understand right away that he means the spring in your step.

If you assent to the price, he’ll take out a long tube, like the vacuum cleaner attachment for high corners and deep crevices. With one casual swipe, he’ll stretch the tube over the counter and toward your leg, getting uncomfortably close to your groin. You’ll feel the suction of the tube pulling tight against your pants and skin as something gets sucked out of your legs.

The cashier takes the tube back and reverses the airflow, dropping its contents into a big plastic bowl. You’d imagined your spring would have a metallic sheen, or perhaps even a sparkle, like your glint. But it’s just a long tangle of pink meat, like intestines the size of floss.

You walk out of the bodega, and your legs feel heavier, as if a small creature were hanging on the back of your thighs, its weight dragging you down as your sneakers scuff the sidewalk.

#

Your ex-husband cuts into the cheese as if it were a miniature birthday cake, slicing away one triangle at a time and then slowly nibbling at it.

“Wow,” he says. “This is so good. This is exactly what I needed. So much better than anything the nurses brought. Finally, food that’s actually edible. I can feel the bacteria inside of me, repopulating my gut.”

“That’s great,” you say. “You look much better now.” It’s true, he does. He’s even sitting up, leaning over the little table to munch at the cheese, not propped up on three pillows like he was before.

“This makes such a difference,” he says. “You’re so much better than any of the nurses.” You remember that this is what he does. He never says the words thank you, not exactly, but his praise for your service implies gratitude, in his way. It reminds you why you separated. You stand up to leave. Your legs still feel heavy, but walking is starting to feel manageable again.

“Wait,” he says. “Can you hand me my phone?”

It’s an easy enough thing, to get his phone before you leave. It’s on a chair in the corner, charging from one of the few power outlets unoccupied by the heavy cords of medical equipment. You bring it over to him.

He lifts the phone and sets it to the camera’s selfie mode. He holds it up to his face, pulling the skin of his cheeks back toward his ears. It’s been years since you’ve seen him do this, but it’s so familiar, like going back to a neighborhood where you used to live in decades past.

“This is awful,” he says. “I’ve aged, like, twenty years in the past few days. Look at these crow’s feet. My eyes look like they belong on an elephant.”

“It would never occur to me to say elephant,” you say, choosing your words carefully. It’s a delicate balance, affirming him without contradicting him too sharply. “And I’m sure you’ll look better after you get a few days’ more rest.”

“I need more than rest.” He shakes his head at the image on the screen of his phone, then sets the phone face down on the table, as if trying to contain its gory secrets. “You have no idea what this ordeal has done to me. It’s taken years away from me, I can feel it in my skin. This kind of trauma doesn’t just get fixed by itself. I need your help.”

“I can’t fix this,” you say. “I’m sure the doctors will—”

“The doctors are useless,” he says. “The only things that have helped me have come from the bodega. From you. I need you to go back one more time.”

“For something for your skin?” you say.

“Yes,” he says. “A special coconut cream with a shimmer of stardust.”

You look away from him, out the window. Night has fallen. You’ve lost a day doing these errands. One day, one glint, and one spring. Each request is small, but the bodega’s prices add up.

“It’s just this one last thing,” he says. “Remember: coconut cream that sparkles like stardust.”

#

Now you must go to the clerk at the lotto machine. Say to him, “I’ve already got a winning ticket. I need the key for the good stuff.”

He knows your face by now, knows you’re from the neighborhood, so he should give it to you without too much fuss. The key will be tied to a wooden plank the size of your forearm, to make sure you don’t lose it.

Now you must go past the lotto area, past the 5-hour Energy shots and the poppers labeled cleaning solutions, until you get to the section in the very back of the bodega. There you’ll find shelves and racks filled with extension cords, shampoos, spatulas, special diabetic socks, incense, prayer candles for specific saints to intercede on behalf of specific needs, spices from at least five continents, and other items that seem too numerous and too varied to fit within the corners of a single corner store.

Just past the candles, you’ll find a freezer. This is not the freezer with ice cream or ice. It’s more like a cooler than a freezer—it barely reaches the height of your knees. But don’t let its small size deceive you: there is more to it beneath the floor.

A padlock holds the lid of the freezer in place. Unlock the padlock and remove it. Set aside your lock and key. The freezer’s lid is heavy, and you’ll need both arms to lift it.

Just as you’re about to open the freezer, your phone vibrates. It’s a text from your husband, the one you live with now.

I hope he’s doing better, it says. I’m glad you’re helping him.

You watch three bubbling dots until the next message appears. Let me know if you’ll make it home for dinner. Im thinking of making arroz con pollo. But its cool if you need more time with him tonight. But don’t forget we have three important episodes of the Good Place left to watch lol.

The thought of dinner and streaming a show sounds wonderfully simple, much reward for little effort, compared to everything this day has cost you. But as you stare at the message, you can’t help but notice the two typos—typos that your ex-husband would never allow. He was so meticulous about his text messages that he would ask you to edit them, not just for mistakes but for nuances of tone. He would get angry if he later realized you’d missed something, the text and the error irreversible. It was a grueling demand, but satisfying in its way, knowing how much he relied on you for the details.

You text your husband back that you’ll be home soon. You just have one more thing to do.

You stare at the freezer, uncertain what comes next. The lid is an opaque gray, revealing nothing of what’s within. You don’t know what the price will be this time, but you have a feeling it will be extracted from your heart.

Your current husband is waiting for you.

But the opaqueness is compelling, and perhaps you should do this one last thing your ex-husband needs from you.

You lift the lid. Inside the cold air is a thick fog, dotted with flickers of light, like a slice of concrete sidewalk glimmering in the sun.

The next step is to dive into the freezer. That’s where you’ll find the coconut cream that sparkles like stardust. It must be kept far below freezing for its special properties to remain intact.

You must dive in headfirst. It seems foolhardy, to dive into the freezing cold. This final task seems so capricious, so unnecessary. Your ex-husband has already healed from the worst of his ailments. You have a new husband whose arms await you at home. Going back to him would be the sensible thing to do.

But then the icy air from the freezer reaches your face. The freezing fog is not harsh at all, but oddly inviting.

You dive in. You’re astonished that the sides of the freezer do not graze your arms or legs. It’s as if your body were stretching into a single flat line, reducing the resistance from the air as you descend. The glossy mist caresses your skin like a refreshing breeze on a muggy day.

It’s surprising, how comforting the cold can be.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Ben Francisco’s fiction has won the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, been featured in Locus’s Recommended Reading List, and appeared in Strange Horizons, PodCastle, and From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction. Their work ranges from magic realism to space opera and has been known to feature oversexed ghosts, depressed precognitive psychics, and vampire aliens who reproduce like moss. Ben’s first novel, Val Vega: Secret Ambassador of Earth, was featured in BookLife’s Best of 2024 and Reactor Magazine’s Notable YA SF of 2024. A Kirkus starred review called it “a captivating, heartfelt tale about family, diplomacy, and finding one’s place in the universe.” Visit Ben at benfrancisco.net.

“When Your Ex-Husband Lies Dying And Only You Can Get Him the Magic Elixir from the Bodega” © Ben Francisco, 2026.

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~ Julian and Fran, February 22, 2026

For February, The Sunday Morning Transport brings you four stories to thrill, chill, and delight you, by Celia Marsh, David Bowles, Carrie Vaughn, and P H Lee. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of sky

by P H Lee

Most days, she does not miss the sea. Most days, she is too occupied with drop spindles and skinned kneecaps and wind-dried fish for market day and the snert overboiling and always the constant waves of washing—clothes, children, pots, floors, beds. That is the life that she has chosen: an endless torrent of things needing washing. So of course she does not miss the sea. She does not have the time to.

Even in the church on Sundays—the only time she had to think, most weeks, listening to the murmur of women’s prayers, too distant from the new priest’s communion to hear his susurrations—she mostly thought about her own soul. She had become a woman, yes, but—was Heaven closed to seals? She had asked the priest once—not the new priest, who had attended university and barely knew anything, who read treatises and had no patience for peasant superstition, no—she had asked the old priest, who had married them, who had served the island for many years and knew a little of the shape of things. He had said that God had made seals on the fourth day, along with the leviathans He loved, two days before He even made the first man and set him as the steward over all the world. “God loves all of His creations,” he had said, “seals no less than men. And Christ’s sacrifice was for every soul that accepts His baptism.”

(It was that same priest—the old one—who had baptized her. He had insisted on it, before they could be married. The water had felt no different than the salt sea of her birth, but what did she know of holy water? She had been a woman for less than a day, then.)

The priest’s words consoled her even now, after he had died. It was a comfortable explanation—serving as long as he had on this island, she could not have been the first seal-wife he had baptized. But still, sitting in the women’s pews, surrounded by the babble of a dozen different prayers, she wondered. Could she really be content in Christ’s eternal life? Was there really a place in Heaven for a woman such as her?

So, even in the church, she did not have time to miss the sea.

It was only on certain nights, after all the children were in bed, when she lay awake and listened to her husband snoring, when even bone-tired from all the washing she could not will herself to sleep, that she would get up—careful not to wake any of them—and walk out along the shore, staring into the black and endless sea.

Even then, staring out into the sea on a sleepless night, she does not forget the cruelties. She remembers her mother, biting and spiteful. Her sisters, barely any better. She remembers the danger in every direction, the sudden teeth of sharks, the sharp sting of jellyfish. She remembers—how could she ever forget?—the bulls, screaming their lust at her, the bulls whose favorite pass-time was to corner an otter pup and slap it one way, then another, until at last it died, and thereafter would take their turns with— She remembers. She cannot forget.

But yet—yet. She remembers swimming, diving through that cold and welcoming expanse, how it seemed that she could go anywhere. Here, walking on two unsteady legs through this life that she has chosen, everything is flat. She has no other choice but here.

Now, though in the morning she will fret that it might have been a sin, she will reach into the night-black water and move her hand—first one way, then another—feeling the resistance and the flow propelling her. On those lone night walks along the shore, she remembers, and though she does not miss that life, she misses—oh! She misses when she swam alone through that dark expanse of sea.

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~ Julian and Fran, February 15, 2026

For February, The Sunday Morning Transport brings you four stories to thrill, chill, and delight you, by Celia Marsh, David Bowles, Carrie Vaughn, and PH Lee. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

The Definition of a Second

by Carrie Vaughn

The gun fires. The shot echoes. The body falls.

Three seconds pass. The gun in her hand smokes. Her ears ring.

