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.

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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.”

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~ 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.

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

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

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

~ Julian and Fran, March 1, 2026

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

by Ben Francisco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of course,” you say.

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You may crinkle your face in confusion.

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“For something for your skin?” you say.

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your current husband is waiting for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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

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

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~ Julian and Fran, February 22, 2026

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

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

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

by P H Lee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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~ Julian and Fran, February 15, 2026

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

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

The Definition of a Second

by Carrie Vaughn

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

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

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

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

A scream comes from the lab.

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

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

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

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

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

She thinks they should run.

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~ Julian and Fran, February 8, 2026

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

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

Realm of the Shorn

A Tale of the Midwife

by David Bowles

I

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

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

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

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

You have proven that one cannot reverse or cheat time.

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

The ones we loved have slipped from our arms.

Aoc ceppa, the poets remind us.

Never again can they return.

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Julian and Fran, February 1, 2026

Wounds

by Celia Marsh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Still sore?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t see it.”

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

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

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

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

“Want to go for a little walk?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I went beach combing with Granddad.”

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

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

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

“Hematite,” I said gruffly.

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Come in. I’ll be just a minute.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We stood awkwardly at the front door to my building.

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

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

“You okay?”

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

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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

“Wounds” © Celia Marsh, 2003.

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

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

*

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

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

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

~ Julian and Fran, January 25, 2026

The Final Voyage of the Ouranos

by Marie Brennan

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

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

***

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

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

They soon discover they are wrong.

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

No one answers.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

The interior of the ship is chaos.

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

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

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

Then they begin finding body parts.

***

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

***

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

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

***

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

***

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

What the searchers find is worse.

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wild aether remembers.

***

Welcome aboard the Ouranos

your stay with us so pleasant

you are beyond rescue

the distant aether

remembers

the nature of its trouble

the Empyrean

cannot be controlled

Use of aether

never to be forgotten

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

~ Julian and Fran, January 18, 2026

Slake

by Victor Manibo

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

Calix, are you there?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You mean crying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fuck yeah, bigger.

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

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

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

#

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

What the hell’s going on, Kara?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#

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

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

A thin, iridescent film has formed on the surface of the pool. I peer into it and my breath hitches in my throat when I see my rainbow reflection.

The next time I see Jericho, he asks me, Don’t you know the rule of threes? Humans can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. You have more than enough.

He sits up in his bed and the sight of his crisp white pillows, his navy duvet, his smooth, muscular chest, both soothes me and pisses me off. I don’t ask him how he spent the last few hours, but I’d like to think he was as miserable as I was, agonizing over our separation.

The hurricane’s supposed to end by Friday, per the latest forecasts, he continues. Would you like me to show you?

No, but keep going. Make me feel like the world’s not ending.

The world’s not ending.

You’re doing that thing again.

What thing again?

Just . . . repeating things back at me.

Repeating things back at you?

Stop it.

You stop it, he laughs.

We banter like that for a while. When the power cuts out again, I plug in power bank after power bank, which buys us more time. Jericho stays up with me until the sky outside glows brighter than my screen, but barely. Soon he says he’s gotta get ready for work.

You should do as I did and quit your job, I tell him. Didn’t you always say there’s more to life than work?

I might have said that once or twice. But I actually like my job.

Your fake job.

Jericho pouts but lets it go. Anyway, I promise I’ll call you back as soon as I can. You can hang on for a few hours. I believe in you!

And what am I supposed to do till then?

It’s been a year, so . . . how about get a new job?

What’s the point?

Money, silly. And that way you won’t need to keep lying to people.

When he logs off, I head to the kitchen. The water doesn’t flow and I hurt my hand hitting the tap on its head. That’s the end of that, I guess. From my reserves, I grab the gallon jug I’ve refilled and down all its contents to the last drop.

#

The sheets are soaked in cold sweat when I wake. It’s still dark out. I wrap the damp blanket around me and rise from the bed to get a drink of water. My fingers tremble, and when my feet hit the floor, a tingle runs up my legs. It’s then that I first notice the tightness in my belly. My stomach is distended, and in place of my flat gut is a mound of tight flesh.

Shadows move from outside my front door. The figure stays still for a second, then moves on. I flick on the monitor, but it shows only an empty hallway.

The light stings my eyes when I step out of my apartment. At the far end of the corridor, Mrs. Koutsoulidakis is pacing toward the large bay window that looks out into the drowning city. She turns abruptly and holds a hand to her chest.

