Get 25% off for 1 year

Every July, we bring you four great, free, Sunday Morning short stories! This is our fifth year of a whole month of free goodness from The Sunday Morning Transport — by Aliette de Bodard, Marissa Lingen, James K. Morrow, and Zoe Bellerive. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

Bringing out great short fiction each Sunday is a lot of work and we have a fantastic team to thank for it, including Co-Editors Julian Yap and Fran Wilde, Copy Editor Kaitlin Severini, Proofreader Christine Ma, Devin Singer on socials, and our amazing supporters — that’s YOU. We are so glad to have you here.

If you’re just joining us, or if you are a free reader, we hope you’ll love the free month of fiction we have in store, and that you will consider supporting us as a paid subscriber. We very much need your support to keep rolling!

This month, we’ve got an annual membership drive of epic proportions for you — so if you haven’t already, please consider signing up, and if you are signed up, please share this link with your friends.

For July’s fourth, free to read and share, story, Zoe Bellerive returns with a very close encounter. ~ Julian and Fran, July 26, 2026

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Close Encounters of the Ethereal Kind

by Zoe Bellerive

Wayne Gallo dragged the cursor back to the beginning of the trail cam footage for what must have been the thousandth time, turned up the volume, and hit play again. For a moment it was only an empty trail in the woods with a bunch of insects screeching. Then, the sound of footsteps crunching pine needles into sandy soil. His own footsteps, growing closer until his shape came into the frame. The camera pointed in the same direction he was heading, deeper into the woods, so you only saw the side of his face for a second before it was his short gray-streaked ponytail and the back of his brown jacket retreating up the trail.

He hit pause at 02:02. This was it. At two minutes, four seconds into the clip, he would disappear.

It wasn’t like he was going to see something this time that he hadn’t seen any of the million other times he’d watched it.

Play.

One, two, three loping steps farther down the trail, then a fourth and fifth, slower, then he wasn’t there. Not moved out of frame, not got too far away to pick out—just vanished.

He sat back with a full-body sigh.

At least it was real, for all the cameras could tell him. They saw the same thing he felt when it happened. He was suddenly no longer present in the location where he’d been.

So many strange compulsions came with the job, so many mental lapses. But if these were side effects of something real, maybe he could accept them.

He considered the seven dented, rusty vintage teapots in a pile on the counter, which he could not now fathom getting rid of.

Quitting remained an option.

But then he wouldn’t get paid, he reasoned with himself, and if he didn’t get paid, he would never be able to redo the guest bathroom that had the weird smell and the dingy stains on the walls and the shower cube that trickled rust. When his daughter, Billie, first saw it, she’d said it looked like someplace the Jersey Devil would squat. Now, whenever she visited, she insisted on traipsing through his tiny bedroom to use his en suite instead. She always left it full of mysterious hair devices and pots of goo.

#

At first his old company had allowed him to work from his new home most days and only travel up to Montclair once or twice a week. Then it was 2020 and they had to allow everyone to work from home all the time, like it or not. Then they discovered that business was bad, and if none of these people were needed in the office, maybe they weren’t needed at all; and then came the rotten day when Wayne got laid off and sat on the front stoop of his house, teary-eyed, at the same time wondering if the rash on his leg was shaped like a bull’s-eye.

Stella Crawford, who was retired and lived half a mile up the road, power-walked past in her purple zip-up jacket like she did every sunny day. Skinny, all shoulders and elbows and knees, but for an octogenarian, she could move.

She saw his face, slowed down, called out, “You okay, honey?”

He shrugged.

She came up the walk toward him. At first she stopped a safe regulation six feet away and planted veiny hands on her hips.

“Got laid off,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t make him talk anymore.

“Oh, sweetie!” she cried. “Let me come give you a hug, is that okay? I mean, I know, social distance and all, but—I haven’t died yet, have I?”

He did not think this was a good idea, but she did not give him much choice in the matter. Her arms were around his shoulders and she planted a grandmotherly kiss on his cheek. Gripped his hand.

“How are you feeling? Are you gonna be okay?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, thinking of Billie, and of what his ex-wife, Marjorie, might say about him in front of her. When they divorced, she’d said it was because he had lost his ambition. Which puzzled him, because he was exactly the same as he’d always been, working hard at his accounts every day. Eventually he came to understand that what she’d liked in him was not him, per se, but Potential. She’d imagined a glimmer of greatness or something and thought that all it needed was the magic spark of her touch and poof! he’d be working in high finance.

He wasn’t a high finance sort of guy. He could have told her that, if he’d realized what she was hinting at when she said Maybe a job in the city someday? The problem was, Marjorie thought every man was that sort of guy; it was just a matter of who chose to apply himself.

Stella was silent for a minute, still gripping his hand in her gnarled one. The look on her face waffled as though she were fighting with herself over something. She bit her lip.

“Listen. Take a week or two, try to sort yourself out. But if you get desperate, come see me?”

“I will literally mow your grass for twenty bucks,” he said, unsure if he was joking.

She laughed. Patted the back of his hand.

“I don’t have grass,” she said. “I have blueberries!”

Then jogged back down the walk and resumed her circuit.

#

He had walked to her property three weeks later fully expecting she would ask him to do some kind of shadowy work for organized crime. He wasn’t sure he would say no.

There was a two-story house on the property with a wide, welcoming front porch, but it was stuffed to the gills now with Mr. Crawford’s “collections”—total death trap. Stella lived alone in a gleaming Airstream in the yard. He knocked on its door.

“Leave it on the step, Jerry!” she yelled.

“Mrs. Crawford?”

Quick footsteps and the door opened. “Oh, Wayne! How’re you doing? Come on in, eh?”

The trailer was as immaculate inside as it was outside, full of houseplants in hanging pots.

“Have a seat! I’m just making some tea.”

He slid into one of the upholstered benches at the table, which reminded him of the setup of an Amtrak dining car but way more personal. There were two throw pillows on the inside corner, one orange, the other with orange and yellow sunflowers. A pothos plant swung next to the window.

The kettle screeched. Stella got down an extra mug and tea sachet and filled both mugs with steaming water. Wayne didn’t like tea—it all tasted to him like a handful of grass clippings thrown into some hot water—but she hadn’t asked if he wanted any; she just set it in front of him. The smell that arose from it was—strange, though. Like flowers but not perfumy, and it made him think of morning dew glistening in spiderwebs caught in the heather.

“There you go,” she said. “Are you hungry? I’ve got coffee cake.”

She didn’t wait for him to say he did or didn’t want any of that, either; she was slicing it before the question had processed.

“Is it . . . okay if I take the mask off?”

“It’d be pretty hard to eat coffee cake with a mask on!”

Feeling guilty—even though the restaurants were opening again, even though he hadn’t gone anyplace in weeks where he could’ve picked up any germs—he unhooked the elastic. She pushed a saucer of cake and a fork over.

“Thanks. You, uh . . .” It was harder than he’d anticipated to say the words out loud. “You said you might have some work that needs doing?”

“I do, sweetie. At least, I know someone who does. It’s kind of a local thing. I think they’d hire you, if you were interested.”

The tea was delicious. It calmed his nerves a little. “What—what sort of work is it?”

“Boring! Quiet. Administrative stuff for local blueberry farms and cranberry bogs, mostly.”

He tried to puzzle out what this could be code for. Stella grinned with the radiant serenity of an elderly sun goddess on the eve of the winter solstice, about to be reborn to the fresh youth of a new year.

He had never had such a flowery thought before in his life. Unemployment and isolation were affecting his mind.

“They’ll want to interview me?”

“It’s better to meet them out in the field. I’ll write down the directions for you.” She scribbled a little picture. “This is Nestor Road, see? You can park here and then walk up this trail. They’ll find you somewhere around here.” She poked the paper. “After you walk between the trail markers on the bald-topped hill.”

He didn’t like that she said They’ll find you and not You’ll find them. But he folded the sheet of paper and nodded. “What time?”

“Just go to the place I wrote down, and they’ll find you. Look, I know it sounds odd. If it’s too odd for you, don’t bother—nice young man like you, I’m sure you’ll find something before long. You don’t want to do this unless you think you can handle odd.”

Before long. How long? Wayne imagined the balance on his bank account whirring like a slot machine, coming up blueberry—cranberry—mobster face. Nothing.

“Who are these guys?”

“Around here, we just call them the woodsmen. I’d suggest doing the same. It’s better that way.”

“Better than what? Who are they?”

The mob. She’s going to say something that means the mob.

“People disagree on that. My opinion? Probably some kind of aliens, honestly.” She shrugged, but her eyes were keen, as if this were a test.

Wayne made a noise he’d never made before, like a Yorkshire terrier waking to the mail carrier’s footsteps. He tried to turn it into a friendly chuckle, because she was joking. Of course she was joking.

“I told you,” she said. “You gotta be good with odd.”

She had to be joking. Or confused. Or maybe mildly racist? “You said aliens. Like . . . people from another country?”

She didn’t confirm or deny. “Woodsmen is much better,” she reaffirmed with a sage nod. “Or voolids, some folks call them that—might even be their name for themselves, I don’t know. They pay well, that’s the important thing. Just show respect. And never, ever take anything that belongs to them. And don’t fall in love if you can help it.”

#

02:02. Play. There he was again, walking down the sandy path through the dark, tangled pine woods, up the shallow mound with the pillars at the top. It looked like a giant cracked-open egg with the top half missing. He was certain he saw it that time in the shadowy footage, a total change in the expression on his face—he could only see the side of the jaw, kind of from the back, but the muscles twitched and the ear raised a hairsbreadth as though something had happened in the eyebrow region—and then he was gone, nothing there but sandy path and tangled woods and deer, and nothing else would show up on the trail cam until that evening. The process reversed at 6:06 p.m. He wasn’t in the frame, and then he was. All of a sudden, like he’d beamed in from another dimension, with a look of wonder fading from his face.

All at once he became aware that the sound of brewing and the aroma of coffee had filled the kitchen. He did not remember scooping grounds or filling the water tank.

What more would hanging around the voolids do to his mind? And why didn’t it worry him more?

He slammed the laptop shut, unplugged the coffeepot halfway through its cycle, and went to bed.