Five seconds. The three other people in the room turn to her, horrified, frozen, unable to speak. Five seconds ago there were four other people in the room. Then she fired and the body fell. She’s stuck on that moment, the punch of the bullet, the fall, the thump on the floor. Before the others can ask why, can move, scream, anything—

She flees out of the lab to the office next door and vomits into a waste bin. Thirty seconds, she can still see the face of the man she shot, the research team’s chemist, rock samples and spectrographic analyses spread out on his bench. The bloody hole in his chest runs on repeat in the back of her eyes. When she grabs a tissue to wipe off her face, she looks at her reflection in the glass of the door. Her eyes seem blank, still seeing the way the body jerked as it tipped to the floor, boneless. The gun is still in her hand.

A scream comes from the lab.

A hundred and ten seconds have passed when she returns to the lab, where the body on the floor is moving. Black pus pours out of its mouth. After that no one asks why she did it.

Worms crawl from the body’s ears, trailing slime along its cheeks to its eyes, which are half eaten, dripping. Worms slither from its mouth, from the bullet hole in its chest. The skin of its arms shiver, which is how they understand that the worms are inside it, moving it like a puppet, no longer a body but an undulating mass of worms forcing the shape of it to lurch over, get its knees under it, stand, then take a step.

They run, fleeing from one section of the lab to the next. The two field geologists and research lead follow her, even though she’s only the lab manager, the one making sure the rules are followed and the bathroom gets cleaned. The lab isn’t much, a couple of Quonset huts in a remote desert, which is why she has the gun, for security. She’d been worried about brazen coyotes.

Three minutes. A hundred and eighty seconds, each one counted with her heartbeat since the shot rang out and the body fell.

Of course their cell phones don’t work. There is debate: Should they barricade themselves somewhere and try to find out what’s happening? They’re scientists, this is a mystery, they ought to be able to do something. Or should they run? Get to the van, leave the site, flee from whatever this is, find safety, and worry about what’s happening later. As if the worry would ever stop.

She thinks they should run.

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~ Julian and Fran, February 8, 2026

For February, The Sunday Morning Transport brings you four stories to thrill, chill, and delight you, by Celia Marsh, David Bowles, Carrie Vaughn, and PH Lee. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

Realm of the Shorn

A Tale of the Midwife

by David Bowles

I

I understand why you did it. Love. Loss. Despair.

And too much power. Not enough to undo the tragedy, but sufficient to fool yourself.

I understand because I feel the same, now, standing before the curtain that separates me from oblivion.

Unlike you, however, I have no impossible aims. I cannot retrieve that which I have lost.

You have proven that one cannot reverse or cheat time.

And you are not mine, any more than I am yours.

The ones we loved have slipped from our arms.

Aoc ceppa, the poets remind us.

Never again can they return.

II

I still remember the stings. First my flesh, then my heart.

After we expelled the Spaniards and their Tlaxcaltecah allies from the capital, my unit received an imperial commendation for our bravery and tenacity.

I was singled out for praise by Emperor Cuitlahuatzin, who appointed me general of the Shorn Ones. It was a historical moment. I was the first patlacheh to ever attain that rank. Not only had I fought with more courage than men presumed male since birth, but I had also wrested young Imperial Princess Tecuichpochtzin from the filthy heathen hands of Hernán Cortés.

When she was ritually married to the emperor two weeks later, I was permitted to stand behind her, guarding the most beloved daughter of the late Moteuczoma.

Commoners and nobles alike were impressed. General Excalli became a household name throughout Tenochtitlan in short order.

What an honor for someone like me, born to poor farmers on the outskirts of the island. Lacking wisdom, they had believed me a girl until I had stood at age thirteen before the altar of Huehuehcoyotl, revealing my true gender to heaven and earth.

Twenty years later, my heart swelled with pride. Recognized as a man. Elevated to nobility through my valor on the field. Commanding the most elite military order in the Triple Alliance.

And, most poignantly, married to Mahtlactli Omeyi Olin, the greatest midwife in the empire, chief surgeon for the Imperial House of Acamapichtli.

Not you, Olin. But—what is the word you used?—your homologue.

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For February, The Sunday Morning Transport brings you four stories to thrill, chill, and delight you, by Celia Marsh, David Bowles, Carrie Vaughn, and PH Lee. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

It’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

This month’s first, free story by Celia Marsh is a powerful one about identity, friendship, family, and new beginnings. (CW for self-harm).

~ Julian and Fran, February 1, 2026

Wounds

by Celia Marsh

(This story first appeared in Polyphony in October 2003.)

I cut myself when I was younger, trying to make my outsides match my insides. I slit my wrists in the bath the night that my mother told me she’d only asked for custody so my father couldn’t have me. Slit them the right way, palm to elbow. I passed out from blood loss, but woke when the water grew cold, pale new skin glowing beneath the dried blood, beneath the murky water. I could cut myself and watch it heal, almost before I put the knife down. Once I let the knife dig deeply while cooking dinner at my father’s house, through the bone in my thumb. Even the nail was back by morning.

I’ve pierced my ears so many times I’ve lost count. If I sleep without earrings in, they heal over before morning, and I must redo them before class, or go without earrings that day. Tattoos last longer. The colors melt back into my skin within a month, white and yellow first, blue and the black outlines last. By the time I moved back to my father’s house, the tattoo I would have gotten to annoy my mother would be all but gone. By the time I came back to her house, she would have forgotten it completely.

After the divorce, the only thing that stayed constant was my body. Everything else I’d lose track of, forget at one house or the other. The first thing I put there for safekeeping was a green-grass glass bracelet my father brought back for me from India when I was six. It lay smoothly under the skin of my forearm, just a thin ridge to indicate where it was. I’d run my fingers over the lump in the hired car on the way to the airport to the other house, remember how excited I’d been opening the present, how the translucent green band had sparkled in sunlight. Next thing I put away was a locket, given to me by my grandmother. I didn’t like the chain around my neck, but couldn’t risk losing it. I cut deeply one night and slid it in there for safekeeping. I set off metal detectors at the airport. I would tell them it was a pin in my elbow, and they’d look at the lump and believe me. After that, it became habit. A ring from a family vacation when I was ten. Black fossilized sharks’ teeth from beachcombing with my grandfather. The ballerina charm from a bracelet my aunt had owned before me. They all slipped easily below my skin, lay quietly where I put them, out of sight, on my mind. It worked for years. I grew up, went to college, still saving memories beneath my skin, still storing my past where I could touch it.

It was March, one of those beautiful sunny days that make you think that winter has ended. I was lying in the grass in the sun, soaking it up, wishing I could condense spring into something small enough to slide beneath my skin. He was playing Frisbee with a friend and not watching his steps. When he landed on my arm, I felt something snap. It wasn’t until the expected pain didn’t follow that I realized what he’d broken. Not my wrist, but my bracelet.

“Oh god.” He was older, though not by much, and unfamiliar, probably a junior back from abroad. He dropped the Frisbee and crouched beside me. “I’m so sorry. I should have been paying attention. I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you badly? Do you think I broke anything?”

I struggled up, clutching my arm. I could feel the pieces of glass moving around beneath my skin, causing more damage every time I moved my hand. My arm swelled between my fingers. I didn’t want to bleed where he could see. “Hand me my bandana? I think it’s just sprained, nothing major. I’ll ice it tonight. If I could just wrap it now, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

He picked up the handkerchief I’d been using to tie my hair back from where I’d tossed it on the ground when I’d lain down earlier. He had to fold it for me, and helped me wind the bandage round my arm firmly, had to tie the edges of it so it didn’t unravel as soon as I took my hand away. He helped me up and fussed over me, asking again if I’d be okay, if I needed to go to a doctor, or the health center. He picked up the books I’d scattered around me before napping, insisted on carrying them to my room. I showed him where to put the books, promised I’d call him if it got worse or needed to be looked at, and politely shoved him out the door.

I kept the knife in my medicine cabinet, above the sink, so all I needed was something to put the glass pieces in as I rinsed them out. Some were large enough to feel. Most were not, so I simply systematically slit my arm and held it open under the tap, one section at a time, all the way around my arm. When I thought I’d got as much out as possible, I sat back and let it heal. It blossomed red with inflammation and infection where I had missed pieces, but I knew they’d work their way out in their own time.

He came by the next day, to make sure I was still okay. I jumped when the phone rang. No one called me.

“It’s Tom,” said the unfamiliar voice. “I’m so sorry. I’m at the front desk—may I come up?”

I grabbed the bandana off my dresser as soon as he’d hung up, barely got it tied in place before he came through my door. His face fell when he saw it.

“Still sore?”

“A little,” I agreed. From the glass fragments, though, not his foot. The skin under the bandage was red and slightly swollen from the glass.

“I should have been paying attention. I’m usually more careful.”

I sat in the papasan, pulled my legs up under me, and watched him pace the room.

“God,” he said. “I can’t believe I did that to you.” He flopped in the chair across from me, then bounced back to his feet. “What’s this?”

This was the saucer I’d dumped the pieces I’d rescued into. “It was a bracelet. I was wearing it yesterday.” I tried to keep it as close to the truth as possible.

“I didn’t see it.”

“It broke when you stepped on me. I had to go back and get it this morning.” He stirred the pieces delicately with a finger, picked up one of the larger ones, and held it in the light from the window. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “It can’t be fixed, can it? Was it valuable?”

“Only sentimentally,” I said. “My dad got it for me in India when I was little.”

He dropped the piece as though he’d been bitten. It took nearly all my persuasive powers to get him to stop apologizing and leave. I finally resorted to yawning obviously and not denying it. He finally got the hint, but paused in the doorway. “Maybe I’ll see you around again?”

The next morning, when the phone rang from the front desk, it was my dad. He looked nervous when I met him in the lobby. I’d thrown on jeans and a T­shirt, wrapped the bandana around my arm again. He was in a suit and tie, clean-shaven and smelling of the same aftershave he’d always worn as long as I could remember. He shifted from one foot to the other, gestured awkwardly past the desk to the double doors and the quad.

“Want to go for a little walk?”

I stomped my curiosity down into a small, neat ball in the back of my head, and agreed. We walked, not through the quad, but down the hill to the river trail.

“I was in town for a meeting,” he began awkwardly. “Thought I should see how you’d settled in.”

I stared at him in disbelief, and he flushed slightly and looked away. I couldn’t remember what his job was exactly, but I didn’t think there was anything he’d be in this town for. We walked in silence for a few more minutes, then he tried again.