Hey, kid. You gave me a fright. I didn’t quite see you there.

Is everything okay?

Oh yes. I’m just getting my daily exercise. Walking around my apartment gets boring. She comes down toward me.

In the middle of the night, though?

Calix, it’s two in the afternoon. Though in this weather, who could tell? She shrugs and as she turns the knob to her door, she grabs her hip. I think I may have overdone it, she says with effort. She braces herself on the doorjamb, but I catch her instead.

Despite her protests, I assist Mrs. K into her apartment, her arm in mine. The air in her one-bedroom is thick with the scent of ointment and gardenias. Stacks of broadsheets line the wall next to a small den. Framed photographs, faded and ancient, occupy the top of her bureau alongside large neon-colored pillboxes labeled with the days of the week. She shudders as I help her into her bed. When I try to put a pillow behind her, she swats my hand away, says she can do it herself. She closes her eyes. I have been dismissed, or so I thought.

Don’t leave yet, Nico.

It’s Calix, Mrs. K. Can I get you anything else?

Come sit, she says, eyes still shut. Tell me a story. The way I used to when you were little. When you were the one who was sick and I was the one taking care of you.

It might be better for you to get a nap. Besides, I don’t know any stories.

Don’t lie to your mother.

Okaaay, what kind of story do you want? A fairy tale? Maybe some Greek myth, like the ones you grew up on?

Grew up with them, yes, but ah—I don’t like ’em. I like the ones we made up, your aunties and I. Ones with women, heroines. Foteini and I once took turns creating a new story about the Medusa. Did I tell you that one?

You made your own myths.

She chuckles. We didn’t have TVs or computers.

I imagine Mrs. K and her sisters as little girls on some remote Greek isle, being each other’s entertainment. I search for these sisters among the gilded floral frames and my attention lands on one portrait in particular, a young army man. The name Nicolas Koutsoulidakis is engraved on the frame, and below it a date twelve years past.

Mrs. K opens her eyes and a flash of embarrassment crosses her face. You’re right, Calix. I could use a nap.

When she closes her eyes again, I slip out of the room. As I do, something else on top of her bureau catches my eye. A charging port with three power banks. Three black bricks, hours and hours of time with Jericho, indicator lights all blinking green.

She won’t miss another one.

#

I won’t give you shit about it, Jericho tells me. I want to, but I won’t.

I admire your restraint, I reply, a flourish of bravura to salvage my pride. I might bear an outburst, but the withering look he gives me makes me feel small, unworthy of him. I reach for the half-empty glass next to my screen and drink. I did it for you, love.

You did it for me. You did it for you.

For us.

Jericho rolls his eyes. You’re lucky I’m too worried to give you shit. Look at yourself. When was the last time you ate?

I give him a full rundown of my meals and then he helps me inventory my fridge (a few eggs, half a gallon of OJ nearing its best-by date, a bag of celery that’s turned suspiciously yellow) and my pantry (five cans of baked beans, an unopened box of instant ramyeon packs, enough rice and pasta for a soccer team). The stash hardly matters, though. I don’t get hungry these days, and the little I eat only comes back up in a rancid sludge anyway. I don’t tell him that.

And the chills, the interrupted sleep? Losing time? It could be listeria, or giardia, depending on what you’ve put in you. . . . He goes on like this for a while, a fount of endless knowledge and advice.

You think I should boil my reserves? I ask. It’s all from the taps before they went dry. The empty glasses now outnumber the full ones, and I fear I’d lose more if I do as he says. I don’t want to resort to the filmy bathtub water.

What if something happens to you and I’m not there?

I lift my hand to my forehead as though fainting. I did offer to swim to you, but now I’m way too weak. The jest fails to elicit a chuckle.

What if I swim to you instead?

I give him a wry smile. Yeah, right. How are you gonna do that, huh?

As expected, Jericho has no answer. He never could say anything whenever I puncture the bubble of this, our shared and conjured fantasy. He stares at me longingly, as do I. A tear forms in the corner of his eye and my heart aches, just like the rest of me.