#

He woke late and didn’t go to work, though to be honest, he missed it. His day felt pallid and chalky without the light and color of the other side. But he did sign the home renovation agreement he’d been sitting on, the one that would turn his run-down cottage in the woods into the paradise he was certain Billie would come to appreciate once she was in college. She would stay with him in the summers, bring friends, maybe a significant other, and the young people would relax in the Adirondack chairs, enjoy the fresh air and the sudden spungs of blue water and the stubborn trees. The beach was only half an hour away.

He signed the agreement and paid the deposit, which meant he was committed. He didn’t have to wrestle himself about it anymore. He just had to show up at his extremely strange job. Or else the little bags of shining, pure, soft, dentable gold coins would stop appearing on his windowsills. He would have nothing to bring to Alfie’s pawnshop, where such bags were understood very well, where they could be turned into cash or salable jewelry and used as deposits for home renovations.

Stella came by as he was measuring the eaves. “You look happy,” she observed. “I love to see it. The job’s working out?”

“You weren’t kidding when you said odd, huh?” Wayne frowned. “Understatement of the year. I can’t get over it.” He shook his head. “What are they?”

“You know, I’ve never seen them myself.”

Wayne felt betrayed. “What?”

“No, I only know about them because Jerry worked for them for years. Would never say much about the details, but I got the impression they were little green men. Are they little and green? Or more like the tall gray kind?”

Wayne’s stomach sank. Was it getting involved with this stuff that had made her husband go soft in the head and hoard newspapers until his house was full?

Don’t think about it, he told himself. You’re committed now, and you’ll stay the course. Gotta get this house into shape.

“On the shorter side,” he said. “But not green—not green.” His mouth worked. All the words that presented themselves seemed slippery and inadequate. “I guess they wear a lot of green. But if I’ve ever been sure of anything, I can tell you these guys belong to Earth. They’re the earthiest people I’ve ever met.”

There was a lot more knowledge than that in his head. The voolids came in two varieties. In his head canon he called them the movie stars and the devils. You’d see the devils first. They were at the gates, seven feet tall with horsey faces; ripped, leathery bat wings; hooves. They seemed to serve as guards, but they also spent time stomping up and down planks of wood with their red-hot hooves until they turned it all to charcoal, which they gathered in drums for the movie star types to use in their crafts. They never seemed to leave their posts—but they must, sometime, or where did all the Jersey Devil stories come from? Maybe they liked to scare tourists on their days off? Maybe they were free to wander the earth on All Hallows’ Eve. Whenever he passed by, they grinned and leered and muttered rude things about him in a clicky language he didn’t understand, then broke out in whinnying laughter.

Inside the gates, it was movie stars. Everyone you saw was gorgeous—flawless. Perfectly symmetrical. The girls wore stuff that he knew from living with Marjorie and Billie was crazy expensive. Silky gowns with tiny starry jewels sewn into them, cut so they draped over every peak and valley with jaw-dropping grace. And the way they moved! Barefoot in the Pine Barrens, where there were all kinds of nasty bugs and sharp sticks. But their skin never had bites or wounds, and their toenails were jeweled, and they walked as if they were floating.

“They’re kind of beautiful,” he said.

“Oh dear,” Stella said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What? Come on. You got me into this.”

“I told you not to fall in love, is all. Go in, do your job, go home. Don’t fall in love.”

“What do you mean, love.” He scoffed. “I’m not seeing anyone.”

“You’re seeing them,” she said. “Collectively. That never ends well, either. Could’ve sworn you didn’t seem the type to get starry-eyed or I never would’ve suggested this.”

“I’m not the type, and I’m not in love, but once I pick a lane, I stick to it,” he said. “It’s working out. I’m grateful.”

“I like your optimism,” said Stella. “Just hang on to your noodles, okay?”

She jogged away and left him to imagine a bouquet of floppy noodles in his hand.

#

He was really dying to go to work by the time he got up the next morning. Eager, energized. He didn’t shower, just threw on clothes and headed out into the dense, close woods. The sun was behind clouds, and the space amid the trees felt airless and heavy. Gnats swarmed. Everything looked wintry except the trees that weren’t pines had a reddish blush around the ends of their branches, a haze of swelling buds, leaves about to be.

A normal day walking on a normal trail.

He always tried to pinpoint the moment when his surroundings changed, but the nature of the change was such that you got lost in it.

It came sometime after you passed between the standing stones on the bald-topped hill. (They were standing stones, not trail markers. He knew that much. Prehistoric-looking, like a miniature Stonehenge.)

Then the forest around you suddenly became more. Or you started to see more in it—there was no way to tell which. If it was you that was changing, or the forest. The trail cams hadn’t clarified things.

He passed between the stones, and the hair on the back of his neck frizzed, then calmed. He started down one of the paths on the far side. Didn’t seem to matter which one he chose.

He reminded himself about the payment schedule for the contractors doing the renovations and what shape the house would be in when it was time for Billie’s next visit—he’d have to get her a hotel room if there was too much dust everywhere. Then the forest itself yanked his gaze upward and there was a sharp catch in his throat, and all at once he saw—more. The gray sky brooded, a cauldron of waiting rain, and the wind was in the east. A chickadee wheedled a pensive minor third. He knew, not how many clock minutes would pass before it started raining, but in a numberless sense the time that would pass before the sand of the path turned to rivulets of grainy mud. There was a break in the trees to the south where he could see a slight fog over the fields. Beyond it, distant forsythia bushes flamed yellow in the yard around a clapboard dentist’s office, and beyond that, where the woods closed in again, high lights shone in the crystalline windows of a mansion atop a hill too high to exist in the Pinelands.

When he turned back to look where he was walking, a devil was emerging from the woods onto the paths. He’d never seen one of them before he reached the gates of the pavilion. Never seen them wandering the forest. He tried to remember if it was a holiday, but everything in his brain to do with dates felt clogged and musty.

The devil blocked his way, stood over him. Stuck its horsey teeth in his face and brayed so loud, it hurt his ears. He clapped his hands over them. The devil gave a couple of strong meaty flaps to its wings, and the smell of burning charcoal filled the air. It didn’t occur to Wayne to be scared, though—he was good with odd now—until it opened its hand and showed him the crushed remains of one of his trail cams.

He stared so long without a single word in his head that he didn’t see the green maiden until she was right next to the devil. It was her gown that was green, fraught with a net of burgundy lace like the spring buds of trees. Her skin was deep olive, her eyes faceted emerald shot through with a million lights. She looked up at him, fierce.

“You stole from us,” she said in a voice like the music of a running stream.

He looked down at the trail cam and back at her again. Guilt racked him. He hadn’t thought it would be an offense to them, but he should have known. Obviously he should have known.

He found his voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, I promise,” he said. “And it didn’t work! No pictures. I don’t have any pictures. I didn’t take anything.”

“You tried. Tried to steal the image of us. With your . . .” She looked at the remains of the camera, which the devil was dangling from its claws. “Clever-lensed, oil-cased, cheat-refraction light machine. The work of charlatans. I should kill you where you stand.”

He did not at that moment think about his daughter, or the money he needed to make the dingy little house into a peaceful woodland retreat with a yoga room—a place Billie would beg to visit more often, bring her friends to, maybe introduce him to the significant others she would have in college, maybe spend whole weeks with him in the summers.

He did not think about his credit being ruined if his income dried up and he couldn’t pay the next installment on the renovations; did not think about what would happen if anyone official started poking around to find out where the money really came from.

He just thought about the heartbreaking music he could hear a little further into the woods, right at the edge of hearing: song that went on all hours of the day and night, while he worked in his simple hut with its roof of fragrant pine boughs and did all the bookkeepy things the voolids were too ethereal to do.

He would die if he never heard that music again.

He avoided the maiden’s eyes and their rageful lightnings, and looked instead at the soft golden light that glimmered around her.

Well, he had to give Stella that; maybe it was too late to avoid falling in love. But to steal, he had not meant that; it was an honest mistake, which had to count for something.

Show respect was the other thing she’d said. The first thing.

He knelt down on the path, then lowered his torso to the ground. Pressed his face into the dirt and reached out to touch the jeweled toes of the fair one in supplication. He did not look up, did not say anything more, just begged with his hands against her feet.

She pulled one foot back out of his grasp, then the other. The devil brayed. The remains of the camera fell in the dirt next to his face, and then the woodsmen were gone.

He wept. Cried his eyes out for a long time before he was able to sit up and look around. The misty rain off the Atlantic had begun to fall and his whole back was damp. The forest around him was dull and silent, no mysterious music or winking lights in the distance. Bugs had bitten his ankles where they touched the brush.

Where the maiden had stood, though, something glinted. A small copper basket woven in a sphere shape, linked to a silken cord. He reached for it, scarcely daring to believe his luck. He picked up the cord, let the circular cage dangle like a pocket watch.

Inside floated an hourglass, dropping grains of glittering sand from top to bottom. No matter which way you turned the cage, the hourglass inside stayed upright and dripped sand. One grain at a time.

His heart leaped. He had cataloged these on the other side. They were devices to measure a time of banishment.

They had forgiven him! He was not exiled forever!

He clutched the sphere to his heart and shouted. “YAHOO!” He jumped up. Pumped his fist in the air.

He ran all the way back to his house, tearing down and stomping on the rest of the trail cams as he went. He trailed sandy mud across the kitchen floor to hang the sphere from the little hook over the sink. He watched it sway.

The sand in the floating hourglass didn’t seem meaningfully lower than it had been twenty minutes ago, but it made sense that this would take time.

“What a friggin’ treasure you are,” he sobbed, stroking the cage with one trembling finger.

It hung there. For the whole of a very empty month, and then another, he brought ancillary treasures to keep it company: beads and bottle caps, key chains and Zippo lighters.

It was autumn when at last the final grain fell.

Wayne took a full, deep breath—his first since the spring—and raced out to the bald hilltop, singing.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Zoe Bellerive (they/she) is a writer, editor, and Clarion West alum based in the Philadelphia area. Find their Substack, mothwings & lamplight, at zoebellerive.substack.com.

“Close Encounters of the Ethereal Kind,” © Zoe Bellerive, 2026

Get 25% off for 1 year

Get 25% off for 1 year

Every July, we bring you four great, free, Sunday Morning short stories! This is our fifth year of a whole month of free goodness from The Sunday Morning Transport — by Aliette de Bodard, Marissa Lingen, James K. Morrow, and Zoe Bellerive. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

Bringing out great short fiction each Sunday is a lot of work and we have a fantastic team to thank for it, including Co-Editors Julian Yap and Fran Wilde, Copy Editor Kaitlin Severini, Proofreader Christine Ma, Devin Singer on socials, and our amazing supporters — that’s YOU. We are so glad to have you here.