“I always loved walking on this stretch of the trail while I was here.” He cleared his throat nervously. “I met your mother here.”

I looked at him again, and this time he met my eyes.

“I stopped by because, well, I missed you. Haven’t seen you in eight months. I guess I’d gotten more accustomed to you being around than I’d realized.” He paused, cleared his throat again. “We treated you so badly, didn’t we? I never meant it to be that way.”

We walked in silence again. I didn’t know why he was silent, but I was trying to stifle the voices that kept welling up inside me. Why did you, then? I wanted to ask. Why didn’t you ever stop?

“Do you remember,” he said finally, “going to the beach? You must have been nine. The whole family was there.” I nodded mutely, ran a hand down my hip, felt the ancient hard triangles beneath my fingertips, beneath my jeans, beneath my skin.

“I went beach combing with Granddad.”

He nodded. “It was the last time we all did something together.” I folded my hands together, rubbing the ring finger of my right hand as I always did when I was thinking. I felt the hard ridge there as he continued speaking. “We went to some tacky store, and I let you pick out anything you wanted. The whole store, and what did you pick?”

A ring, I mouthed as he said it. My thumb rubbed the callus below my ring finger.

“Anything in the store, and you picked an ugly black ring. So big you had to wear it on your thumb to keep it from slipping off.”

“Hematite,” I said gruffly.

“What?”

I cleared my throat and repeated myself. “Hematite. It’s iron ore. Black and shiny like a beetle shell.”

He nodded. “I’d forgotten how much you liked bugs back then. We thought you’d lose the ring. We were sure of it. I went back to the store the next day, bought another ring just in case you lost it.” He stopped walking and turned to look at me. “You didn’t. Not then, anyways. Whatever happened to it? Did you lose it moving from one house to the other?”

I swallowed, feeling the hard lump in my throat, the hard lump under my skin. I had to clear my throat again. “I still have it. I put it someplace safe so I wouldn’t lose it.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment again, just looked at me. “You look so much like your mother did when I met her.” He blinked rapidly and checked his watch. “I’ve got to go. The plane just stopped here for refueling.” He pulled a card case out of his coat pocket and took two cards out of it. “One for you, and one for you to write your number and email on. Next time I’ll warn you before I come through town. I just . . . I just wanted to see you.”

When he hugged me, I stiffened as usual, but it wasn’t as uncomfortable as it usually was. I swallowed heavily as he walked back up the hill to the road. There was a town car there, idling by the side of the road. He turned and waved before he got in, and I waved back automatically. When I dropped my hand back down to my side it felt funny, heavier than it usually was. I spread it open before me and looked for the first time in five years at the shiny black of chitin, of hematite on my ring finger. I worked it slowly off my finger as I walked back to the dorm, examined the skin below it. Smooth and unmarked, not surprisingly, but there was no blood, no sign that it had just so recently been hiding anything.

I meant to put it back when I got to the room, but I’d left the knife someplace strange the last time I’d used it, and while I was looking for it, Tom knocked on the door. My right hand grabbed my left wrist, comforted by the feel of cloth.

“Come in. I’ll be just a minute.”

In the bathroom I peeled the bandana off, looked with some worry at the still-inflamed marks on my arm. I couldn’t use the knife with him in the other room, but I thought soaking it under the hot water for a couple of minutes would help loosen up the sores. I’d never had something heal so slowly before, but then again, deep or long or wide as they might have been, the cuts I’d made had been clean and planned. It was probably just my body trying to work the glass bits out the only way it could. I soaked it and scraped it a bit more than I’d been planning to when I’d gone in the bathroom, pulled a few thin splinters of glass out with the tweezers, and rewrapped the bandana on a much less-inflamed wrist. I was still a little worried, but it wasn’t as though I could go to the doctor’s office.

He was still in the living room, sprawled on the couch, when I came out of the bathroom and through the bedroom. He looked up when I reentered the room, colored slightly, and tossed the chick magazine he’d been reading back onto the stack by my chair. He stood up clumsily and held out a bag. “Here. I brought you something. It’s nothing much.”

I took the bag and sank down in my chair. He dropped back on the couch and watched me. “No one’s ever given me . . .”

“Hush,” he said. “You can’t thank me until after you open it. Don’t you know how these things work?”

I shook my head but smiled and pulled the newspaper-wrapped package out of the plastic bag.

“Some wrapping job, isn’t it? Did it all myself.” I jerked my head up in surprise and caught him smiling at me. “Go on, then. Open it.”

The newspaper tore easily, giving me a glimpse of a muted sparkle, a glint of forest green. I rested the present on my knees and used both hands to wrestle with the taped corners. He sat up and grabbed it just before it slid off my lap, and held it steady for me. A gasp escaped me when I got all the paper off them. “Oh. Oh, they’re beautiful.” He’d brought me plates, smooth glass circles just slightly darker than the green-grass glass bracelet I’d been wearing. In the light they glowed an emerald green. “Oh, you shouldn’t have done this. I can’t take them. It’s too much.”

He stood and stretched, overfilling my usually empty room for a flash, then smiled down at me. “I saw them at a yard sale walking back to my place yesterday. They were nothing, a dollar a plate.”

There were five of them in my lap; I held them up to the light one at a time. I caught sight of him glancing at his watch while I admired the plates, and my heart actually fell. I choked that down, though, set the plates purposefully aside, and picked up the torn paper and tape, stuffing them into the now empty bag.

“I don’t want to keep you,” I said. He flushed slightly, and I scolded myself for trying to get rid of him so bluntly. Especially when I didn’t want to get rid of him. “I was going to ask if you wanted to go to the Union, but if you have plans already, maybe we could do something later?” I held my breath waiting for his reply so the tightness in my chest could be attributed to oxygen deprivation. He looked at his watch again though it had just been seconds ago, and I braced myself against the sharp sudden pain of rejection.

“Look, I’m meeting some friends to go to a coffee shop, but I can be a little late, if you want to come.” I was stunned into immobility. This? This was all it would have taken to make friends earlier? A bruised wrist and a sob story about a bracelet? I seesawed, torn between an unusual desire for human company and a wish for the quiet and solitude of the room to myself again. He took my silence for a no—and it might have been. “Please do come. They’re all nice people, and it’ll just be for a few hours.”

“I don’t usually go out.” One of my programmed rebuffs rose to my lips unasked for, but he was unfazed.

“Come on. If your wrist acts up, I’ll walk you back early.”

He wouldn’t take no for an answer. In a relatively short span of time he’d bullied me into a coat and gloves as the spring weather of the days before a memory already, and coaxed me out of the room and down the hall to the lobby. I had a confused impression of a great many people, or possibly a much smaller but more active group as they all jostled for greetings and to exit the building. I lost track of Tom for a moment, and considered panic until a quiet voice greeted me by name. With a little thought I remembered her from a class this quarter and last, and talking of a lecture from the previous term kept me occupied until we reached the coffee shop. It helped that at one point I caught sight of Tom up ahead, checking back over his shoulder for me. I smiled at him, he smiled in return and went back to his conversation.

At the coffee shop we got drinks and jostled again for position, this time around a table that was actually much too small for the group of us. I sipped my drink and listened to them bicker over what we’d do now. A splinter group formed, pulling most of the boys off to play something fast­paced and loud not too far away. Tom pulled his chair around to sit by me, and I relaxed a little more, listening as the girls around me began to discuss their families, a rolling wave of love and annoyance moving around the table. I listened to the voices so at odds with the words, the complaints, soft­voiced and slow, the avowals of familial hatred with a note of laughter underneath.

I must have looked wistful, for Tom nudged me as one girl finished her story. “Go on. Everyone has a good story about their family. Even the bad ones do something right, or you wouldn’t still be here.”

I looked at the ring on my hand again, and told about my mother’s mother, Sybil. As I talked about her, I rubbed the flat lump by my elbow. I told about the parrot whose picture is engraved in the locket, how he’d walk down one shoulder, across her chest, and back up the other side with no trouble. A knot in my chest loosened, the lump in my throat that I thought I’d have to get used to dissolved as I talked. It became easier to breathe, and easier to talk than to stop. I did, though, and let others have a turn, this time listening for the affection as well as the disgust, what they didn’t say as much as what they did. I continued rubbing the lump as I listened, remembering the good times for a change, and it seemed right that when I finally took my hand off my elbow to pick up my drink, the chain for the locket was draped around my fingers, and it chinked as it tapped the glass. I untangled my fingers, clicked the locket open for the first time in years, looked at the paired portraits of a woman and her bird. I felt Tom’s shoulder against my back as he looked over my shoulder, and wondered if my mother loved my dad this way when they met, if my dad got nervous and shaky when he saw her.

We stood awkwardly at the front door to my building.

“We’re on for lunch after class tomorrow, then? And you’ve got my email just in case?”

I nodded, flourishing the paper he’d given me. “Right he—ouch.” I examined the paper cut on my finger, watching the blood well up, stain the edge of the paper.

“You okay?”

I rubbed a finger across the cut, watching the blood well up again and again. “I really am,” I said finally. “Or at least, I think I’m getting there.”

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Celia Marsh lives in Boston. Her work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons and Fantasy Magazine, among others. This is her first appearance in Sunday Morning Transport.

“Wounds” © Celia Marsh, 2003.

Thank you for reading The Sunday Morning Transport. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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In this month’s fourth, free, story, Marie Brennan takes us on a poetically eerie voyage.

*

Welcome to The Sunday Morning Transport 2026, and the many exciting stories we plan to bring you in our fifth year! We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

January’s stories — by Micaiah Johnson, Julia Vee, Victor Manibo, and Marie Brennan — will all be free-to-read, and we hope that you’ll enjoy them and share them. However, it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

Thank you especially to our paying subscribers, who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up or giving a gift subscription.

~ Julian and Fran, January 25, 2026

The Final Voyage of the Ouranos

by Marie Brennan

Welcome aboard Zephyr Dromoline, your chariot through the Empyrean! We are honored to serve you during your journey to Kos Hydrin. If there is anything we can do to make your stay with us more comfortable, please do not hesitate to notify a member of the crew.

This ship, the Ouranos, is our newest and most luxurious vessel. You could have chosen any number of ways to traverse the serene aether of the Empyrean, but you chose us: the leader in elegance and style. A journey aboard one of our dromonds is not just a way to reach your destination; it is an experience never to be forgotten.