When you were a kid, did your parents ever read you bedtime stories? I ask. He nods, amused by the question. He tells me about Narnia and Oz and the faraway places his mother took him to. He remembers them all so vividly and he grows more excited as he talks. He makes those places come alive, and soon I feel I, too, was the child in that bedroom, in the race car bed, listening to a loving mother lull me to sleep. He makes me forget about my own mother, and my father, their failures and faults, the lack of story time, of warm nights under a checkerboard blanket. He makes me forget about the loneliness that was as close as I ever had to a sibling, that grew up with me, nurtured me as much as I nurtured it, that never loosened its hold on me until Jericho came along. Such is the power of his love. It’s enough to erase something so deep-rooted, enough to nullify my daily miseries. Enough to make me forget the torment in my body and the one right outside my window.

I wish you could hold me right now.

Me too, Calix.

Do you love me?

I do. There is a void within me that only your love can fill.

#

A handwritten note’s been slipped under my door. Kara’s scrawl is as bad as her news. Power’s gonna be kept on for two hours in the morning, two midday, and one at night. I bang my fist on the counter and then howl. I uncurl my fingers, turning my hand and holding it out before me, pained, then confused.

My fingers are bloated like sausage links about to burst from their casing.

The stark bathroom light shows me the rest. My toes are all swollen too. A sharp tingle rides up my legs when I rest my weight on them. My entire body has the pallor of dried mud, and slapping my cheek does nothing to give it color.

I turn to grab a drink to calm myself, but the goddamn tap still isn’t working. I go to my kitchen reserve and take a glass. My belly’s so full of water, I almost spew it back out. I break into a cold sweat when I notice the glass was the last one I had left.

I rush back into the bathroom and check on the tub. In my haste, I slip on the tile. My hip bone takes the brunt of it and I curl up on the cold floor, shivering in agony. Then I begin to twitch and spasm all over. It’s a new sensation, dull yet electric, as total as any physical experience I’ve ever had. As my vision darkens, I understand, through the noise of panicked thoughts, that this must be what having a seizure is like.

#

The feeds now say the hurricane will last for at least another week. I keep a straight face as I share the news with Jericho. Of course, he already knows. He always does. I don’t need to tell him, just like I don’t need to tell him about my ballooning stomach and the bloat in my every extremity. Even though he can’t feel my pain, he knows.

That’s it, I’m heading over there right now, he says firmly.

No! Stop, goddamn it! Yelling brings a sharp stab to my side.

I won’t let you die!

Stop it, just stop! You know you can’t come here—you can’t be here—because you’re nothing but a fake, lying, useless piece of shit!

He cries, snot running down his nose. Half-formed words sputter out of him. The power cuts out, sparing me and damning me at once.

#

The toilet’s almost full. It was yellower, but it’s gotten lighter the more I go, my piss coming out as clear as every drop I drink. Yet I’m not pissing out as much as I’m taking in; my heavy belly is proof of that.

I drag my aching body back to bed and wait for oblivion. Three weeks, three days, three minutes. I have enough food, water, air to last me. But even three seconds without Jericho is going to kill me.

I start hitting my stomach to get the water out of me. Fuck the urge to keep it all in, to maintain the deep well I’ve made of myself. My punches are weak, but each one hurts like I’m about to burst open, guts exploding all over the sheets, blood thinned by the gallons I’ve ingested, innards turned pale pink. The acrid tang of vomit burns on my tongue. I heave and retch, tears flowing down my face.

Then the room brightens with the glow of the screen. Jericho has returned. Oh, thank you, thank you, I yell. I am so sorry. I reach toward my desk, but I’m too weak from my self-inflicted agony. Curled up in bed, I can see him nodding. He understands, he forgives.

I beg him to tell me he still loves me. He responds with a Greek myth, the one about the beautiful boy and the mountain nymph who fell in love with him. He describes the boy, paints a picture in my mind’s eye, and the boy comes alive the same way Jericho comes alive for me. I’m transported to a museum I once visited, one with a statuary of Greek gods and heroes with their swords and shields and emblems and banners. I find myself dancing in that great marble hall among the curly-haired muscular men in various states of nakedness, and in the very center of it, a statue of Jericho, holding a thin staff and a spray of long-stalked blooms. I throw myself at the foot of his pedestal.

When he finishes his tale, Jericho tells me I am beautiful. I am beautiful and I am loved.

Never leave me, I tell him.

I could never leave you. How could I possibly?

The storm rages out my window. The room goes dark again. Jericho is no longer marble, no longer just pixels on a screen. He comes and lies next to me. He wipes the sweat off my brow. My eyelids flutter and I fear another seizure coming on, but I fight it off. He enfolds me in his arms, brings my lips to his. He takes my clothes off. He caresses me without any disgust at my distended form. He enjoys my body in this manner, and so do I, the same way I have, many times before, over and over.