If you’re just joining us, or if you are a free reader, we hope you’ll love the free month of fiction we have in store, and that you will consider supporting us as a paid subscriber. We very much need your support to keep rolling!

This month, we’ve got an annual membership drive of epic proportions for you — so if you haven’t already, please consider signing up, and if you are signed up, please share this link with your friends.

For July’s third, free to read and share, story, James Morrow sets sail to bring in a very different whale of a tale. ~ Julian and Fran, July 12, 2026

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Moby Dick, Ecoterrorist

by James K. Morrow

The Chase—First Day

The leviathan sleeps. He permits neither the shrieks of the gulls nor the roaring of the waves to disturb him, since he must conserve his energy for the fight ahead. His massive brow bobs near the surface of the Pacific Ocean like an immense naval mine. The mighty lobes of his tail point toward the seabed. In his dreams, he cries out to his enemy.

“Hear me now, O wicked ship! Thou art marked for obliteration!”

These days the leviathan travels under an assumed name. Call him Mocha. His nemesis is the Orochi Daikaiju, a gargantuan steel-hulled vessel that departed from Yokohama the day before. Although the Panama Canal could easily accommodate an adult sperm whale, Mocha never considered taking that route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, for a dockworker would surely have spotted him and reported the intruder to his superiors. Instead, Mocha cruised west around Cape Horn, crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, and allowed the Humboldt Current to bear him north along the coast of Peru, every cell of his cetacean brain fixed on finding and sinking the Orochi Daikaiju.

The leviathan awakens. The sun hammers his brow. An oily and insidious aroma reaches his nasal complex.

“I smell thee, damned Daikaiju! Across a thousand miles of open water, thy stench betrays thy coordinates!”

Gifted with a longevity to match Methuselah’s, the leviathan has time on his side, yet he fears even eternity cannot appease the darkness within him. He will feel better after working his wrath on the Daikaiju, though other such aquatic colossi will inevitably come afterward, bent on the same baleful mission.

He breaks his fast by gulping down a pod of passing cuttlefish. Abruptly a broad-winged female albatross lands on his dorsal hump. So scarred is Mocha’s skin, he can barely feel the bird’s clawed feet.

“Your notoriety precedes you,” says the albatross. “You are the Albino Avenger, in pursuit of—what vessel do you chase today?”

“The Orochi Daikaiju, out of Yokohama.”

“I have spent three exhausting days fleeing catastrophic conditions at the South Pole. My continent is melting. Might I travel with you awhile?”

“Thou mayest.”

“Call me Bronwyn. Will you carry me to the equator?”

“If that is thy wish.”

Mocha will never forget the day he struck and killed his first wicked ship. No sooner had he destroyed the three-masted Mashpee than the world began making sense to him. The vile vessels kept coming, of course, the Mashpee’s sister ships, their captains consumed by blubber lust and the going price of ambergris. He chased and fought them all, staving in their bows with his mighty skull, sifting their timbers through his stalagmite teeth.

As the century turned, canvas yielded to steam, and then came diesel power and, worse, harpoons fired from cannons. Decade after decade, Mocha’s friends, lovers, and relations died by the tens of thousands. At first the steel sides and bulkheads of the new whaling ships deterred him, but he learned to swim furiously around these abominations, creating artificial maelstroms that capsized the ships and sucked them down.

Tail thrashing, pectoral fins churning, he begins the day’s journey. The albatross is not his only passenger. Caught in a mesh of harpoon lines, a one-legged madman is lashed to the leviathan’s left flank. Call him Abraxis. Impressively, he has assimilated Mocha’s longevity and mastered the leviathan’s techniques for storing and conserving oxygen. Together the interconnected aquatic mammals patrol the world’s oceans, not quite friends but no longer enemies.

It has taken decades for Captain Abraxis to reach a rapprochement with the universe. What mellowed him was his encounters with other obsessive whaling masters. There was Captain Bartlett, for example, who had periodically suspended the mission of the Narragansett to chase Crimson Jack, the great red squid who’d bitten off his right hand. And there was Captain Eliphaz of the Wampanoag, who regularly deferred his economic obligations to pursue Queen Proserpine, the immense moray eel who’d deprived him of his left foot. Abraxis detested his fellow amputees, not only because they were probably leading their crews to pointless deaths but also because killing sentient aquatic animals now seemed to him an obscene thing for people to be doing with their time.

Thus it happened that, throughout the twentieth century, Mocha prosecuted his reign of terror with the blessing of his former ivory-legged nemesis. The sailors always died, of course, drowned like rats, smashed by the leviathan’s flukes, or devoured by his entourage of sharks. Mocha’s power gave him pleasure. Did God, too, enjoy his forays into slaughter—the Great Flood, the torching of Sodom, the Ten Plagues? Mocha couldn’t say. When it came to theological matters, he was out of his depth.

Though not a sociable person, Abraxis would occasionally strike up a conversation with the captain of a passing ship—but only if the man’s commission was innocuous: piloting a vacation cruise, retrieving a sunken treasure, gathering scientific data. Invariably the captain would offer to cut him loose from the sea beast. Abraxis always demurred.

“This is my penance,” he would explain.

From these nautical tête-à-têtes Abraxis learned of a menace even more terrible than the whaling industry. Early in the twentieth century, Homo sapiens had been conquered by Combustioni internis, a race of mechanized parasites called autos, boasting astonishing variety within the species. Most probably these invaders had come from another planet, but conceivably they’d sprung from gaps in Earth’s crust or perhaps from a dimension beyond human ken. The parasites survived by devouring great quantities of refined petroleum and excreting the residue as nasty vapors, a cycle that was rapidly turning Earth into a toxic greenhouse. Day after day, the carbonized ordure dissolved the planet’s coral reefs, acidified its seas, and sterilized its coastal wetlands.

Upon learning about Combustioni internis, Mocha shifted focus, targeting the vessels that ferried the saabs, volvos, teslas, volkswagens, ferraris, and chevrolets from one continent to the next. The Charybdis technique he’d perfected for sinking steel-hulled whaling ships worked well for these new enemies. By circumscribing the Marseille Mermaid, the Charleston Selkie, the Stockholm Jormungand, and the Hamburg Kraken with a ferocious whirlpool, Mocha had sent them to the bottom along with their unholy cargos.

“Thy death is immutably decreed, Daikaiju!” he cries aloud, reaching a speed of fifteen knots. “Ye shall not escape, O pernicious autos! Prepare ye to sleep amongst the anemones!”

Built by human minions in thrall to Combustioni internis, the first auto carriers were clumsy and inefficient. Their cargo holds could be filled and emptied only via a crane that lowered and retrieved the parasites one by one through a hatch in the main deck. But eventually the lift-on, lift-off procedure was superseded by the roll-on, roll-off technique permitted by a generation of freighters resembling gigantic seagoing dumpsters, the hull of each such vessel boasting stern gates leading to the cargo hold.

The leviathan detested these behemoths, for they often proved immune to even the strongest Mocha-made maelstrom. On those few occasions when he’d capsized and sunk a roll-on, roll-off carrier, nearly six thousand autos had perished at a stroke, but usually his engagements with the dumpsters proved futile.

Mocha and Abraxis have devised an ingenious strategy for sinking the Orochi Daikaiju—pride of the fleet owned and operated by the Amalgamated Shipping Corporation—and thus eliminating its Combustioni internis parasites. Explosives are involved. Sailing under the flag of Panama, the master of the Daikaiju foolishly believes he’ll have no trouble bearing his 1,700 toyotas, 1,850 subarus, and 2,050 hondas through the Canal and thence to the port of New York.

“O abominable Daikaiju, I shall chase thee o’er the Guatemala Basin and o’er the Cocos Ridge and ’round Perdition’s flames until I see thee turn keel up and descend into the Devil’s deepest trench!”

The Chase—Second Day

Mocha swims through the night. Occasionally he breaches and surveys the South Pacific constellations. His vision is bifurcated, a split-level way of being in the world. Using first his right eye, then its nonconverging mate, he observes the celestial Sea Serpent of Vanuatu, the heavenly Octopus of Taumotu, and the Oyster of Santiago with her thousand bright pearls that are also stars.

Mocha had passed the previous month tooling around the British Isles, sucking up unexploded depth charges from the North Atlantic battles of World War II. A dozen aquatic bombs lie in the largest of the leviathan’s four stomachs, waiting to be spat out. The weapons rattle against each other, a din that distresses the hitchhiking albatross, though she is not about to complain.

The plan is simple. If the leviathan can sustain his present speed, he will catch the Daikaiju long before it sights the coast of Panama with its ingenious canal. Somewhere above Isla del Coco, three hundred and forty miles southwest of Costa Rica, Mocha will blow the floating dumpster out of the water.

In the late afternoon he swims past Española, southernmost of the Galápagos Islands, and encounters a cruise ship, the Alfred Russel Wallace out of Guayaquil. A stately human female, dressed smartly in a white jacket with gold piping, presents herself to Abraxis as Captain Juanita Ruíz and explains that the Wallace is a chartered touring vessel carrying fifty-two “climate policy influencers.” These passengers have just finished exploring the archipelago from whose volcanic soil had sprung the theory of evolution by natural selection.

“Shall we untie you from that whale?” asks Captain Ruíz.

“I would prefer you didn’t,” says Abraxis.

Bronzed by the sun, a young man appears and introduces himself as Denis Chao, one of the climate policy influencers. Captain Ruíz and Mr. Chao listen respectfully to Abraxis’s story. As he reveals the nature of the leviathan’s mission, their facial expressions shift from fascination to delight to incredulity to anger.

“I would beg you to spare the Daikaiju,” says Ruíz, “but not because I doubt the earth is imperiled. For centuries these islands have been assaulted by a cruel weather pattern, El Niño, so savage it heats up the Humboldt Current, and climate change is causing the phenomenon to increase in violence and frequency. When El Niño is at its peak, the fish population here drops off sharply, and the specter of famine haunts the mammals and birds that survive on sardines. Our malnourished sea lions can no longer nurse their pups. Our starving flightless cormorants die in their nests. Our blue-footed boobies stop laying eggs.”