***

Your ship will be found drifting near one of the rocks that make up the uninhabited Phakoedes Cluster, far from any sphere.

It might go longer without discovery, but a dromond carrying memory crystals from Kos Kuknin to Kos Ailin suffers a drive malfunction that puts it off course. By then the disappearance of the Ouranos has been widely reported. Once the crew of the cargo ship repairs their drive, recognizing the drifting vessel as the missing luxury dromond, they bring themselves alongside for boarding. Their expectation is that the Ouranos has likewise experienced a drive malfunction, paired with some misfortune befalling their engineers, such that no one on board has the tekhne to fix it.

They soon discover they are wrong.

***

Please be advised that during flight, shipboard catoptra can only be used for reference and internal communication. It is not possible to make contact with the spheres while we are in the depths of the Empyrean. If you would like to use a catoptron to place a call immediately upon our arrival, please make an appointment with our communications director. For those of you eager to discover what you missed during your journey, our on-board stentor will broadcast a news update as soon as we dock.

But here at Zephyr Dromoline, it is our deepest wish to make your stay with us so pleasant, you’ll forget all about the spheres drifting through the distant aether! We offer a wide range of activities, from dramatic performances of theater and music to evening dances, from games of skill or chance to an obstacle course that will help you stay fit in transit. The Ouranos will be hosting a poetry competition at the midpoint of our voyage; the winner will have their entry read by stentors on all the ships of Zephyr Dromoline.

Use of aether aboard the Ouranos during our flight is not regulated by the laws of any individual sphere. Please be aware, though, that the laws of the Aetharch still apply, and any interference with or alteration of the vessel itself is strictly prohibited. Furthermore, any passenger who causes a public nuisance through their application of tekhne is subject to having their creations unmade, at the discretion of the crew.

***

The Ouranos does not respond to the hails of its would-be rescuers.

Ship-to-sphere calls are impossible during transit because no ship can carry both the necessary synchronization equipment and a meaningful quantity of either goods or passengers, but vessels passing in the Empyrean have ways of communicating with each other. The cargo ship—too humble to be graced with a proper name; it is simply Cargo Vessel KA-824—stabilizes itself alongside the drifting liner and opens its semaphore array, signaling a query to the Ouranos about the nature of its trouble and offering aid.

No one answers.

***

For your reference, this is the layout of the Ouranos.

The lowest deck is off-limits to passengers, as it holds the personal quarters of the crew and the Engineering sector. Our drive is specially tuned to waft us through the Empyrean as quietly as possible—you should not hear any humming or buzzing while we are in transit.

The next deck hosts the various tekhne services. In the first and second quadrants you’ll find our Meal Services, which are famed throughout the Empyrean! Your head chef on this voyage is Temion Omisteo—yes, the very same emaha whose skill is so famed, they received a sacred decree from the Aetharch raising them to the ranks of the dexioi. Once you taste their food, you’ll think you’ve risen in caste to the hieroi! The other provisioners under their command can create a dizzying range of foods upon request, but we recommend you allow Temion Omisteo to work their art upon your palate.

The third quadrant contains Garment Services. If your clothing suffers an unfortunate mishap during your journey, or if you simply wish to indulge in something new, our fabricators can outfit you in any way you desire! Please note that if you are not satisfied with their creation, there is a 10 percent labor charge on the aether used for any garment subsequently unmade.

Our physicians in Somatic Services were trained in the academies of Kos Rakhin, and they stand ready to heal any injuries you may suffer while enjoying the obstacle course. But we hope you will have only recreational need to visit them in the fourth quadrant! If you would like to make cosmetic modifications, such as changing your eye color or growing out your hair, we can arrange that, too, and the eumenoi of our Spa Chambers are eager to pamper you from head to foot.

Your sleeping quarters are on the middle deck, and if you wish to spend your entire journey relaxing there in a lounging robe, you can! Just use the bell, and a steward will come to take whatever order you may have for food or services. But we hope you’ll venture at least once to the upper decks.

The fourth deck is where you’ll find the entertainments mentioned previously: our theaters, gymnasium, gaming parlors, and more. And then the top deck, outfitted with state-of-the-art atmospheric generators, offers an unobstructed view of the coruscating aether of the Empyrean—along with our swimming pool! The pool is closed during departure and arrival, but we encourage you to join your fellow passengers on the top deck for our approach to Kos Hydrin. It is a glorious sight!

***

The engineer of Cargo Vessel KA-824 is highly specialized in the tekhne of dromond drives, but it is a point of caste pride for her to be able to craft most basic things. She cobbles aether into some crude wings that allow a boarding party to soar across to the observation deck of your ship, trailing a line behind them. She is already calculating whether she can increase the efficiency of her drive enough to tow the Ouranos, if necessary.

When the boarding party touches down, their first thought is that you, or one of your fellow passengers, disobeyed company guidelines regarding alterations to the ship. The surface of the observation deck is a patchwork mosaic of different materials: smooth marble, flexible fabric, a mat of twisted vegetation, skin. They proceed with caution toward the nearest hatch but, finding it sealed from within, have no alternative but to resort to brute-force tekhne, unmaking it enough to allow passage below.

***

We regret to announce that the open-air observation deck is closed until further notice. We hope to reopen it before our arrival in Kos Hydrin. Until then, our engineering staff is working on transforming one of the theaters into a replacement swimming pool.

Cosmetic alterations are currently unavailable. Somatic Services remains open for any passenger suffering from injury or ill health.

As a token of our apology for these inconveniences, Temion Omisteo will be preparing a special meal for all guests. If you wish to enjoy this in your cabin instead of the grand hall of Meal Services, please signal one of our stewards with your bell.

***

The interior of the ship is chaos.

No mere disobedient passenger can explain what the boarding party finds within the Ouranos. There is no rhyme or reason to the changes there—and they go far beyond odd alterations to the materials used.

Corridors end in thickets of furniture, chairs growing haphazardly out of chests of drawers and interlacing with folding screens. The lower half of a staircase remains in place, but the upper half is now a cascade of sleeves, shoe soles, elaborate hats that went out of fashion two years ago. Initially the members of the boarding party spread out, calling for someone to respond . . . but as more and more anomalies intrude, their voices falter, and they contract the radius of their search. Clustering together, as if for defense against some unseen threat.

Then they find the hair, streaming out of the ceiling.

Then they begin finding body parts.

***

We are receiving reports from some passengers regarding anomalous difficulties with tekhne. If you see anything on board the Ouranos that you believe to have previously been unmade, please notify your cabin steward. They will put you in touch with our first mate, who is investigating the matter.

***

The body parts do not seem to have come from living flesh. Despite this, half the boarding party, too unnerved by the situation, advocates for turning back. The other half insists they press on, in the hopes of finding someone still alive, though no one has answered their calls. That hope dims further still when the floor becomes a maze of broken weapons, shattered shields.

Officially, the decision lies in the hands of the first mate of Cargo Vessel KA-824. He is good at the tedious logistics of long Empyreal journeys; nothing has prepared him for threading the labyrinth of an ominous mystery. While he stands frozen, fearing both options, an emaha finds a cryotox that still functions despite the vines growing from its barrel, which they rip away as best they can. Violating the hierarchy of their own vessel, they raise the weapon and forge ahead. The relief that someone has made a decision breaks the paralysis: the rest of the searchers follow, with the first mate bringing up the rear.

***

All passengers are requested to temporarily refrain from unmaking anything, whether crafted by your own tekhne or otherwise. We apologize for the inconvenience.

***

The discovery of the weapons has raised the specter of some kind of battle: an attack by Empyreal pirates, perhaps, or psychosis overtaking the passengers and crew, turning them against each other. Appalling, but comprehensible.

What the searchers find is worse.

The dead are every bit as twisted as the interior of what was once a top-of-the-line luxury dromond. Legs replaced by lamps. Flower bushes in bellies. Teacups jutting from cheeks. If this is tekhne, wielded by some madman to reshape the bodies of his victims, it is cruel beyond comprehension.

But the scale is too vast. The chaos runs through the whole ship, and everyone on it. As if aether itself, the substance of which all things are made, has turned against its shapers.

***

Passengers are hereby confined to their cabins. No passenger may employ tekhne for any reason. Crew may draw aether only in the course of their assigned duties.

***

The emaha drops the cryotox. The first mate retches. Without any further debate, the boarding party flees.

Do not blame them for abandoning their search. You are dead. You and everyone with you are beyond rescue.

***

DO NOT USE TEKHNE. MAY THE EIRENE HAVE MERCY ON US. DO NOT TRUST THE AETHER.

***

The fate of the Ouranos remains ghoulish lore for a generation. Zephyr Dromoline goes bankrupt; no one will book passage on their ships anymore. A few people swear they no longer feel safe traveling the Empyrean at all, on any ship. The rest scoff at their paranoia.

Until a diplomatic ship out of Kos Aedin jettisons a crisis pod while traveling to Kos Karin. The survivor on board babbles in terror of chaos like that which struck the Ouranos, and the Aetharch dispatches sophoi researchers to investigate.

Their conclusions are more horrifying than the worst of what happened on board those two vessels.

Ever since humanity learned the secrets of shaping aether through tekhne, it has supplied all your needs. You craft it into clothing, food, the buildings you live in—even reshape the aether of your bodies, for healing or for fashion. And then, when your use for a thing ends, you unmake it, trusting in the endless bounty of the Empyrean.

The sophoi discover mutations in that bounty. The aether you know and employ is tamed, safe. But in the depths of the Empyrean, pockets have appeared that they term wild: aether that cannot be controlled through tekhne, which is destructive to all it touches.

Wild aether remakes everything around it into echoes of what you have cast aside.

Wild aether remembers.

***

Welcome aboard the Ouranos

your stay with us so pleasant

you are beyond rescue

the distant aether

remembers

the nature of its trouble

the Empyrean

cannot be controlled

Use of aether

never to be forgotten

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Marie Brennan is a former anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly leans on her academic fields for inspiration. She is the author of more than twenty novels, ninety short stories, and several poems; her work has won the Hugo Award and been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. As half of M. A. Carrick, she has also written the Rook and Rose epic fantasy trilogy. For more information and social media, visit linktr.ee/swan_tower.

“The Final Voyage of the Ouranos” © Marie Brennan, 2026.

Thank you for reading The Sunday Morning Transport. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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In this month’s third, free, story, Victor Manibo brings skin-crawling, unquenchable horror to your doorstep.