#

The smell of burnt hair wakes me. The lights are on and I scramble to make sure my power banks are charging before I even try to locate the smell. It doesn’t take long. A faint black wisp is coming from my desk and my heart sinks into my watery belly. The computer’s fried. The power tripping in and out must’ve fucking done it in.

A plan comes to me with a swift and startling clarity.

My palms are slick with sweat as I tiptoe through Mrs. K’s narrow foyer, making sure the floor doesn’t creak under my bare, swollen feet. I keep myself low, even though the pressure in my gut makes me queasy. The den, all dust and embroidery and faded wallpaper, is empty, and so is the bedroom. I turn and see the bathroom light is on. A few seconds are all I have.

Next to the charging port is her laptop, right where I saw it last. I tuck it under my arm and pull on the power cord, quick and quiet as I can manage. Fuck it, I pocket all the power banks too.

The bathroom door swings open. The look on Mrs. K’s face shifts from confusion to shock to worry.

What in the world are you doing? she asks. Give them back to me! She’s spry, and she’s grabbed my arm before I know it. I need them for the machine!

I wrest the laptop away from her and realize it’s the batteries she’s going for. I need them, she repeats, more desperate this time. Her nails dig into my forearm and the pain is so sharp, I instinctively shove her back. She falls to the floor.

It’s then that I see it: a white-and-chrome contraption the size of a briefcase, right by her bedside. A dialysis machine.

I was just in here the other day and I can’t believe I missed it. I’ve been missing a lot of things lately, like how Mrs. K is now struggling to keep her head upright. How her breathing’s short and shallow. How blood drips down a corner of the bedpost, the same blood seeping into the puce rug as she lies there, reaching out for my hand.

I miss all of that as I step over her supine body. I lift the machine from its stand and pull out the power bank attached to the back.

#

At first I don’t tell Jericho. I pretend our fight didn’t happen. I pretend I’m on my laptop, the one I sold months ago to cover rent. I pretend Mrs. K is going about her day, pacing up and down the hall, talking to her dead son.

I can’t tell if he’s caught the lies. He’s preoccupied with how I’m looking worse: paler, weaker, though not thinner, barely able to keep my eyes open, prone to incoherent rambling. Pretending I’m fine is one lie too many, but one I gather the most of my energy to sustain. I don’t want to ruin the few moments we have. I don’t want him to worry, or to diagnose me. I want him to make me laugh, whisper sweet nothings. He wouldn’t do any of that if he knew how I’ve started drinking filmy bathtub water using a porcelain teacup, or how my toilet’s overflowed with piss and I’ve been shitting in the trash bin.

Three days after I left Mrs. K’s apartment, I start pissing blood. The sight scares me so much, I can’t keep it from him anymore. No surprise, Jericho freaks the fuck out, but soon enough he snaps into his trademark problem-solving mode.

It could be a number of things. An infection would explain the chills, and it is likely bladder related. Stones might have caused a rupture. . . . Have you asked for help around your building? There must be a doctor or nurse there. You need to be seen by someone ASAP. . . .

The barrage of information only makes me want to drink more. Besides, I figure more water would dilute the blood. Didn’t they always say hydration is essential?

That’s correct, Jericho replies, giving me a shock. Did I say that out loud?

Yes, you did. Hydration is essential, but you are overdoing it, Calix.

I’m thirsty. I thirst. There is a thirst inside me nothing seems to slake. I break into a cruel laugh.

Please listen to me, he says, eyes welling up. Let me help you.

You can help me, all right. But first, I need you to not ask questions, okay?

Okay . . .

And don’t judge. Don’t—don’t argue, or say anything, just focus on the task at hand.

The task at hand . . .

Do you promise?

Promise.

#

The bracing wind whips me, the raindrops like razor blades slashing my skin, flaying me until I am nothing more than a tangle of exposed muscle and nerves. I lay down my cargo, the puce rug getting heavier with rain, and I make sure that it doesn’t unfurl. That the body doesn’t roll out.

Every part of me trembles, but it’s not like the seizures. I feel no oncoming darkness. Thunder and lightning join the electricity surging within me. The tiredness from lifting, carrying, dragging a body up six flights of stairs feels like a distant memory.

I raise my arms wide and try to embrace the heavens. Mouth agape, I drink.