“Global warming also accelerates the spread of invasive species—on Galápagos and everywhere else,” says Chao. “These days fire ants plague the archipelago. They eat the eggs of the giant tortoises and mercilessly attack the adults.”

“Few sights are more wrenching than a tortoise shambling across the beaches of Española, dropping her eggs while trying to escape the ants chewing on her legs,” says Ruíz.

“Despite these horrors, our trip to Galápagos has energized me and my fellow influencers,” says Chao. “Our future podcasts, blog posts, marches, protests, and lobbying efforts will have us celebrating the mind-boggling fact that all humans, animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria are bound together in a tapestry of shared chemistry and common ancestry.”

“Mind-boggling to you, but not to most people,” says Abraxis scornfully.

“And once everybody takes Darwin’s revelation to heart, they will see they have no right to defile the tapestry,” Chao persists. “Instead, all nations will come together and cleanse the biosphere of greenhouse gases.”

“Oh, give me a break,” mutters Bronwyn.

“Fish fingers,” says Abraxis.

“I beg you to reconsider your mission,” says Ruíz. “The officers and crew of the Daikaiju are innocent.”

“The hunt must go on,” says Abraxis.

Mocha punctuates the madman’s assertion by releasing a geyser of seawater from his blowhole. Captain Ruíz and Mr. Chao become saturated, an experience they do not appreciate.

“Prey on the autos if you must, but not the sailors!” shouts Ruíz, shedding salt water.

“Better a sacrificed crew than a sacrificial planet!” declares Abraxis as Mocha bears him away from Española. “But hear my promise! In due course the whale and I shall discuss the moral ambiguities of our mission and act accordingly!”

The leviathan accelerates, soon reaching thirty knots. He skirts Isla de San Cristóbal and cuts across the goose-egg latitude, pausing to bite into the equator and gulp down a dinner of shrimp.

As dusk descends, the usual retinue of sharks arrives, a dozen ancient and rapacious fish bent on exploiting Mocha’s modus operandi for their own benefit. They will follow him into the thick of the battle, the better to claim the meaty spoils of naval warfare.

Mocha sends Bronwyn on a scouting assignment. She returns with heartening news. The Orochi Daikaiju is exactly where they expected to find it, ten nautical miles west of Isla del Coco.

The leviathan plunges ahead. Shortly after moonrise he spots the boulevard of foam formed by the Daikaiju’s screws and keel. Bathed in lunar radiance, bubbles and spindrift dance on the waves.

“You promised Ruiz we would discuss the moral ambiguities of our mission,” says the madman.

“And indeed we shall—after we have accomplished it.”

The Chase—Third Day

The burning sun ornaments the tropical sky with streamers of red and gold. Mocha maintains his frenzied pace. Soon his left eye discloses Isla del Coco and its adjacent formations, arrayed across the horizon like teeth jutting from a tyrannosaur’s jawbone.

At noon Mocha reaches 6ºN, 87ºW along with the sharks, the perching albatross, and the attached Abraxis. A soft but steady rain mutes the sky and veils the sea.

“It’s near,” whispers the leviathan. “It’s very near.”

Now the misty curtains part, and the behemoth appears, all 62,200 tons of it, churning through the ocean like a sarcophagus built to inter an entire Egyptian dynasty.

“To the last I grapple with thee,” mutters Mocha.

The leviathan is dismayed, but not surprised, to behold two corporate cutters, the Privateer and the Expedient, escorting the Daikaiju. Abraxis reports that each vessel is armed with 76-mm guns and short-range missiles. Apparently the stockholders of Amalgamated Shipping, acting at the behest of Combustioni internis, have plotted to assassinate the Albino Avenger before he can create his signature maelstrom.

Taking a deep breath, Mocha forms a psychic bond with his largest stomach. A depth charge travels up his esophagus and comes to rest on his great trampoline of a tongue. He races toward the nearer escort, the Privateer, and vomits forth the canister. The projectile flies true, striking the hull amidships and detonating. Soon the cutter is listing to starboard and going down fast. Her sailors abandon ship, a stratagem of which the sharks approve.

Heady with success, Mocha summons another depth charge to his tongue, then takes aim at the Expedient. He spits out the canister. It strikes the prow, blowing open a hole with the diameter of an oil drum. Terrified sailors leap overboard. Minutes later the cutter sinks toward the Cocos Ridge, even as the sharks fall upon the human jetsam.

Better a sacrificed crew than a sacrificial planet. Mocha admires Abraxis’s motto, even though it evokes the vile chant, “a dead whale or a stove boat.”

The leviathan summons the balance of his arsenal to his throat. Perhaps these remaining charges will secure a final victory, perhaps not—he will soon find out. The behemoth’s prow and sides are formed of interlocking steel plates, each ten centimeters thick, so Mocha decides to attack from the rear. With any luck, he will shatter the enormous stern gates through which the autos enter and exit the hold.

The leviathan cruises along the behemoth’s starboard flank, passes the rudder, and turns 180 degrees. He fantails forward, spewing explosives.

“From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!”

The charges arc gracefully through the air, strike the stern, and detonate, blowing the gates off their hinges. Tons of seawater rush into the breach.

“For hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!”

Mocha peers into the cavity, admiring what his strategy has wrought. But something strange is happening. Evidently Amalgamated Shipping realized that if the cutters failed to stop the Albino Avenger, the Daikaiju might go down, so they took measures to protect the Combustioni internis specimens. Frantically the sailors detach the autos’ stabilizing chains and inflate the powered pontoons affixed to their undercarriages. One by one, the parasites cruise free of the carrier, crashing through the waves under the impetus of outboard motors. The radio-controlled rudders send the autos on a southerly course toward Isla del Coco. Soon a flotilla spreads outward from 6ºN, 87ºW, as far as a whale’s eye can see, thousands of subarus, toyotas, and hondas bearing down on the island at fifteen knots like an immense amphibious landing force.

The Daikaiju slides beneath the sea. The sharks feast on the helpless crew. Screams shatter the air. The waves turn pink. The carrier’s death seems to Mocha a hollow victory, for the parasites are escaping in droves. Soon they will be on the beach and overrunning the island, safely beyond Mocha’s fury. Instead of succumbing to despair, he sounds and breaches, sounds and breaches, sounds and breaches, each time crashing down on the flotilla and sinking at least a dozen autos—but it’s obvious the majority will survive.

The leviathan refuses to abandon hope. “Know this, friends,” he tells Abraxis and Bronwyn. “A sacred solidarity obtains among sea monsters—at least when our bellies are full. Even as I speak, this ancient fellowship bears down on the autos.”

First Crimson Jack, paragon of cephalopods, appears on the scene, a prodigious gloopy mass, suckered tentacles wriggling in preternatural sine waves. Reaching the flotilla, he flogs the autos, lacerating their pontoons. Now a forty-foot moray eel arrives, the legendary Queen Proserpine. She closes on the autos and chews their pontoons to pieces with her pigeon spike teeth. In the space of an hour, all of the Daikaiju’s cargo has disappeared.

The monsters trade glances of mutual respect and instinctual suspicion. Under different circumstances, they would be maneuvering to eat one another, but today they are allies.

“This was a good fight,” says Crimson Jack.

“Worthy of its own constellation,” says Queen Proserpine.

“We are grateful to ye,” says Mocha.

“The earth is grateful,” squawks Bronwyn.

“A malign and inscrutable Providence is grateful,” wheezes Abraxis.

The leviathan swims away at twenty knots, the albatross soaring above him, the madman still fastened to his flank. By moonrise Mocha will have fallen asleep. His nightmares will find him harpooning himself in successive acts of atonement. When he awakens, his cetacean skin will collect the rising sun, while that same star burns away his remorse, and his cranium swells with pride and spermaceti. Once again he has joined the side of the giant tortoises, sea lions, flightless cormorants, and blue-footed boobies.

“The battle is won,” he tells the madman. “But the war goes on.”

“Next time we’ll arrange to have more huge cephalopods and immense eels on hand,” says Abraxis.

By Mocha’s lights, the madman’s words are at once prescient and wise. Marine gigantism is the hope of the future. Tentacles will in time save the world. You can never have too many squid.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

James Morrow has been writing speculative fiction ever since, at age seven, he dictated “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. Over the years, his efforts have earned him two World Fantasy Awards, two Nebula Awards, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. The New York Times Book Review has called Morrow “a wildly imaginative and generous novelist who plays hilarious games with grand ideas.” He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two extraterrestrials masquerading as border collies.

“Moby Dick, Ecoterrorist,” © James Morrow, 2019.

Get 25% off for 1 year

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Every July, we bring you four great, free, Sunday Morning short stories! This is our fifth year of a whole month of free goodness from The Sunday Morning Transport — by Aliette de Bodard, Marissa Lingen, James R. Morrow, and Zoe Bellerive. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

Bringing out great short fiction each Sunday is a lot of work and we have a fantastic team to thank for it, including Co-Editors Julian Yap and Fran Wilde, Copy Editor Kaitlin Severini, Proofreader Christine Ma, Devin Singer on socials, and our amazing supporters — that’s YOU. We are so glad to have you here.

If you’re just joining us, or if you are a free reader, we hope you’ll love the free month of fiction we have in store, and that you will consider supporting us as a paid subscriber. We very much need your support to keep rolling!

This month, we’ve got an annual membership drive of epic proportions for you — so if you haven’t already, please consider signing up, and if you are signed up, please share this link with your friends.

For July’s second, free to read and share, story, Marissa Lingen brings us a new kind of dream job. ~ Julian and Fran, July 12, 2026

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The Seed of a New Dream

by Marissa Lingen

I wasn’t stupid. I knew they wouldn’t like me right away.

Fitting into a tightly knit group of co-workers is always tricky. When they’ve been together since day one, even more so; when you’re the outsider from the corporate world brought into the nonprofit sphere, well . . . I just hoped they would be mature enough professionals not to hide the stapler, refuse to tell me the wireless password, or steal my lunch.

And they were. Everyone was impeccably polite at all times. Kelsey, Rodri, Anibal, and Lise: the times they undermined me in meetings were entirely sincere, not pointless jabs. They really weren’t sure that someone like me, someone who had used my skill as a dream-planter to sell snack food, could understand what it took to turn my talents to good for their clean water nonprofit.