*

Welcome to The Sunday Morning Transport 2026, and the many exciting stories we plan to bring you in our fifth year! We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

January’s stories — by Micaiah Johnson, Julia Vee, Victor Manibo, and Marie Brennan — will all be free-to-read, and we hope that you’ll enjoy them and share them. However, it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

Thank you especially to our paying subscribers, who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up or giving a gift subscription.

~ Julian and Fran, January 18, 2026

Slake

by Victor Manibo

The ocean has merged with the bay, with the city loop, with the boulevards and thoroughfares, with Oak Street four floors below me. It hasn’t stopped raining in two weeks. A new record. At this rate, the water will soon reach the second-floor apartments, the ones without airtight barriers. I swear I hear the waves splashing against metal and glass. I see the inky surface and feel its depths, like an endless void. Like the void within me, the one only Jericho can fill.

Calix, are you there?

Here now, I answer. My screen’s lit up and so is Jericho’s face and now so is mine, and it’s as if there’s a supernova in my tiny studio.

I couldn’t wait, he says. It’s almost noon. He masks his concern with elation. I’m so glad to see you.

You know you can call anytime, right? You don’t have to wait.

He nods, gives me a sheepish grin. I didn’t wanna wake you.

I could be in a coma and I’d pick up. How bad is it where you are?

Same as yours. Jericho cranes toward his window. At this rate, the water’s probably gonna reach the second floor soon. . . .

This makes me laugh, but when he asks why, I say, Nothing. Just gotta laugh to keep from dying.

You mean crying.

Sure. Silence, too long that I chuckle in nervousness. God, I wish I was with you.

I wish I was with you too, he says in a whisper.

Southside isn’t far. Twenty minutes by train, if they still ran. Not even a full marathon far. I’ve told him, during the last big hurricane, about people who’ve swum the English Channel. That’s so romantic, he’d said, not needing me to finish the thought. He didn’t want to encourage the idea.

Did I ever tell you I was Division II? I ask, trying again.

Yeah, several times. Still have that swim meet photo, you in the teeny-tiny red Speedos. He pulls it up on the screen and we laugh.

See, this was only a few years ago. I might be bigger now, but that’s mostly muscle, babe. Means I’m stronger, more equipped to endure the elements. Hardier.

Bigger, huh? His face disappears from the screen and my Speedo’s maximized, zoomed in on my bulge pressing against Lycra.

Fuck yeah, bigger.

And hardier, did you say? Jericho zooms in some more. You sure that wasn’t a slip of the tongue?

I look down between my legs. Well, now it is.

Then the screen goes dark. The supernova collapses into a black hole.

#

Half an hour later there’s a banging on my door. The super won’t tell me anything I don’t already know, but screaming at someone might make me feel better. I swing the door open, ready to fight.

What the hell’s going on, Kara?

We need to take a couple more hours, she says, deadpan.

More? I’m already losing two hours of nighttime, primetime power!

It’s called rationing, Calix. You see the same feeds I do. We need to cut down till this blows over.

Jesus fuck! How am I supposed to survive? Some people need more than food and water, y’know. My racket rouses Mrs. Koutsoulidakis from her hovel across the hall.

The boy needs to work, the wiry old lady chimes in. We really can’t afford all these interruptions. Well, I suppose I can, and it’s not like the pension credits won’t come, but we don’t want Calix here getting fired, now do we?

I bat my lashes at the super. She shrugs and says she’ll see what she can do, but makes no promises. Better make adjustments now, she warns. We don’t know when this’ll end.

I dash back to my desk and grab a power bank. I catch Mrs. K right as she’s closing her door.

Hey, thanks again for this. It’s out of juice, though. I click the button on its side, and it’s so depleted, it can’t even blink red. Sorry about that.

The old lady waves me off. That’s a spare spare spare, she tells me.

You sure? Because I do have a pair of spare spares myself. It’s just that . . .

It’s fine, kid. You need it more than me. She pats my cheek, wheezes her goodbye, shuts the door behind her. I hear her warped wood floor creak under her feet.

#

I pass the rest of the afternoon in darkness. My body forms a fetal indentation on my bed-slash-couch. I imagine myself swimming the city streets toward Jericho. The thought exhausts me, leaves me parched. The kitchen tap sputters, then gushes to life. I drink till I can’t anymore, fearful of how long this will last.

For a second there I thought I’d have to dip into my reserves. The rows of glasses and jugs and reused wine bottles stare back at me from the counter, taunting me. I go into the bathroom and check on the tub I’ve turned into a cistern. Thank heavens the water level hasn’t dropped; the stopper holds its place.

A thin, iridescent film has formed on the surface of the pool. I peer into it and my breath hitches in my throat when I see my rainbow reflection.

The next time I see Jericho, he asks me, Don’t you know the rule of threes? Humans can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. You have more than enough.

He sits up in his bed and the sight of his crisp white pillows, his navy duvet, his smooth, muscular chest, both soothes me and pisses me off. I don’t ask him how he spent the last few hours, but I’d like to think he was as miserable as I was, agonizing over our separation.

The hurricane’s supposed to end by Friday, per the latest forecasts, he continues. Would you like me to show you?

No, but keep going. Make me feel like the world’s not ending.

The world’s not ending.

You’re doing that thing again.

What thing again?

Just . . . repeating things back at me.

Repeating things back at you?

Stop it.

You stop it, he laughs.

We banter like that for a while. When the power cuts out again, I plug in power bank after power bank, which buys us more time. Jericho stays up with me until the sky outside glows brighter than my screen, but barely. Soon he says he’s gotta get ready for work.

You should do as I did and quit your job, I tell him. Didn’t you always say there’s more to life than work?

I might have said that once or twice. But I actually like my job.

Your fake job.

Jericho pouts but lets it go. Anyway, I promise I’ll call you back as soon as I can. You can hang on for a few hours. I believe in you!

And what am I supposed to do till then?

It’s been a year, so . . . how about get a new job?

What’s the point?

Money, silly. And that way you won’t need to keep lying to people.

When he logs off, I head to the kitchen. The water doesn’t flow and I hurt my hand hitting the tap on its head. That’s the end of that, I guess. From my reserves, I grab the gallon jug I’ve refilled and down all its contents to the last drop.

#

The sheets are soaked in cold sweat when I wake. It’s still dark out. I wrap the damp blanket around me and rise from the bed to get a drink of water. My fingers tremble, and when my feet hit the floor, a tingle runs up my legs. It’s then that I first notice the tightness in my belly. My stomach is distended, and in place of my flat gut is a mound of tight flesh.

Shadows move from outside my front door. The figure stays still for a second, then moves on. I flick on the monitor, but it shows only an empty hallway.

The light stings my eyes when I step out of my apartment. At the far end of the corridor, Mrs. Koutsoulidakis is pacing toward the large bay window that looks out into the drowning city. She turns abruptly and holds a hand to her chest.

Hey, kid. You gave me a fright. I didn’t quite see you there.

Is everything okay?

Oh yes. I’m just getting my daily exercise. Walking around my apartment gets boring. She comes down toward me.

In the middle of the night, though?

Calix, it’s two in the afternoon. Though in this weather, who could tell? She shrugs and as she turns the knob to her door, she grabs her hip. I think I may have overdone it, she says with effort. She braces herself on the doorjamb, but I catch her instead.

Despite her protests, I assist Mrs. K into her apartment, her arm in mine. The air in her one-bedroom is thick with the scent of ointment and gardenias. Stacks of broadsheets line the wall next to a small den. Framed photographs, faded and ancient, occupy the top of her bureau alongside large neon-colored pillboxes labeled with the days of the week. She shudders as I help her into her bed. When I try to put a pillow behind her, she swats my hand away, says she can do it herself. She closes her eyes. I have been dismissed, or so I thought.

Don’t leave yet, Nico.

It’s Calix, Mrs. K. Can I get you anything else?

Come sit, she says, eyes still shut. Tell me a story. The way I used to when you were little. When you were the one who was sick and I was the one taking care of you.

It might be better for you to get a nap. Besides, I don’t know any stories.

Don’t lie to your mother.

Okaaay, what kind of story do you want? A fairy tale? Maybe some Greek myth, like the ones you grew up on?

Grew up with them, yes, but ah—I don’t like ’em. I like the ones we made up, your aunties and I. Ones with women, heroines. Foteini and I once took turns creating a new story about the Medusa. Did I tell you that one?

You made your own myths.

She chuckles. We didn’t have TVs or computers.

I imagine Mrs. K and her sisters as little girls on some remote Greek isle, being each other’s entertainment. I search for these sisters among the gilded floral frames and my attention lands on one portrait in particular, a young army man. The name Nicolas Koutsoulidakis is engraved on the frame, and below it a date twelve years past.

Mrs. K opens her eyes and a flash of embarrassment crosses her face. You’re right, Calix. I could use a nap.

When she closes her eyes again, I slip out of the room. As I do, something else on top of her bureau catches my eye. A charging port with three power banks. Three black bricks, hours and hours of time with Jericho, indicator lights all blinking green.

She won’t miss another one.

#

I won’t give you shit about it, Jericho tells me. I want to, but I won’t.

I admire your restraint, I reply, a flourish of bravura to salvage my pride. I might bear an outburst, but the withering look he gives me makes me feel small, unworthy of him. I reach for the half-empty glass next to my screen and drink. I did it for you, love.

You did it for me. You did it for you.

For us.

Jericho rolls his eyes. You’re lucky I’m too worried to give you shit. Look at yourself. When was the last time you ate?

I give him a full rundown of my meals and then he helps me inventory my fridge (a few eggs, half a gallon of OJ nearing its best-by date, a bag of celery that’s turned suspiciously yellow) and my pantry (five cans of baked beans, an unopened box of instant ramyeon packs, enough rice and pasta for a soccer team). The stash hardly matters, though. I don’t get hungry these days, and the little I eat only comes back up in a rancid sludge anyway. I don’t tell him that.

And the chills, the interrupted sleep? Losing time? It could be listeria, or giardia, depending on what you’ve put in you. . . . He goes on like this for a while, a fount of endless knowledge and advice.

You think I should boil my reserves? I ask. It’s all from the taps before they went dry. The empty glasses now outnumber the full ones, and I fear I’d lose more if I do as he says. I don’t want to resort to the filmy bathtub water.

What if something happens to you and I’m not there?

I lift my hand to my forehead as though fainting. I did offer to swim to you, but now I’m way too weak. The jest fails to elicit a chuckle.