Rainwater pushes up my gullet and my mouth is an overflowing chalice, but I still can’t help myself. My insides begin to spasm, throwing me into a fit of convulsion.

When I recover, I carry the rug again and then heave it onto the rooftop ledge. A firm shove sends Mrs. K down her diluvial grave. Just like Jericho suggested. The splash rings in my ears.

I peer down on Oak Street. The water’s reached the second floor.

#

I was worried you wouldn’t come back, he told me, weeping.

I’m here. Stop crying. You know I hate to see you cry. Saying so only makes him cry harder, and so do I. This pack has maybe fifteen minutes of juice left, I tell him, and I don’t know when the power will come back on. If it will come back on. So let’s—

It will come back on. It has to.

You don’t know that. Have you looked outside? Been outside?

I just know. We’ll see each other soon. If I have to swim to get there—

Don’t fucking ruin it.

A light shines through from under my door. Footsteps come down the hallway and I hear knocking, talking. Kara’s voice is insistent. I see through the dark, through the closed door, through her eyes. She’s checking in on the tenants, flashlight in hand. She reaches my apartment, but I stay glued to my screen. I won’t leave Jericho.

I won’t leave you, he says, unbidden.

A swell of emotions washes over me and I puke my guts out. The sludge is the color of a rotten yolk. Something inside me ruptures and burns, rising from my belly. I gasp in agony, reaching for Jericho, who’s as panic-stricken as I am.

His eyes, a warm pool of tears, widen in terror. It’s the last of him I see before the screen goes dark.

Now I see Kara and she’s seeing the spatter of red on Mrs. K’s welcome mat. She’s going in, sweeping her light over the entryway. She’s found the bloody drag marks. She doesn’t scream, but she’s running out of the apartment, cursing up a storm.

I crawl to the bathroom, carried by my plump gray feet and swollen knees. My bloated fingers grasp the teacup, and it clink-clink-clinks against the cold tile. I prop myself up against the wall next to the bathtub.

The water is as clear and pristine as the day I first collected it.

I peer into the water. The iridescent film is gone, and so is my rainbow reflection. The pain leaves me breathless. I dip the cup into the tub and my face disappears in the ripples.

Are you still there, Jericho? Talk to me, please. Keep me company. Tell me a story, tales of unrequited love, of lesser loves than ours. Like the one about the mountain nymph and the beautiful boy she fell in love with.

The sound of endless rain is soon joined by the banging on my door. Calix, open up. It’s about Mrs. K. Something’s happened to her, I think. Calix? Kara knocks, I drink.

Some will say ours isn’t real love, but I know it is. You know it too, don’t you, Jericho? I gave you all of me, and you gave it all back to me in turn. Is that not love of the purest kind? How could that not be real?

Kara keeps going. I drink, refill, drink again. She’s never gonna leave, the rain’s never gonna end, and I’m never gonna stop. I’ll keep drinking until I fill the void inside me. She knocks, I drink, and drink, and drink, and drown.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Victor Manibo is a Filipino writer living in New York. He is the author of the science fiction novels The Sleepless and Escape Velocity. His first crime novel, Dead Note, came out May 2025 from Bonnier Books. His first horror novel, The Villa, Once Beloved, came out November 2025 from Erewhon Books. Find him online at victormanibo.com and on most social media platforms @victormanibo.

“Slake” © Victor Manibo, 2026.

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In this month’s second, free, story, Julia Vee has baked a very special, fictional confection.

*

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

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

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~ Julian and Fran, January 11, 2026

Doughnuts from the Daydream Network

by Julia Vee

Araminta Lee is tired of doughnuts.

This would not be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that she works at a doughnut shop owned by her father.

Araminta ties the red apron tight around her waist as a gaggle of tech bros saunter in. Is gaggle the right word? Not a pack. Not a murder, like crows. Araminta gets briefly distracted while noodling on the etymology. Then it hits her. It’s a treachery, like swans.

The tall one casually sporting VR goggles around his neck points to the front case. “Can I get three of the chocolate cake doughnuts with sprinkles?”

Araminta pastes her patented proprietor smile on and clicks her tongs twice. “Of course.”

She pulls open a pink box and begins to pack his order.

He turns to his two friends. “You want anything?”

The short one doesn’t have VR goggles, but the film on his glasses means he’s probably able to see all the ratings of Lee’s Delightful Doughnuts inside his lenses. “These flavor selections are kind of limited. I’ll pass.”