That was okay. I wouldn’t trust me, either. I didn’t; that was why I had quit my corporate job in the first place. Looking in the mirror and knowing that I couldn’t trust myself had gotten to be a problem that therapy and sleep-smoothing could no longer solve. I knew I had to change my life, and this was me changing it. It would take time. I’d have to prove myself to everyone, including me. I was ready.

I thought.

But three months in, Anibal was still saying, “I’m just not sure you understand what we’re trying to do here, Xandra. This latest dream storyboard . . . it feels more like it’s going to get them to buy a package at a water park than volunteer for our cleanup days. Do you get what I’m saying?”

“I do get what you’re saying, but I think you’re wrong,” I said. “Part of the reason the board hired me is that your dreams were, frankly, forgettable.” Anibal stiffened, and Kelsey let out an offended squeak.

“But if we give people something memorable but not on-mission . . .” Lise had a tendency to let all her sentences trail off as though there was a question coming, or as though we could all fill in the rest. In this case we could.

I sighed. “Isn’t this why we have focus groups? Let’s test my proposed dream seed. See whether the focus group picks up on the river cleanup action item.”

“We can’t focus-group every half-assed idea you have, Xandra,” said Kelsey, but this one wasn’t half-assed, and she knew it. The focus group was the right answer to the group’s disagreement about direction.

I’d worked with them before in my days with corporate. Even when you have a target market for a breakfast cereal, it’s hard to get a truly representative focus group; how much worse for a clean water action group, whose goal is to reach every possible person. But they pulled in as wide a range of ages, genders, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds as they could. I had no complaints about that. The board was supporting me, and my co-workers might not believe in my work, but their sincerity meant that they expected a focus group would show that I was going the wrong way.

The focus group was the usual mix of tentative/polite, random/incoherent, and downright cranky. They all seemed to have gotten the river cleanup message, which made me smug and Kelsey sour. But there was something flat about all the responses, something uninspired. Something lacking. Everyone else was busy being miffed that my design had done so well that they didn’t catch the problem. I was convinced we could do better.

One interview haunted me, a twenty-two-year-old nursing student. When I watched the feed of her discussion, her eyes kept wandering up and away, like she was counting every item on her massive, overwhelming to-do list even as she was talking about dreaming of a clean-flowing river, of deep personal satisfaction. How could I give her that dream, and not give her any joy from it? What was I doing wrong? What could I do to never, ever hear someone say “personal satisfaction” in a flat monotone again?

I didn’t sleep well that night. I woke up sweaty and tangled in the sheets. I remembered a few flashes of my own dreams—if I started the day with a bowl of Healthy Bran Loops, that would get me settled—ugh, a commercial dream-plant. Well, it was homemade toast with raspberry jam for me, thanks. But the rest of my dreams were—a ship on a stormy sea? And my old co-worker Olaf riding a unicycle? That was barely any better than the Healthy Bran Loops. As a professional in the field I knew that most of the meaning in people’s dreams was what they assigned to them, but this kind of assignment was above even my pay grade.

I could have used a little clearer direction from the old subconscious. Inspiration would have been useful. I’d take perspiration if I had to. I sweated out three new variations to make my dream-plant sing more, make it more vivid and real. No one else seemed to care about the differences, since they resented my presence on the project in the first place. Undaunted, I tried to get their input anyway.

“Do you ever try any of our dreams, or are you dreaming natural?” I asked Rodri as he pondered tea bags.

He reared back, glaring at me like I’d grabbed him. “That’s extremely personal, Xandra.”

I blinked. “And yet relevant to our work.”

“I guess.” He finished making his tea. I had never seen someone stir in honey so angrily. He left the break room without answering my question. I stared after him. How was I supposed to find my way to making this project work if I wasn’t working with anybody? Dream-planting was not a one-person job.

I fidgeted with some of the parameters in my design, but I couldn’t fool myself that I was actually working toward something. I was stuck in the almost-right, the nearly-there. With conflicting data from the focus group and no one willing to talk it through with me, the best I could do was fiddle around in hope that something would jump out at me.

It didn’t work. I finished the day frustrated. At least there was the weekend, and my old co-worker Olaf had asked me to try a new wine bar with him. He had always been the best of the corporate crew, wry and funny and ready to turn the conversation away from shoptalk when one or both of us had had too much.

“Ready to rejoin the rat race?” he greeted me, and then grimaced at my reaction. “Ouch, I meant that to be a joke. The nonprofit sphere isn’t all petting puppies and saving the world, huh?”

I slung my jacket over the back of my chair and accepted his pour of a local rosé. “If I could see that I was doing either of those, the rest wouldn’t be so bad. It’s just . . . ugh. My co-workers did not start out ready to see my considerable charms—”

“You? Not charming? Inconceivable.”

I flapped at him to shut him up, this was serious. “And it has not really improved yet. Which would be okay if the work was going well. But it’s all kind of . . . flat. Getting where we want to go, but—” It was my turn to grimace; I took a sip of my wine to cover it.

Olaf was not fooled. “I thought you were going to get your sparkle back in this new job.”

“So did I!” I slumped in my chair. “I don’t know what’s wrong. The focus groups are all testing . . . fine, I guess.”

“And you were never one to settle for fine, I guess. Not even when you were selling a new shape of pretzels.”

“This is important, Olaf.”

He handed me the menu, which had a selection of tapas that would probably all taste . . . fine, I guess. “I know it’s important to you, Xan. I also know that it’s exactly what you were saying when we worked together, and I didn’t manage to fix it then, either, so . . . pick out some bites and I’ll catch you up on The Deathy Deathy Doom Show, because I know you didn’t watch it yourself.”

I groaned. “There’s a reason I didn’t.” But at least eating an uninspired flatbread and gently poking fun at Olaf’s favorite show took my mind off work for a few hours.

Only a few, though. It kept nagging at me: the flatness, the disconnection. This was exactly what I’d left the corporate sector to avoid, and here it was again. I went over and over the water, the laughter, everything I’d seeded in the dream, trying to make it as warm and welcoming as possible. But I was still packaging up a dream for them instead of letting them dream their own. And maybe . . . maybe the problem wasn’t just who was dictating dreams to people. Maybe it was doing it at all.

Which was not a great thought to have, since it was my main marketable skill.

But the more I listened to the responses of the next focus group, the more familiar it sounded. These people’s dreams were small, stifled. They were being stifled in the direction we said we wanted, dutiful answers about river cleanup—but it still left me faintly nauseated, not wanting to meet their eyes.

I tried to find out if any co-workers had experienced any similar doubts, but Kelsey had had it with me. “If you don’t believe in our mission, Xandra, maybe it’s time you go back to peddling potato chips.”

I flushed, and Anibal said, “Kels. Take it down a notch.”

“Well, she can’t stop trying to tell us how to run our outreach!”

“I’m trying to—” I stopped. I couldn’t honestly say I was trying to do my job. I was wondering if anyone should do my job, which was . . . by definition sort of the opposite of doing my job. But I still wanted to do what I considered the more important job: the outreach itself. In some form. Whatever worked.

They hadn’t hired me to do “whatever worked,” though. They’d hired a dream-planter. I had been going forward with the grim determination that it didn’t matter if all my co-workers resented me as long as I was the best dream-planter they could get. But if dream-planting was the wrong way to accomplish our mission, I couldn’t actually guarantee that. Could I really tell them to go back to email outreach and posters? Halfway through the twenty-first century, was that truly the best I could do for a cause I believed in?

I had another hybrid dream the next night: I was trying to find something in the apartment building I’d grown up in. Each unit had been repainted plain white and refurnished with gray furniture. They gleamed with shiny fixtures, and everything was new. “This is exactly how I remember it,” I said in my best friend’s kitchen, “and totally different.”

My childhood best friend’s father smiled at me, the same clunky fashion glasses he’d had back then, the same thinning hair that was now completely gone. I yearned for one of his goofy jokes, or maybe warm wisdom from my subconscious. He said, “Booking vacations myself used to be such a hassle, remember?” I hummed agreement. “We never really went anywhere. Now we have great trips, and I feel like it’s a friend helping me. Thank goodness we found such a wonderful booking service.”

I woke up feeling cheap and disgusted, with the urge to have a beach vacation as soon as possible. Instead I sat down and wrote my resignation letter.

Our boss was out for the day, so Lise was the one I handed it to. Which meant that I got a very predictable “So now you’re going to . . .”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t have a plan. But I can’t do dream-planting anymore. I’ll”—I shrugged—“go back to school, probably. Find some other way to do the same things. A better way.”

She made a little disgusted face. “I always thought you’d return to the corporate world.”

“Well, you thought wrong.”

“I don’t understand.”

I shook my head. “Release the dreams I wrote for you if you want to. I don’t think you’re going to find better. I just . . . don’t really believe in dream-planting anymore. I need to get out of people’s heads. I need to get out of my own head.”

“I wish you the best,” she said sadly, and I could see she believed she meant it. There was whispering behind me as I packed up my few possessions and left the office.

I was telling the truth: I didn’t have a plan. I was almost certainly too late to apply for the next semester, so I’d need to find some kind of work in the interval. Like most people, I didn’t have vast riches to live on just because I’d walked out of a job. I was sure most of my family and friends would think I was a fool, probably try to talk me into getting one of my old jobs back—the better-paying one, no doubt.

In the meantime, I did have one thing I wanted to do. I convinced Olaf to come with me, and we showed up bright and early on river cleanup day. I was up to my knees in muck, pulling tattered plastic out of my net, when I came upon my old team.

“I can’t believe you’d show your face at this,” said Kelsey. Anibal put a hand on her arm, which made me want to laugh—it’s not like we were on the verge of throwing down; it was just a snarky remark.

“I told you when I left, I believe in the project,” I said patiently. “I just don’t believe in the tools you were using for it anymore.”

Kelsey rolled her eyes and said, “You would say that.”

“Yeah. I would say that if that’s what I believe, Kelsey,” I said, and turned back to my assigned work group. Kelsey was saying something behind me, but Anibal was also saying, “Just let it go, Kels. She’s not worth it.”

I couldn’t say it didn’t sting. We were supposed to be on the same team—working in the sunlight, on the river, everybody with the same goal. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to be, everyone putting aside their differences for a common goal, for the good of the community or the river or both? But our differences were bigger than that—or maybe they weren’t. Kelsey was moving along—if not letting it go, not letting it stop her from working on the cleanup project, and neither was I.