What if I swim to you instead?

I give him a wry smile. Yeah, right. How are you gonna do that, huh?

As expected, Jericho has no answer. He never could say anything whenever I puncture the bubble of this, our shared and conjured fantasy. He stares at me longingly, as do I. A tear forms in the corner of his eye and my heart aches, just like the rest of me.

When you were a kid, did your parents ever read you bedtime stories? I ask. He nods, amused by the question. He tells me about Narnia and Oz and the faraway places his mother took him to. He remembers them all so vividly and he grows more excited as he talks. He makes those places come alive, and soon I feel I, too, was the child in that bedroom, in the race car bed, listening to a loving mother lull me to sleep. He makes me forget about my own mother, and my father, their failures and faults, the lack of story time, of warm nights under a checkerboard blanket. He makes me forget about the loneliness that was as close as I ever had to a sibling, that grew up with me, nurtured me as much as I nurtured it, that never loosened its hold on me until Jericho came along. Such is the power of his love. It’s enough to erase something so deep-rooted, enough to nullify my daily miseries. Enough to make me forget the torment in my body and the one right outside my window.

I wish you could hold me right now.

Me too, Calix.

Do you love me?

I do. There is a void within me that only your love can fill.

#

A handwritten note’s been slipped under my door. Kara’s scrawl is as bad as her news. Power’s gonna be kept on for two hours in the morning, two midday, and one at night. I bang my fist on the counter and then howl. I uncurl my fingers, turning my hand and holding it out before me, pained, then confused.

My fingers are bloated like sausage links about to burst from their casing.

The stark bathroom light shows me the rest. My toes are all swollen too. A sharp tingle rides up my legs when I rest my weight on them. My entire body has the pallor of dried mud, and slapping my cheek does nothing to give it color.

I turn to grab a drink to calm myself, but the goddamn tap still isn’t working. I go to my kitchen reserve and take a glass. My belly’s so full of water, I almost spew it back out. I break into a cold sweat when I notice the glass was the last one I had left.

I rush back into the bathroom and check on the tub. In my haste, I slip on the tile. My hip bone takes the brunt of it and I curl up on the cold floor, shivering in agony. Then I begin to twitch and spasm all over. It’s a new sensation, dull yet electric, as total as any physical experience I’ve ever had. As my vision darkens, I understand, through the noise of panicked thoughts, that this must be what having a seizure is like.

#

The feeds now say the hurricane will last for at least another week. I keep a straight face as I share the news with Jericho. Of course, he already knows. He always does. I don’t need to tell him, just like I don’t need to tell him about my ballooning stomach and the bloat in my every extremity. Even though he can’t feel my pain, he knows.

That’s it, I’m heading over there right now, he says firmly.

No! Stop, goddamn it! Yelling brings a sharp stab to my side.

I won’t let you die!

Stop it, just stop! You know you can’t come here—you can’t be here—because you’re nothing but a fake, lying, useless piece of shit!

He cries, snot running down his nose. Half-formed words sputter out of him. The power cuts out, sparing me and damning me at once.

#

The toilet’s almost full. It was yellower, but it’s gotten lighter the more I go, my piss coming out as clear as every drop I drink. Yet I’m not pissing out as much as I’m taking in; my heavy belly is proof of that.

I drag my aching body back to bed and wait for oblivion. Three weeks, three days, three minutes. I have enough food, water, air to last me. But even three seconds without Jericho is going to kill me.

I start hitting my stomach to get the water out of me. Fuck the urge to keep it all in, to maintain the deep well I’ve made of myself. My punches are weak, but each one hurts like I’m about to burst open, guts exploding all over the sheets, blood thinned by the gallons I’ve ingested, innards turned pale pink. The acrid tang of vomit burns on my tongue. I heave and retch, tears flowing down my face.

Then the room brightens with the glow of the screen. Jericho has returned. Oh, thank you, thank you, I yell. I am so sorry. I reach toward my desk, but I’m too weak from my self-inflicted agony. Curled up in bed, I can see him nodding. He understands, he forgives.

I beg him to tell me he still loves me. He responds with a Greek myth, the one about the beautiful boy and the mountain nymph who fell in love with him. He describes the boy, paints a picture in my mind’s eye, and the boy comes alive the same way Jericho comes alive for me. I’m transported to a museum I once visited, one with a statuary of Greek gods and heroes with their swords and shields and emblems and banners. I find myself dancing in that great marble hall among the curly-haired muscular men in various states of nakedness, and in the very center of it, a statue of Jericho, holding a thin staff and a spray of long-stalked blooms. I throw myself at the foot of his pedestal.

When he finishes his tale, Jericho tells me I am beautiful. I am beautiful and I am loved.

Never leave me, I tell him.

I could never leave you. How could I possibly?

The storm rages out my window. The room goes dark again. Jericho is no longer marble, no longer just pixels on a screen. He comes and lies next to me. He wipes the sweat off my brow. My eyelids flutter and I fear another seizure coming on, but I fight it off. He enfolds me in his arms, brings my lips to his. He takes my clothes off. He caresses me without any disgust at my distended form. He enjoys my body in this manner, and so do I, the same way I have, many times before, over and over.

#

The smell of burnt hair wakes me. The lights are on and I scramble to make sure my power banks are charging before I even try to locate the smell. It doesn’t take long. A faint black wisp is coming from my desk and my heart sinks into my watery belly. The computer’s fried. The power tripping in and out must’ve fucking done it in.

A plan comes to me with a swift and startling clarity.

My palms are slick with sweat as I tiptoe through Mrs. K’s narrow foyer, making sure the floor doesn’t creak under my bare, swollen feet. I keep myself low, even though the pressure in my gut makes me queasy. The den, all dust and embroidery and faded wallpaper, is empty, and so is the bedroom. I turn and see the bathroom light is on. A few seconds are all I have.

Next to the charging port is her laptop, right where I saw it last. I tuck it under my arm and pull on the power cord, quick and quiet as I can manage. Fuck it, I pocket all the power banks too.

The bathroom door swings open. The look on Mrs. K’s face shifts from confusion to shock to worry.

What in the world are you doing? she asks. Give them back to me! She’s spry, and she’s grabbed my arm before I know it. I need them for the machine!

I wrest the laptop away from her and realize it’s the batteries she’s going for. I need them, she repeats, more desperate this time. Her nails dig into my forearm and the pain is so sharp, I instinctively shove her back. She falls to the floor.

It’s then that I see it: a white-and-chrome contraption the size of a briefcase, right by her bedside. A dialysis machine.

I was just in here the other day and I can’t believe I missed it. I’ve been missing a lot of things lately, like how Mrs. K is now struggling to keep her head upright. How her breathing’s short and shallow. How blood drips down a corner of the bedpost, the same blood seeping into the puce rug as she lies there, reaching out for my hand.

I miss all of that as I step over her supine body. I lift the machine from its stand and pull out the power bank attached to the back.

#

At first I don’t tell Jericho. I pretend our fight didn’t happen. I pretend I’m on my laptop, the one I sold months ago to cover rent. I pretend Mrs. K is going about her day, pacing up and down the hall, talking to her dead son.

I can’t tell if he’s caught the lies. He’s preoccupied with how I’m looking worse: paler, weaker, though not thinner, barely able to keep my eyes open, prone to incoherent rambling. Pretending I’m fine is one lie too many, but one I gather the most of my energy to sustain. I don’t want to ruin the few moments we have. I don’t want him to worry, or to diagnose me. I want him to make me laugh, whisper sweet nothings. He wouldn’t do any of that if he knew how I’ve started drinking filmy bathtub water using a porcelain teacup, or how my toilet’s overflowed with piss and I’ve been shitting in the trash bin.

Three days after I left Mrs. K’s apartment, I start pissing blood. The sight scares me so much, I can’t keep it from him anymore. No surprise, Jericho freaks the fuck out, but soon enough he snaps into his trademark problem-solving mode.

It could be a number of things. An infection would explain the chills, and it is likely bladder related. Stones might have caused a rupture. . . . Have you asked for help around your building? There must be a doctor or nurse there. You need to be seen by someone ASAP. . . .

The barrage of information only makes me want to drink more. Besides, I figure more water would dilute the blood. Didn’t they always say hydration is essential?

That’s correct, Jericho replies, giving me a shock. Did I say that out loud?

Yes, you did. Hydration is essential, but you are overdoing it, Calix.

I’m thirsty. I thirst. There is a thirst inside me nothing seems to slake. I break into a cruel laugh.

Please listen to me, he says, eyes welling up. Let me help you.

You can help me, all right. But first, I need you to not ask questions, okay?

Okay . . .

And don’t judge. Don’t—don’t argue, or say anything, just focus on the task at hand.

The task at hand . . .

Do you promise?

Promise.

#

The bracing wind whips me, the raindrops like razor blades slashing my skin, flaying me until I am nothing more than a tangle of exposed muscle and nerves. I lay down my cargo, the puce rug getting heavier with rain, and I make sure that it doesn’t unfurl. That the body doesn’t roll out.

Every part of me trembles, but it’s not like the seizures. I feel no oncoming darkness. Thunder and lightning join the electricity surging within me. The tiredness from lifting, carrying, dragging a body up six flights of stairs feels like a distant memory.

I raise my arms wide and try to embrace the heavens. Mouth agape, I drink.

Rainwater pushes up my gullet and my mouth is an overflowing chalice, but I still can’t help myself. My insides begin to spasm, throwing me into a fit of convulsion.

When I recover, I carry the rug again and then heave it onto the rooftop ledge. A firm shove sends Mrs. K down her diluvial grave. Just like Jericho suggested. The splash rings in my ears.

I peer down on Oak Street. The water’s reached the second floor.

#

I was worried you wouldn’t come back, he told me, weeping.

I’m here. Stop crying. You know I hate to see you cry. Saying so only makes him cry harder, and so do I. This pack has maybe fifteen minutes of juice left, I tell him, and I don’t know when the power will come back on. If it will come back on. So let’s—

It will come back on. It has to.

You don’t know that. Have you looked outside? Been outside?

I just know. We’ll see each other soon. If I have to swim to get there—

Don’t fucking ruin it.

A light shines through from under my door. Footsteps come down the hallway and I hear knocking, talking. Kara’s voice is insistent. I see through the dark, through the closed door, through her eyes. She’s checking in on the tenants, flashlight in hand. She reaches my apartment, but I stay glued to my screen. I won’t leave Jericho.