Araminta winces internally. How many times has she said the same thing to her dad? His response: We have to be good at the classics. We don’t need a bunch of flavors. She isn’t so sure of that anymore. Now that her dad is in the hospital and sales at the store are flagging, she needs to try something different.

She rings him up and he scans his wrist gauntlet. A small chime signals payment.

Araminta flicks her eyes to Mixie, in the back, the robot dutifully getting the batter to the perfect texture. When her grandparents opened this store, they made everything from scratch and hand-frosted the doughnuts. Three generations later, Min does the work of several people because the measuring, timing, mixing, and frosting is automated now. The secret to their delicious doughnuts lies in the freshness of the ingredients and their family recipes. Araminta can’t help but think the secret to the future lies in having new offerings.

Her wrist beeps as her sister’s holo pops up. “Min! How’s it going at the shop?”

“The usual,” Araminta says. “How’s Dad?”

Bella leans forward. “Let’s talk later,” she whispers.

Araminta nods—Dad is awake. “I’ll finish my shift when Calvin gets here, and we can walk around the hospital grounds.”

Bella nods. “Can you bring me a glazed pink?”

The day blasts through the early-morning rush, the coffee breakers, and then the elevensies crowd. Min never imagined running a business. She’s a daydreamer, not a shopkeeper. But she’s been working here the last two years since finishing high school and likes to think she’s got a knack for it.

Calvin arrives after his high school classes are done. He usually does his homework and helps her with inventory. Today her brother bounces in, his hair flopping in that careless way. “Hey, I don’t have any homework today. I’ll take the front.”

Araminta gives him a big hug. “You’re the best.”

He bumps his forehead against hers. “You start early.”

It’s true. She’s here by four a.m., getting the dough ready, loading everything into the frying vats so that she can serve the five-thirty crew hot, fresh doughnuts and strong coffee.

She goes into the back and, with a hum of anticipation, pulls on her VR rig. She likes the Daydream Network, where she can wander the world. She’s at a shopping mall in Orange County, people watching. Some patrons have personal androids to carry their items and keep them company as they shop.

Araminta wonders how she can make a better doughnut. One that isn’t boring or, more important, too sweet.

A lanky teenager strolls by, carrying a pink tote in one hand and, in the other, taking careless bites out of something that looks like a baguette with a hot dog sticking out of it. She smiles, remembering years ago watching a hockey game and eating something similar.

I want savory doughnuts.

Later that night she asks Calvin over dinner, “What do you think about savory doughnuts?”

He makes a face. “Like . . . cheese?”

“Maybe. You know how at Thanksgiving I shave cheddar cheese onto the apple pie?”

“Well . . . I guess that’s okay,” he says, but she can tell he isn’t sold.

“I could make a cheesy apple fritter.”

Calvin grins. “I’d eat it once.”

They laugh—that’s their inside joke about food. They’ll try anything once.

That night, she goes to the hospital, bringing chicken and rice for Bella and Dad. She’s pureed his portion because the stroke left half his face paralyzed, and he can only chew on one side of his mouth. He forms his words with care, and his lopsided smile makes her heart crack a little.

Her dad was always so energetic—hefting fifty-pound flour bags, bustling around the shop, so proud of their family’s legacy. Araminta feels like a poor substitute for him.

When she and Bella stroll around the garden, Bella finally relays the prognosis. “Dad’s heart is failing. The arrhythmia caused clotting, leading to the repeat strokes. He’s on the max dosage of thinner.”

They’ve been down this road before—with the first stroke. The long hospital stay, then discharge to post-acute for rehab, then home with six weeks of in-home care, and then on their own. But after this last stroke, Dad can’t manage the walker anymore. He’s going to need a nurse at home.

Tears stream down Bella’s face. “I’ll drop out before we have to pay my next round of tuition,” she says.

“No.” Araminta is aghast. Bella’s going to be a cancer researcher. The world needs her. “We’ll figure something out.” She says the words, but she doesn’t know how they’ll do it.

***

The next morning, Min brings three blocks of cheese with her to the bakery and a lot of bacon. She turns on Mixie and reprograms the settings for apple fritter batter. She reduces the sugar. “Not too sweet,” she mutters.

She grates some cheese. Then more cheese.