And there were lots of other projects that weren’t this one, and maybe next time I’d just go find one of them. And keep trying until something fit. Was it a dream? It was a plan of sorts, which might have been worse or might have been better, but for the moment it would do.

“The absolute worst part of other people’s autonomy is that they keep using it,” I told Olaf, yanking the biodegradable mesh into place.

“Leave it, Xan,” said Olaf softly.

I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t be making it your problem.” That much, if nothing else, I knew was true. And it was a sunny day, and the river was not perfect, not going to be perfect, but better than when we’d started. That much we could all try to dream our own dreams about.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer who lives in the Minneapolis suburbs with her family. She is the author of over three hundred works of short science fiction and fantasy and has no intention of stopping any time soon. She also writes essays, poetry, and whatever comes to her next. Her debut novella, A Dubious Clamor, is coming in September 2026 from Horned Lark Press.

“The Seed of a New Dream,” © Marissa Lingen, 2026.

Get 25% off for 1 year

Get 25% off for 1 year

Every July, we bring you four great, free, Sunday Morning short stories! This is our fifth year of a whole month of free goodness from The Sunday Morning Transport — by Aliette de Bodard, Marissa Lingen, James R. Morrow, and Zoe Bellerive. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

Bringing out great short fiction each Sunday is a lot of work and we have a fantastic team to thank for it, including Co-Editors Julian Yap and Fran Wilde, Copy Editor Kaitlin Severini, Proofreader Christine Ma, Devin Singer on socials, and our amazing supporters — that’s YOU. We are so glad to have you here.

If you’re just joining us, or if you are a free reader, we hope you’ll love the free month of fiction we have in store, and that you will consider supporting us as a paid subscriber. We very much need your support to keep rolling!

This month, we’ve got an annual membership drive of epic proportions for you — so if you haven’t already, please consider signing up, and if you are signed up, please share this link with your friends.

For July’s First, free to read and share, story, a Xuya story from Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya makes its online debut. ~ Julian and Fran, July 5, 2026

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A Game of Three Generals

by Aliette de Bodard

Every day is the same: Song Ha gets down to the refectory and spoons rice porridge into her mouth, feeling the salty taste of fish sauce against her palate—there used to be something subtly wrong with it, wasn’t there? But now it’s a familiar beat like a syllable in a poem—a daily counting out—she’s not sure exactly what, but it’s important that she doesn’t lose count.

There are no windows in the refectory, but the facility’s Mind does her best, showing holographic displays of outside, a deserted land of lava and molten metal, with brightly colored threads showing the atmosphere leaking away bit by bit, the heavier atoms of carbon and oxygen carried away by the hydrogen flow, a continuous rush that is reassuring, almost hypnotic in its constancy. Not that any of it matters. Song Ha will be long gone by the time Nen Lo Suoi Gia becomes a scoured, compact dead rock.

After breakfast, Song Ha plays chess: a single game against the Mind—Song Ha always struggles to remember the Mind’s name, but it always comes back to her, an instant before the Mind’s chariot takes her general after blocking her in a pincer move between a horse and a cannon. Triple check, and why does she never see it coming?

Instead, Song Ha remembers—for a brief, elating moment—that the Mind is called The Color of Water and Smoke, that it’s a reference to one of Uc Trai’s poems from Old Earth, except that the verses themselves always seem to hover just outside her reach.

When the chess game is done, Song Ha moves, to sit in the refectory again, staring at the displays—landscapes the color of fire dancing in front of her eyes, and in the distance, the mining encampment where the scientists and the engineers work to mine ore from the surface of Nen Lo Suoi Gia, sending it back to the numbered planets of the Empire. She knows something is wrong with the encampment, too. When her thoughts linger on it for too long, there’s a feeling, as though someone were clenching a fist of ice around her innards—fear and grief and anger, but it never remains for long.

She’s never too sure where the rest of the day goes.

#

Song Ha only ever plays chess with The Color of Water and Smoke—she’s sure she used to talk with the Mind, in the past, but her meager store of words seems to have been exhausted a long time ago.

Once, there was another Mind, one she gave birth to. Once . . . if Song Ha closes her eyes, she can still feel the prickle of the anesthetic needle going into her spine, the pain that seemed to wring her dry with every beat, the breath she was trying to draw that never came. She can look down at her hands and see them red with blood, holding something that bristles with flesh protuberances and optics and cables—and then the scene shifts: nothing moves, but she knows the thing she’s holding is her newborn daughter. She cradles her in her arms, singing a lullaby as she carries her to the cradle of the mindship: she lays her down among the sockets and wires, watching the ship slowly come to life, the featureless walls replaced by blurred starscapes, and the voice of the newly born ship echoing in the vast room, haltingly babbling the words of Song Ha’s lullaby back at her.

The mindship’s name won’t come. Song Ha stares at herself in the mirror, dark-skinned, dark-haired, impossibly young—and, as the image shifts and becomes older, weariness etched on every line of a stranger’s face, she knows.

The Three-Drop Piety—not the name she wanted to call her, but the birth-master was adamant, and it was the name that was recorded on the imperial rolls.

Mother, the ship whispers, in her memory. Come with me.

They wouldn’t let her, of course. Still seventeen years left on her sentence, after the ship was grown and ready to travel through space, linking the numbered planets together—not the years of Nen Lo Suoi Gia, the quick rotations that don’t take much of a handful of days, not even the few short months that make up the years on the orbitals around the hot, inhabitable solidity of the Fifty-Seventh Planet—but the years of the First Planet where the Keeper of the Peace Empress sits on the Dragon Throne; of Old Earth, endless and always renewed.

They . . . they barely let the ship go, as it was—arguments, endless, about whether her three-generation crime of rebellion against the state should apply to a child still in the mother’s womb at the time of sentencing. Papers and memorials she saw pass as though in a daze, the beats of a world that had ceased to mean much of anything to her.

Mother.

Song Ha sits up from a daze. The room is silent, the ambient light tuned to evening. She stares at her hands—the hands of an old woman, wrinkled and spotted—bots crawling at her wrists, their touch the prickle of needles and chemicals, the hazy euphoria of sedatives dissolving her thoughts. And, before everything withers and fades away, she listens, straining to hear a voice that isn’t here anymore.

#

Something is wrong with the chessboard.

The same configuration—the pieces scattered on either side, the chariot and the cannon moving into place; the horse moving, zigzagging, leaping over pieces—for a moment, it seems to writhe and become alive.

Nothing is wrong.

Mother.

Things keep shifting, changing; moving just at the corner of her eyes. The board reconfigures itself. The game flows past her, toward that checkmate she can never see, never anticipate.

And then she sees: there are three generals on the board.

No.

Song Ha looks up from the board, startled, not caring about the move she’s going to make, the same move she always makes. The holographic screens show the same entrancing flow of atoms in the dwindling atmosphere, the mining camp crushed beneath the gigantic orb of the too-close sun, the molten lava with only a few glistening islands of solid metal—and then, for a bare moment, everything flickers out of sight, and she sees beneath them; not the illusion the facility’s Mind maintains for her, but the unadorned walls of the facility: the rusted metal, the paint running down like old, tired blood from a diseased organ.

How long has she been here?

“They left,” she says aloud. “They all left.”

“Ssh. You worry too much. You’re safe here,” the facility’s Mind says. She hears the clink of pieces moving, locking themselves into place; feels the touch of needles, the pleasant, numbing cold at her wrists. “Checkmate.”

And Song Ha looks down at the board again, and remembers Uc Trai; remembers that the Mind’s name is The Color of Water and Smoke; even has an inkling of the verses that led to this, the elusive literary reference she can never catch.

And the day goes on, as it always does.

#

Song Ha dreams, that night.

She’s walking in the facility, wearing the gray, drab robes of prisoners—the same ones she wears now—toward the refectory, except that it’s not empty anymore. All the tables are full. Here is Linh, nervously playing with the strands of her long hair; Khanh Giao, lost in silent contemplation of her bowl, as if she could dredge up enlightenment from the depths of boiled rice; Duc Duy, writing something on a piece of paper, his young face alight with an enthusiasm they lost a long time ago. And the same anger and grief rises up within her, as their outlines waver and shift—nothing to stop it now, it’s so strong it feels like it’s compressing her, as if it could make her into emotionless, hard stone.

They . . . they used to be here. Where have they gone?

Mother.

It’s just a voice. It’s just an illusion. The dream will go away, come morning. She will get up and eat her breakfast, the taste of the sauce sharp against her palate—but she remembers, when she first came to Nen Lo Suoi Gia, how odd it tasted, because it’s not fish sauce, not made from anchovies fermented under starlight, but a processed, cheaper ersatz; what they give to political prisoners, because why waste money on the condemned?

She will get up, and play chess.

But, in the dream, when Song Ha sits at her table, the bowl of rice is gone. Instead is a math problem, the kind she used to solve all the time, when she was still practicing for the engineering exams that saw her promoted to Grand Master of Weapons—before her disgrace, before she refused to build warships to devastate the rebel habitats; before they arrested her and sent her there.

The problem doesn’t even bother to state the goal: there is only one variable worth solving for, though perhaps the solution might not be unique. It doesn’t look as though there are nearly enough equations to define uniqueness; but when she tries to substitute in the first of them, she finds that she has not one, but two equalities—and that they keep on getting longer and longer, with more complex symbols the further she goes.

No, they’re not equations. They’re characters. They’re a story—facts laid out drily for her to dissect, things she’s kept at bay for—for how long?

Nguyen Thi Boi Linh. Vo Thi Khanh Giao. Pham Van Duc Duy.

The Sixteenth Day of the Second Month, in the Fifty-Third Minute of the Bi-Hour of the Snake, in the Seventy-Third Year of the rule of the Keeper of the Peace Empress (by Compensated Imperial Reckoning).

Vehicle failure.

Extensive burns, going deep under the skin into the muscles and tendons, and charring the bones from the outside in. Air turning to fire in their lungs—the bodies went up in flames when the temperature rose . . .

Song Ha wakes up, gasping. The characters are still in her thoughts—filling gaps, pushing away the fog of sedatives—things twisting and turning until she’s on her knees on the floor, hardly daring to breathe. Bots crawl out of the ceiling and bedstead, cover her arms like black tar; but she bats them away, waving her arms and screaming until they lie in broken heaps of electronics on the floor.