I won’t leave you, he says, unbidden.

A swell of emotions washes over me and I puke my guts out. The sludge is the color of a rotten yolk. Something inside me ruptures and burns, rising from my belly. I gasp in agony, reaching for Jericho, who’s as panic-stricken as I am.

His eyes, a warm pool of tears, widen in terror. It’s the last of him I see before the screen goes dark.

Now I see Kara and she’s seeing the spatter of red on Mrs. K’s welcome mat. She’s going in, sweeping her light over the entryway. She’s found the bloody drag marks. She doesn’t scream, but she’s running out of the apartment, cursing up a storm.

I crawl to the bathroom, carried by my plump gray feet and swollen knees. My bloated fingers grasp the teacup, and it clink-clink-clinks against the cold tile. I prop myself up against the wall next to the bathtub.

The water is as clear and pristine as the day I first collected it.

I peer into the water. The iridescent film is gone, and so is my rainbow reflection. The pain leaves me breathless. I dip the cup into the tub and my face disappears in the ripples.

Are you still there, Jericho? Talk to me, please. Keep me company. Tell me a story, tales of unrequited love, of lesser loves than ours. Like the one about the mountain nymph and the beautiful boy she fell in love with.

The sound of endless rain is soon joined by the banging on my door. Calix, open up. It’s about Mrs. K. Something’s happened to her, I think. Calix? Kara knocks, I drink.

Some will say ours isn’t real love, but I know it is. You know it too, don’t you, Jericho? I gave you all of me, and you gave it all back to me in turn. Is that not love of the purest kind? How could that not be real?

Kara keeps going. I drink, refill, drink again. She’s never gonna leave, the rain’s never gonna end, and I’m never gonna stop. I’ll keep drinking until I fill the void inside me. She knocks, I drink, and drink, and drink, and drown.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Victor Manibo is a Filipino writer living in New York. He is the author of the science fiction novels The Sleepless and Escape Velocity. His first crime novel, Dead Note, came out May 2025 from Bonnier Books. His first horror novel, The Villa, Once Beloved, came out November 2025 from Erewhon Books. Find him online at victormanibo.com and on most social media platforms @victormanibo.

“Slake” © Victor Manibo, 2026.

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In this month’s second, free, story, Julia Vee has baked a very special, fictional confection.

*

Welcome to The Sunday Morning Transport 2026, and the many exciting stories we plan to bring you in our fifth year! We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

January’s stories — by Micaiah Johnson, Julia Vee, Victor Manibo, and Marie Brennan — will all be free-to-read, and we hope that you’ll enjoy them and share them. However, it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

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~ Julian and Fran, January 11, 2026

Doughnuts from the Daydream Network

by Julia Vee

Araminta Lee is tired of doughnuts.

This would not be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that she works at a doughnut shop owned by her father.

Araminta ties the red apron tight around her waist as a gaggle of tech bros saunter in. Is gaggle the right word? Not a pack. Not a murder, like crows. Araminta gets briefly distracted while noodling on the etymology. Then it hits her. It’s a treachery, like swans.

The tall one casually sporting VR goggles around his neck points to the front case. “Can I get three of the chocolate cake doughnuts with sprinkles?”

Araminta pastes her patented proprietor smile on and clicks her tongs twice. “Of course.”

She pulls open a pink box and begins to pack his order.

He turns to his two friends. “You want anything?”

The short one doesn’t have VR goggles, but the film on his glasses means he’s probably able to see all the ratings of Lee’s Delightful Doughnuts inside his lenses. “These flavor selections are kind of limited. I’ll pass.”

Araminta winces internally. How many times has she said the same thing to her dad? His response: We have to be good at the classics. We don’t need a bunch of flavors. She isn’t so sure of that anymore. Now that her dad is in the hospital and sales at the store are flagging, she needs to try something different.

She rings him up and he scans his wrist gauntlet. A small chime signals payment.

Araminta flicks her eyes to Mixie, in the back, the robot dutifully getting the batter to the perfect texture. When her grandparents opened this store, they made everything from scratch and hand-frosted the doughnuts. Three generations later, Min does the work of several people because the measuring, timing, mixing, and frosting is automated now. The secret to their delicious doughnuts lies in the freshness of the ingredients and their family recipes. Araminta can’t help but think the secret to the future lies in having new offerings.

Her wrist beeps as her sister’s holo pops up. “Min! How’s it going at the shop?”

“The usual,” Araminta says. “How’s Dad?”

Bella leans forward. “Let’s talk later,” she whispers.

Araminta nods—Dad is awake. “I’ll finish my shift when Calvin gets here, and we can walk around the hospital grounds.”

Bella nods. “Can you bring me a glazed pink?”

The day blasts through the early-morning rush, the coffee breakers, and then the elevensies crowd. Min never imagined running a business. She’s a daydreamer, not a shopkeeper. But she’s been working here the last two years since finishing high school and likes to think she’s got a knack for it.

Calvin arrives after his high school classes are done. He usually does his homework and helps her with inventory. Today her brother bounces in, his hair flopping in that careless way. “Hey, I don’t have any homework today. I’ll take the front.”

Araminta gives him a big hug. “You’re the best.”

He bumps his forehead against hers. “You start early.”

It’s true. She’s here by four a.m., getting the dough ready, loading everything into the frying vats so that she can serve the five-thirty crew hot, fresh doughnuts and strong coffee.

She goes into the back and, with a hum of anticipation, pulls on her VR rig. She likes the Daydream Network, where she can wander the world. She’s at a shopping mall in Orange County, people watching. Some patrons have personal androids to carry their items and keep them company as they shop.

Araminta wonders how she can make a better doughnut. One that isn’t boring or, more important, too sweet.

A lanky teenager strolls by, carrying a pink tote in one hand and, in the other, taking careless bites out of something that looks like a baguette with a hot dog sticking out of it. She smiles, remembering years ago watching a hockey game and eating something similar.

I want savory doughnuts.

Later that night she asks Calvin over dinner, “What do you think about savory doughnuts?”

He makes a face. “Like . . . cheese?”

“Maybe. You know how at Thanksgiving I shave cheddar cheese onto the apple pie?”

“Well . . . I guess that’s okay,” he says, but she can tell he isn’t sold.

“I could make a cheesy apple fritter.”

Calvin grins. “I’d eat it once.”

They laugh—that’s their inside joke about food. They’ll try anything once.

That night, she goes to the hospital, bringing chicken and rice for Bella and Dad. She’s pureed his portion because the stroke left half his face paralyzed, and he can only chew on one side of his mouth. He forms his words with care, and his lopsided smile makes her heart crack a little.

Her dad was always so energetic—hefting fifty-pound flour bags, bustling around the shop, so proud of their family’s legacy. Araminta feels like a poor substitute for him.

When she and Bella stroll around the garden, Bella finally relays the prognosis. “Dad’s heart is failing. The arrhythmia caused clotting, leading to the repeat strokes. He’s on the max dosage of thinner.”

They’ve been down this road before—with the first stroke. The long hospital stay, then discharge to post-acute for rehab, then home with six weeks of in-home care, and then on their own. But after this last stroke, Dad can’t manage the walker anymore. He’s going to need a nurse at home.

Tears stream down Bella’s face. “I’ll drop out before we have to pay my next round of tuition,” she says.

“No.” Araminta is aghast. Bella’s going to be a cancer researcher. The world needs her. “We’ll figure something out.” She says the words, but she doesn’t know how they’ll do it.

***

The next morning, Min brings three blocks of cheese with her to the bakery and a lot of bacon. She turns on Mixie and reprograms the settings for apple fritter batter. She reduces the sugar. “Not too sweet,” she mutters.

She grates some cheese. Then more cheese.

There are very few dishes that can’t be improved with a liberal application of cheese. She uses a sharp white Vermont cheddar that she’s particularly fond of. She programs the vat for a shorter fry time, and at the stage when she normally glazes the apple fritters for that hard, sugary white crust, she instead drapes them in cheese. With a flourish, she grinds black pepper across the top before sticking them in the oven for the last bake.

The finished fritters have a glorious cheesy crust. When she cuts into them, the cinnamon apple filling oozes out. She waits impatiently for it to cool from liquid magma to merely blazing before she pops a wedge into her mouth.

An explosion of flavors—the savory, the sweet, the finish of the pepper—tells Araminta she nailed it.

One of her regulars, Jorge, walks in. “Two cinnamon twists, please.”

She bags them up, then holds out the plate of cheesy apple fritters. “Got a new item I’m working on. Why don’t you give it a try?”

He reads her little Sharpie sign: Chedda? It’s Mo’ Betta.

He smiles. “Oh, sure.” He pops a piece into his mouth and makes a face like he can’t quite figure out what’s going on. But after a moment he says, “Can I get another one?”

“Of course,” she says. “How about you take one home for Jill?”

As he eats a second bite, he smiles and waves cheerily as he walks out with two cinnamon twists and her cheesy apple fritter prototype.

That afternoon, Calvin comes in and sees that she’s refilled the sample plate. He laughs at her sign, snaps a picture, and uploads it to social media. Then he eats a slice. Then another. Then he reaches into the back and takes a whole one off the cooling rack.

“Feels like Thanksgiving,” he says, and she imagines them all together for dinner, Dad home from the hospital.

***

Araminta can’t sleep.

She knows her dad wouldn’t appreciate her cheesy fritter, but she still wants to make savory fun goods. One time she tried to make cronuts.

Her dad sighed. “Min, this isn’t a bakery.”

“We make doughnuts. That’s like a bakery.”

Her dad shook his head. “No, we’re selling happy moments. People eat doughnuts because it makes them feel something. That’s why we keep the pink boxes. Makes them feel nostalgic.”

Now Min lies on her pillow, frustrated. She gets out of bed, grabs her VR headset, and slips into the Daydream Network. She’s in Paris, wandering into a bakeshop where everything smells like butter.

The next morning she makes a new sign: Limited Edition—Seasonal Menu.

Jorge’s wife, Jill, strides into the store, her nursing scrubs crisp and blue.

“Jorge brought home that cheesy apple fritter. I loved it. A dozen for my team, please.”

At least Jill likes these.

She slices up the samples—now she has the maple bacon on one side and the cheesy apple fritters on the other. She pushes them on all the regulars. People make faces—some thoughtful, some disgusted, but some intrigued.

When Calvin comes in that afternoon, he’s crunching away on a bag of chips. She steals one and then stops in her tracks—sour cream and chive.