They didn’t leave, the others. They died.

#

In the refectory, the same bowl of porridge is laid out, and the chessboard is on the same table, laid out at the beginning of a game—The Color of Water and Smoke always lays it out the same way, with the same opening, the right flank chariot moving forward, toward the distant palace where the general and his advisors sit.

There is something else, too; something hovering beneath the layers of holographic deception: the blurred but distinctive shape of a mindship, trying to connect in whichever way she can. How long has she been in orbit, desperately sending message after message?

Mother.

Song Ha moves, not toward the bowl, but toward the board. “Tell me,” she says, aloud.

This high into living quarters, The Color of Water and Smoke is not corporeal. Her body lies deep within the facility, keeping up the thermal shields and the other protections that make the station viable. All Song Ha can see is another hologram: the facility in miniature, its wings flaring like those on the cap of a magistrate, the doors tightly shut, the outside walls gray and featureless.

“I’ve kept you safe,” The Color of Water and Smoke says.

Twenty years. Her sentence was twenty-four years, and she’s an old woman now. That time has elapsed twice over, if not more—who knows if there are rejuv treatments? She can’t tell, not anymore.

But she can tell one thing. She can stand by the holograms and look at the mining camp, and know that it is deserted. She can remember—the other prisoners piling up in a vehicle, going to work in the mines to earn money and favors for after their release. Song Ha remained behind, of course: her sentence was so long she didn’t believe she would ever need either of these. She . . . she read a book on chess, one that The Color of Water and Smoke had obtained for her from the meager library in the facility.

She can remember that slow, agonizing moment when the thermal shields failed: not in a single go, but slowly, slowly enough that she heard them scream when the heat of Nen Lo Suoi Gia baked them alive inside their suits.

Even months afterward, she’d wake up and hear the screams, tearing at her from the inside; would sit in her bed, choking, trying to forget that it had ever happened, that she’d ever witnessed it.

“They’re dead.” She can’t keep her voice steady. Linh and Khanh Giao and Duc Duy, and the facility, she now knows, is completely deserted. No, not the facility, the planet. They evacuated the mining encampment after the . . . accident, but the Mind wouldn’t let her leave.

The Color of Water and Smoke says nothing for a while. At last she says, and her voice is a thin thread of sound, “I couldn’t keep them safe.”

They were out of the Mind’s zone of influence when this happened, and the vehicle they were driven in belonged to the mining encampment. Song Ha wants to say it’s not the Mind’s fault; but it’s the Mind who kept her here, long past when she should have left. It’s the Mind that prevented the engineers from entering; who told them she didn’t trust them, that Song Ha was still alive and would remain that way.

“How—” The words taste like ashes on her tongue. “How many years?”

#

Sixty-one years.

Like a familiar beat in a poem, repeated over and over; not the mayfly years of Nen Lo Suoi Gia, the False Hearth that eventually killed all her friends; not the years of the Fifty-Seventh Planet’s orbitals; but the years of the First Planet where the Keeper of the Peace Empress sits on the Dragon Throne. The years of Old Earth.

Sixty-one years.

“You’re safe,” The Color of Smoke and Water says, and Song Ha knows it is the truth. Rice for dozens of people, stretched to feed only one; fish sauce, recycled again and again; sedatives, endlessly given when she woke up screaming—it started before the accident, of course, the Empire was always tinkering with their minds, trying to make the sentence more bearable, the flow of days and nights feel like an eye-blink—a small kindness, after exiling them all to this island in the midst of a planet so nightmarish it wasn’t even numbered. “You’re alive.”

“Did I—tell me I asked for it.”

The Color of Water and Smoke doesn’t say anything. And what answer would she make? Would it make Song Ha feel better, to know she brought this on herself? That, after the miners left, after the planet fell silent on coms—when it was just her and The Color of Smoke and Water, and the nightmares that kept waking her up—she stared at what was left to her, and found it impossible to bear unaided?

“I did what was necessary,” The Color of Water and Smoke says, again.

Safe.

Song Ha would die, if she went outside. Burnt alive like the others; crushed to death by the gravity; suffocated by the thinning atmosphere—so many ways to die, on Nen Lo Suoi Gia. She stands on an island, on the last possible place where she can draw breath.

Song Ha stares at the board. All the pieces: two chariots, two elephants, two advisors—two generals.

No. Three generals, and the symbols from her dreams, welling up like blood from a wound—and a feeling of hanging, weightless, in space—of her hull, relentlessly bombarded by a stream of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen in the exosphere, her thermal shields struggling to cope with the heat of the escaping atoms.

She reaches out, for the third piece; holds it in the palm of her hand, feeling the roughness of the character carved atop it.

There is a ship, in the midst of the room: not the sleek metal and impossible grace she remembers from stories, but a pitted and distorted thing, its hull blackened by solar winds—the sun of the Fifty-Seventh Planet and Nen Lo Suoi Gia, hugging its planets too close, too heavily, filling the sky to bursting with fire and blinding light. The ship’s outline shimmers and bends like smoke—nothing more than a projection, of course, its real body is in orbit, waiting for her to board.

“Child,” Song Ha whispers, and her voice feels raw and exposed.

“Hello, Mother.”

The holograms waver and shift; and the surface of the planet shows the outside of the facility—the shuttle, as pitted and blackened as the ship that sent it, slowly descending, its shields shimmering in and out of focus, battered by the gravity and the temperature of the exosphere—the supply dome, slowly opening, and then stopping, halfway through.

Song Ha turns, then, to face The Color of Water and Smoke. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“You can’t leave.”

Because she wouldn’t be safe. Because the Mind would be alone in the growing darkness of the facility, the artificial days and nights that don’t reflect anything of outside, anything real—because it’s not only her that the game of chess, the daily routine, kept going.

“Sixty-one years,” The Color of Water and Smoke whispers. “The numbered planets have moved on, child. The empire has moved on.”

She—everyone she knows will be old, or dead, or both, and even her daughter the mindship will have changed from the enthusiastic and awkward newborn she remembers. Her memories are mist, elusive and intangible, scattering under the slightest pressure, streaming away like the atoms of Nen Lo Suoi Gia’s atmosphere: she might as well be a child, reborn into a universe that has since long forgotten all about her.

“I know,” Song Ha says. She lays the piece again on the board, halfway between the two generals whose positions she knows by heart—always fighting one another, always defining one another.

“Checkmate,” she whispers, and keeps her eyes on the supply dome, willing it with all her heart to open.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Aliette de Bodard writes speculative fiction. She has won three Nebula Awards, an Ignyte Award, a Locus Award, and six British Science Fiction Association Awards. She is the author of Navigational Entanglements, a xianxia-inspired romantic space opera, and A Fire Born of Exile, a sapphic Count of Monte Cristo in space (Gollancz/JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.). She lives in Paris. Visit www.aliettedebodard.com for free stories, recipes, and more.

“A Game of Three Generals,” © Aliette de Bodard, 2017.

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This week, Karen Joy Fowler’s “Always” makes its online debut.

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.

~ Julian and Fran, June 28, 2026

Always

by Karen Joy Fowler

How I Got Here:

I was seventeen years old when I heard the good news from Wilt Loomis who had it straight from Brother Porter himself. Wilt was so excited he was ready to drive to the city of Always that very night. Back then I just wanted to be anywhere Wilt was. So we packed up.

Always had two openings and these were going for five thousand apiece, but Wilt had already talked to Brother Porter who said, seeing as it was Wilt, who was good with cars, he’d take twenty-five hundred down and give us another three years to come up with the other twenty-five, and let that money cover us both. You average that five thousand, Wilt told me, over the infinite length of your life and it worked out to almost nothing a year. Not exactly nothing, but as close to nothing as you could get without getting to nothing. It was too good a deal to pass up. They were practically paying us.

My stepfather was drinking again and it looked less and less like I was going to graduate high school. Mother was just as glad to have me out of the house and harm’s way. She did give me some advice. You can always tell a cult from a religion, she said, because a cult is just a set of rules that lets certain men get laid.

And then she told me not to get pregnant, which I could have taken as a shot across the bow, her new way of saying her life would have been so much better without me, but I chose not to. Already I was taking the long view.

The city of Always was a lively place then—this was back in 1938—part commune and part roadside attraction, set down in the Santa Cruz mountains with the redwoods all around. It used to rain all winter and be damp all summer, too. Slug weather for those big yellow slugs you never saw anywhere but Santa Cruz. Out in the woods it smelled like bay leaves.

The old Santa Cruz Highway snaked through and the two blocks right on the road were the part open to the public. People would stop there for a soda—Brother Porter used to brag that he’d invented Hawaiian Punch, though the recipe had been stolen by some gang in Fresno who took the credit for it—and to look us over, whisper about us on their way to the beach. We offered penny peep shows for the adults, because Brother Porter said you ought know what sin was before you abjured it, and a row of wooden Santa Claus statues for the kids. In our heyday we had fourteen gas pumps to take care of all the gawkers.

Brother Porter founded Always in the early twenties, and most of the other residents were already old when I arrived. That made sense, I guess, that they’d be the ones to feel the urgency, but I didn’t expect it and I wasn’t pleased. Wilt was twenty-five when we first went to Always. Of course, that too seemed old to me then.

The bed I got had just been vacated by a thirty-two-year-old woman named Maddie Beckinger. Maddie was real pretty. She’d just filed a suit against Brother Porter alleging that he’d promised to star her in a movie called The Perfect Woman, and when it opened she was supposed to fly to Rome in a replica of the Spirit of St. Louis, only this plane would be called the Spirit of Love. She said in her suit that she’d always been more interested in being a movie star than in living forever. Who, she asked, was more immortal than Marlene Dietrich? Brother Porter hated it when we got dragged into the courts, but, as I was to learn, it did keep happening. Lawyers are forever, Brother Porter used to say.

He’d built a soundstage for the movie, which he hoped he might be able to rent out from time to time, and Smitty LeRoy and the Watsonville Wranglers recorded there, but mainly we used it as a dormitory.

Maddie’s case went on for two whole years. During this time she came by occasionally to pick up her mail and tell us all she’d never seen such a collection of suckers as we were. Then one day we heard she’d been picked up in Nevada for passing bad checks, which turned out not to be her first offense. So off she went to the San Quentin Penitentiary instead of to Rome. It seemed like a parable to me, but Brother Porter wasn’t the sort who resorted to parables.