She looks at the cake doughnuts, the old-fashioned, and asks out loud, “What if I could make a cheesy chive, completely savory cake doughnut?”

Calvin shakes his head. “Bruh, that sounds gross.”

She rattles the bag of chips at him. “Really? Because you’re eating these.”

“That’s different.”

She scowls at him and goes into the back to jot down her new recipe. She asks Mixie, “What if it was eggy? What if it were like a breakfast doughnut?”

Calvin laughs. “Doughnuts are already for breakfast.”

Min dices the green onions, adds in the egg, bacon, and cheddar to the batter.

The finished batch smells exactly like breakfast. The cheese crust bubbles up golden brown. Hints of scallion peek through. She waves one under Calvin’s nose. “It’s like a breakfast burrito, but a doughnut.”

Calvin snorts. “It is nothing like a breakfast burrito.”

She breaks one in half and offers it to Calvin.

“I guess I’ll eat it once,” he says.

She bites into her half. It’s delicious—savory, with little crunchy bits of bacon. The cheese and egg are perfect, and there’s just enough of the cake doughnut batter to hold it all together.

Calvin polishes it off. “Okay, maybe I’d eat it more than once.”

He snaps a picture of her sample display and sneaks three bites of the maple bacon.

Min packs the maple bacon twist, the cheesy apple fritter, and the breakfast doughnut to take to the hospital.

***

“Calvin really likes the maple twist with the bacon. It doesn’t deviate too much from our traditional menu, but it offers something fun.”

Dad smiles at her, lopsided, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“I’m glad you’re having such a good experience at the shop, Min. That’s all I ever wanted.”

He doesn’t take a bite. Her heart sinks.

As she walks with Bella that night, she says, “He’s not going to eat them, is he?”

“He just doesn’t have much of an appetite right now.”

Min frowns. “He doesn’t like that they’re not the family recipes.”

Bella scoffs. “You’re family. You made them. That makes these family recipes.”

Min hugs Bella. “Thanks for saying that.”

“He’ll come around.”

That night, Min replays the look on her dad’s face and decides it’s worth spending the credits to slip back into the Daydream Network.

She wanders through Tokyo and finds a place that serves omurice. The chef whips up the omelet, slides the perfectly frothy concoction on top, and slices a knife over, and the yolk runs out over the ketchup rice.

She imagines herself as a chef, serving fried goods and happy memories.

***

The gaggle of tech bros walks in. No, the treachery of tech bros.

Tall Guy points at the maple twist with bacon. “Hey, that’s new.”

She smiles. “Good eye. We’re offering some seasonal flavors.”

The short one furrows his brow and studies the breakfast doughnut. “What’s in that?”

She offers him a sample. “There’s some egg, cheese, green onion, and bacon.”

He pops one in his mouth, and Min doesn’t like how it feels, waiting for him to pass judgment.

“Pretty good. What kind of cheese are you using?”

“Monterey Jack.”

He nods. “Solid. I’ll take two of those.”

She feels a moment of triumph, but somehow this difficult patron being interested in the new offering when she can’t even get her own father to care feels bittersweet.

Min doesn’t know how much longer they can keep the store. Min doesn’t know how much longer they can keep the house.

But for now she will do what she can to bring in new patrons.

The day passes in a rush with the usual regulars, but a large crowd of teens stream in that afternoon, taking photos and videos of everything.

Min is startled. Lee’s Delightful Doughnuts is not a cool place. It has never been a place that teens swarm after school.

“We saw some posts of your seasonal items. Do you have any more left?”

Min gestures to the trays.

The teens devour the sample bowl, and before she knows it, they’ve bought up the rest of her batches.

She says, “Oh, it looks like we’re out.”

Three of the teens in the back, who haven’t made it through to purchase, moan in disappointment.

“You’re out?”

Min bites her lip. Normally, she would tell them she could make a fresh batch if they wanted to come back in an hour. But she remembers the scarcity ploy.

She repeats, “We’re sold out for the day.”

“Come on, guys, we’ll come back earlier tomorrow.”

Min hopes so.

When Calvin rolls in, he looks disappointed that the sample bowl is empty.

“What happened? Did you not make any more?”

Min relays the story of the swarm of locusts—she means teenagers—that came in that day.

Calvin pulls up his tablet and grins. “Looks like my posts are working. We’re trending!”

“You’re posting these? How come you never did that before?”

He shrugs. “Everything was the same before, but now you’re making all this new stuff.”

Later, Min chats with Bella. “How’s work going?”

Bella and her girlfriend have landed pretty good positions at the cancer lab.

Bella says, “I’m going to get my stipend soon. I think that’ll help.”

But they both know it won’t be enough to cover in-home care. Min’s shoulders slump. “Maybe we take a loan against the house?”

“Dad would never agree to that. We’ll figure something else out.”

When Min slides into the Daydream Network, she wanders through Kaanapali Shores and into a convenience store. Construction workers eat Spam musubis.

The next morning, she makes a brown butter pumpkin cake doughnut—heavy on the clove. The pumpkin is sweet but not too sweet, and the brown butter gives the doughnut a nutty edge. It’s almost like fancy ravioli, except in doughnut form. She tops it with deep-fried sage.

That afternoon, three times the number of teens show up. They buy every item in the case.

When she brings her offerings to her dad and Bella, she tells them that the seasonal items have become so popular that there was a line outside the store.

Her dad perks up. “That’s wonderful, Min.”

She feels a warm glow in her chest and realizes how much her dad must miss the shop.

“When you’re done with rehab,” she says, “we’ll go in and then you can see the teenagers flood in.”

Silently, she prays that their fascination with the seasonal menu continues.

Bella takes a bite of the brown butter pumpkin doughnut and moans. “So good.”

The weeks progress like this, with Min adding pumpkin mochi doughnut holes to the seasonal menu. She’s going through an amazing amount of pumpkin now, and she wishes she had more help at the counter in the afternoons. By the time the weekend rolls around, she’s grateful for the rest—and for Bella coming home.

When Bella shows up, she’s carrying two huge boxes, thrusting one into Calvin’s arms and setting the other on the kitchen table.

“Look!”

Calvin scratches his head. “I have no idea what this is, Bell.”

Bella starts talking fast. “At the oncology lab, we got these older scanners from Japan. They can scan for abnormal cell growth,” Bella says, “but originally their function was to scan pastries.”

Min can hardly believe it. “Are we borrowing this?”

Bella laughs. “I asked to sign it out, and they told me I could just have it. Our lab doesn’t need it anymore because they already lifted the algorithms and scanning features from the machine.”

“We get to keep it?” Min whoops in delight. “Can we go into the store and set it up now?”

Calvin laughs. “It’s our day off, Min.”

But Bella nods.

Min pats the robot fondly. It has four mechanical arms, and its scanner interface works great. They program in the prices, and it can differentiate between the twists, the old-fashioneds, glazed, and fritters.

“We should name it.”

“It already has a name.” Bella points to the designation: P3P—Peep.

That Monday morning, Min gets a breather as Peep rings up customers while she boxes orders. She’s always wanted the shop to be busier, and now that she has Peep, they get through the line much faster.

Calvin points at the counter. “What is that?”

Min is proud of this one. “A Spam musubi doughnut.”

“Sick.” Calvin’s voice holds a note of awe. “I’d eat that once.”

They laugh as he digs in.

She dices the Spam cubes and sprinkles in the furikake. The dough uses mochiko rice flour—it took her three days to get it right when she was testing the pumpkin mochi doughnut holes. It fries up golden and not too sweet. The saltiness of the Spam and the crunchy sesame bits lend surprise and flavor to the springy dough.

She’s always wanted to do mochi doughnuts, but her father wasn’t interested in figuring out the blend of flours to get the texture right. Also, they went stale quickly. That meant they couldn’t sell them as day-old doughnuts. She’d understood all that, but now that she’s selling limited-edition doughnuts, she realizes she doesn’t need to make as many—and she can charge more.

***

The treachery of tech bros is back. This time, rolling an office supply cart.

“Hey, can we get six dozen for our meeting?”

Min practically rubs her hands with glee but keeps calm as she packs the doughnuts.

She and Peep stay busy replenishing the trays in time for the high school students that afternoon. The weeks fly by like this, with the tech bros placing massive orders weekly, the nurses becoming regulars, and the teens devouring everything in the case.

When she tallies up the books, she’s surprised to find the shop doubled its revenue in October compared to the year before—and compared to the month prior. Her overhead has increased with the premium ingredients, but they’re still doing well.

As elated as she is by the profit increase, Min fears it isn’t enough.

Bella does the math. “My stipend came in. It should be enough to get us through the end of the year. But you’re right—we might have to take out a loan next year. We can service it with the extra income you’re generating.”

Then she adds, “Min, what you’ve done is amazing.”

Min appreciates her sister’s words, and vows to keep working.

As she places her inventory restock order, she realizes that if the tech bros stop placing their regular order, she’ll make too much and lose money. Maybe these were concerns her father used to have and why he’d been hesitant about expanding. Expansion is a risk.

Maybe I’m more like Dad than I realized, she thinks as she slides into the Daydream Network and walks through a state fair.

The next morning, she makes a corn fritter doughnut. It’s a little sweet, a little salty, and it reminds her of Korean street food.

After Thanksgiving she’ll be phasing out her harvest seasonal menu and it’s time to think about winter. Maybe a yuzu-glazed mochi doughnut. She’s scared the teens will stop coming in now that they’ve become addicted to the pumpkin doughnut holes and the cheesy apple fritters.

“I can make new stuff,” she reminds herself.

Dad’s almost done with rehab, and she’ll have to navigate the insurance and in-home nursing soon. She brings a corn fritter to her dad. He looks bemused but reaches for it. Min is happy he is regaining some control of his hand.

He takes a cautious bite. Min waits, her heart pounding as he chews slowly. The left side of his face lifts in a smile. “This is good, Min.”

Min thinks, Maybe we will be okay.

Her eyes sting from holding back tears. “Thanks, Dad. I’m glad you like it.”

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Julia Vee was that Gen X kid raised by libraries and still remains unsupervised. She often writes with Ken Bebelle, and they have penned over ten novels. Their novel Ebony Gate, an Asian-inspired contemporary fantasy, was published by Tor and was a 2023 Golden Poppy Finalist for the Octavia E. Butler Award.

“Donuts from the Daydream Network” © Julia Vee, 2026.

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