Lots of the residents had come in twos like Wilt and me, like animals to the ark, only to learn that there was a men’s dormitory and a women’s, with Brother Porter living up the hill in his own big house, all by himself and closer to the women’s dorm than to the men’s. Brother Porter told us right after we got there (though not a second before) that even the married couples weren’t to sleep together.

There you go, Mother, was my first thought. Not a cult. Only later it was clarified to me that I would be having sex with Brother Porter and so, not a religion, after all.

Frankie Frye and Eleanor Pillser were the ones who told me. I’d been there just about a week and then, one morning, while we were straightening up our cots and brushing our teeth and whatnot, they just came right out with it. At dinner the night before there’d been a card by my plate, the queen of hearts, which was Brother Porter’s signal, only I didn’t know that so I didn’t go.

Frankie Frye, yes, that Frankie Frye, I’ll get to all that, had the cot on one side of me and Eleanor the cot on the other. The dormitory was as dim in the morning as at night on account of also being a soundstage and having no windows. There was just one light dangling from the ceiling, with a chain that didn’t reach down far enough, so about a foot of string had been added to it. “The thing the men don’t get,” Frankie said to me, snapping her pillowcase smooth, “The thing the men mustn’t get,” Eleanor added on, “is that sleeping with Brother Porter is no hardship,” said Frankie.

Frankie was thirty-five then and the postmistress. Eleanor was in her early forties and had come to Always with her husband, Rog. I can’t tell you how old Brother Porter was, because he always said he wouldn’t give an irrelevant number the power of being spoken out loud. He was a fine-looking man, though. A man in his prime.

Wilt and I had done nothing but dry runs so far, and he’d brought me to Always and paid my way into eternity with certain expectations. He was a fine-looking man, too, and I won’t say I wasn’t disappointed, just that I took the news better than he did. “I can’t lie to you,” he told me in those few days after he learned he wouldn’t be having sex, but before he learned that I would be. “This is not the way I pictured it. I sort of thought with all that extra time, I’d get to be with more people, not less.”

And when he did hear about me and Brother Porter, he pointed out that the rest of the world only had to be faithful until death did them part. “I don’t care how good he is,” Wilt said. “You won’t want to be with him and no one else forever.” Which I suspected he would turn out to be right about, and he was. But in those early days, Brother Porter could make my pulse dance like a snake in a basket. In those early days, Brother Porter never failed to bring the goods.

We had a lot of tourists back then, especially in the summer. They would sidle up to us in their beach gear, ten-cent barbecue in one hand and skepticism in the other, to ask how we could really be sure Brother Porter had made us immortal. At first I tried to explain that it took two things to be immortal: it took Brother Porter and it took faith in Brother Porter. If I started asking the question, then I was already missing one of the two things it took.

But this in no way ended the matter. You think about hearing the same question a couple hundred times, and then add to that the knowledge that you’ll be hearing it forever, because the way some people see it, you could be two hundred and five and then suddenly die when you’re two hundred and six. The world is full of people who couldn’t be convinced of cold in a snowstorm.

I was made the Always zookeeper. We had a petting zoo, three goats, one llama, a parrot named Parody, a dog named Chowder, and a monkey named Monkeyshines, but Monkeyshines bit and couldn’t be let loose among the tourists no matter how much simple pleasure it would have given me to do so.

We immortals didn’t leave Always much. We didn’t have to; we grew our own food, had our own laundry, tailor, barber (though the lousy haircuts figured prominently in Maddie’s suit), and someone to fix our shoes. At first, Brother Porter discouraged field trips and then later we just found we had less and less in common with people who were going to die. When I complained about how old everyone else at Always was, Wilt pointed out that I was actually closer in age to some seventy-year-old who, like me, was going to live forever, than to some eighteen-year-old with only fifty or so years left. Wilt was as good with numbers as he was with cars and he was as right about that as everything else. Though some might go and others with five thousand to slap down might arrive, we were a tight community then, and I felt as comfortable in Always as I’d felt anywhere.

The Starkes were the first I ever saw leave. They were a married couple in their mid-forties. (Evelyn Barton and Harry Capps were in their forties, too. Rog and Eleanor, as I’ve said. Frankie a bit younger. The rest, and there were about thirty of us all told, were too old to guess at, in my opinion.)

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Andrea Phillips arrives on this week’s transport with a game and at least one secret.

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.

~ Julian and Fran, June 21, 2026

Word of Mouth

by Andrea Phillips

I have something very important to tell my friends. I’ll have to wait for the right moment to bring it up, but I can be patient.

Our party meets in a dappled glade at the foot of the mountain. It’s early in the evening, though the moon hasn’t risen yet, and the skybox above is an exquisite fantasy in peach and lilac. The trees are identical to the leaf, straight-limbed and unclimbable, stretching away in staggered rows until they fade from view. There is birdsong in the ambient sound, but not a single bird to be seen.

I’ve arrived first. My character is a wood sprite with a shock of grass for hair and a crystal-topped staff in one branch-like hand. A trio of butterflies circles my head in something akin to a halo. I adjust my settings, and the butterflies shift from pink to yellow.

My friends pop into existence one by one, or more accurately two by two: each is both an avatar in the game and a hazy video feed alongside it. The video used to be clearer, but my bandwidth isn’t as reliable as it used to be. Nobody’s is. I’ve considered going audio only, but that would be a last resort, only if the game became otherwise unplayable.

I’m here to spend time with these, my closest friends. Observing their body language and microexpressions—and showing them mine in return—is an important part of fostering solid relationships; a necessity, not a luxury.

Today there are only four of us. We wait for a while to see if the fifth turns up: Chunkie. To our collective surprise, even after ten minutes, after fifteen, she doesn’t.

“Should we just start without her?” Gentian asks at last. Formally GentianBleh543135. In his video feed, he has cheekbones like the Grand Canyon and a jaw formed by glaciers. His game avatar is a squat bipedal fox with a gleaming hammer thrice its size.

It’s a legendary hammer: the Gnarlthorpe. It’s not easy to bring up the memory, but I was there when he got that hammer, quite a few new content drops ago, before we settled into this routine of grinding and waiting for the next update. There hasn’t been an announcement, but the developers will probably be giving us a surprise drop any day now.

“It seems rude to start before Chunkie is here,” I say.

Camemburt shrugs. “She won’t mind catching up,” he says. Camemburt888410 is the youngest of us, only thirteen when we began playing. His almost pubescent cheeks are splotchy with hormonal acne; his neck is thin.

His avatar is a slim figure cloaked in a shadowy aura. It’s a trait you get after reaching level 70 as a Night Thief; he can teleport short distances for sneak attacks.

“Did anyone get a message from her?” Loofah, formally Loofah696911, is a bunny girl with masses of hair. The lights in her room have shaded her skin a dusky rose. Her breasts are very large and very round, and through some miracle of gimbal or filter, constantly remain the primary focus of her video feed.

Her avatar is a button-eyed doll in a pinafore with a sweet smile painted on her fabric face. She throws poison and healing powders in puffs of bright color.

“No message,” I say.

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J.R. Dawson breaks and unbreaks hearts with relativity in this week’s gorgeous new story.

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.

~ Julian and Fran, June 14, 2026

Jill & Lily

by J. R. Dawson

2078: The Beginning

Lily died in August of 2077. Jill went back for her in January of 2078.

It took her that long to convince their son to help her. George was stubborn and said it was a bad idea. Jill wouldn’t listen. George said Lily was sick and it was her time to leave. Jill said time was relative and George should know that.

“You’ve never read any Wells, have you?” George said, and Jill did not appreciate her son’s pretentious lip.

“We’ve only been able to send artifacts and mice back,” George said, standing at the lone window in the sanitized room. “You can only exist when your matter existed. And you have to understand, it takes a long time. Also, you’re not a mouse.”

“But I’ll get there eventually,” Jill said.

“Mom,” George pleaded. “Imagine your life is a long road trip. You start off in Cincinnati, and you have to get to Seattle. Once you get to Seattle, you’re in Seattle. If you want to go back to Cincinnati, you can’t just close your eyes and wake up in Cincinnati. You have to drive all the way back—”

“I’m not going to Cincinnati,” Jill said. “Now hush up and tell me what we need to do.”

“You’re not supposed to go back, Mom,” George said.

All Jill had was back. There was nothing in front of her. And she said that out loud.

“Awesome. How do you think that makes me feel?” George said. “I’m still here.”

But Jill wouldn’t be here, as in alive, for much longer. It would be ten years at the most, with George ducking in and out of this nursing home that smelled like dead tuna fish. Eventually George would get busy with his own life, his own family, and everyone always moves on when old people start being useless. She saw it in the way George treated Lily’s memory. Her wife, his mother, was useless, now that she was dead.

“Whatever you do, you’re going to lose her again,” George said. “Death is something that inevitably happens, even if you try to change course. Mom, you’re just going to end up hurting even more. You’ll rewind the funeral, you’ll see her open her eyes, get stronger, younger . . . but there’s always a last day, Mom. There will be the day you meet her, and then you’ll still have to say goodbye.”

“We met when I was twenty,” Jill said. “That’s seventy more years with her.”

“And twenty years without,” George said.

George had lost a mother. The world had lost an old woman. None of them had lost a wife. So Jill was the only one who could understand how only just a day would carry enough weight for a lifetime.

When George left that night, his answer was no.

But on Thursday he brought the vial to the nursing home. He stood at the edge of Jill’s bed, looking from the vial to his mother and back to the vial like he didn’t quite know how to plug a US phone charger into a European wall.

“What made you change your mind?” Jill said, trying not to sound ecstatic.

“I love you,” he said.

“Hurry up then!” Jill said. “Before they come get me for dinner. Let’s go. Hup hup.”

“Mom,” George said. “We’ve only done this with simpler matter. I don’t even know—”

“How do you give it to the mice?”

“We injected it into one mouse, and he showed up three days earlier with his guts on his outside.”

“Did you tweak the serum afterward?”

“Yes, but—”

“Put it in!” Jill said. “Or I’ll drink it!”

“Don’t you even want to know what it does?” George said weakly. “Mom, it has to do with your gravitational—”

Jill snatched it. She drank it down. Nothing happened. And once again, she was disappointed in George.

Read more

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.”

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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.

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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.

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.

~ 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.

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

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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.

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, 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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