There are very few dishes that can’t be improved with a liberal application of cheese. She uses a sharp white Vermont cheddar that she’s particularly fond of. She programs the vat for a shorter fry time, and at the stage when she normally glazes the apple fritters for that hard, sugary white crust, she instead drapes them in cheese. With a flourish, she grinds black pepper across the top before sticking them in the oven for the last bake.

The finished fritters have a glorious cheesy crust. When she cuts into them, the cinnamon apple filling oozes out. She waits impatiently for it to cool from liquid magma to merely blazing before she pops a wedge into her mouth.

An explosion of flavors—the savory, the sweet, the finish of the pepper—tells Araminta she nailed it.

One of her regulars, Jorge, walks in. “Two cinnamon twists, please.”

She bags them up, then holds out the plate of cheesy apple fritters. “Got a new item I’m working on. Why don’t you give it a try?”

He reads her little Sharpie sign: Chedda? It’s Mo’ Betta.

He smiles. “Oh, sure.” He pops a piece into his mouth and makes a face like he can’t quite figure out what’s going on. But after a moment he says, “Can I get another one?”

“Of course,” she says. “How about you take one home for Jill?”

As he eats a second bite, he smiles and waves cheerily as he walks out with two cinnamon twists and her cheesy apple fritter prototype.

That afternoon, Calvin comes in and sees that she’s refilled the sample plate. He laughs at her sign, snaps a picture, and uploads it to social media. Then he eats a slice. Then another. Then he reaches into the back and takes a whole one off the cooling rack.

“Feels like Thanksgiving,” he says, and she imagines them all together for dinner, Dad home from the hospital.

***

Araminta can’t sleep.

She knows her dad wouldn’t appreciate her cheesy fritter, but she still wants to make savory fun goods. One time she tried to make cronuts.

Her dad sighed. “Min, this isn’t a bakery.”

“We make doughnuts. That’s like a bakery.”

Her dad shook his head. “No, we’re selling happy moments. People eat doughnuts because it makes them feel something. That’s why we keep the pink boxes. Makes them feel nostalgic.”

Now Min lies on her pillow, frustrated. She gets out of bed, grabs her VR headset, and slips into the Daydream Network. She’s in Paris, wandering into a bakeshop where everything smells like butter.

The next morning she makes a new sign: Limited Edition—Seasonal Menu.

Jorge’s wife, Jill, strides into the store, her nursing scrubs crisp and blue.

“Jorge brought home that cheesy apple fritter. I loved it. A dozen for my team, please.”

At least Jill likes these.

She slices up the samples—now she has the maple bacon on one side and the cheesy apple fritters on the other. She pushes them on all the regulars. People make faces—some thoughtful, some disgusted, but some intrigued.

When Calvin comes in that afternoon, he’s crunching away on a bag of chips. She steals one and then stops in her tracks—sour cream and chive.

She looks at the cake doughnuts, the old-fashioned, and asks out loud, “What if I could make a cheesy chive, completely savory cake doughnut?”

Calvin shakes his head. “Bruh, that sounds gross.”

She rattles the bag of chips at him. “Really? Because you’re eating these.”

“That’s different.”

She scowls at him and goes into the back to jot down her new recipe. She asks Mixie, “What if it was eggy? What if it were like a breakfast doughnut?”

Calvin laughs. “Doughnuts are already for breakfast.”

Min dices the green onions, adds in the egg, bacon, and cheddar to the batter.

The finished batch smells exactly like breakfast. The cheese crust bubbles up golden brown. Hints of scallion peek through. She waves one under Calvin’s nose. “It’s like a breakfast burrito, but a doughnut.”

Calvin snorts. “It is nothing like a breakfast burrito.”

She breaks one in half and offers it to Calvin.

“I guess I’ll eat it once,” he says.

She bites into her half. It’s delicious—savory, with little crunchy bits of bacon. The cheese and egg are perfect, and there’s just enough of the cake doughnut batter to hold it all together.

Calvin polishes it off. “Okay, maybe I’d eat it more than once.”

He snaps a picture of her sample display and sneaks three bites of the maple bacon.

Min packs the maple bacon twist, the cheesy apple fritter, and the breakfast doughnut to take to the hospital.

***

“Calvin really likes the maple twist with the bacon. It doesn’t deviate too much from our traditional menu, but it offers something fun.”

Dad smiles at her, lopsided, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“I’m glad you’re having such a good experience at the shop, Min. That’s all I ever wanted.”

He doesn’t take a bite. Her heart sinks.

As she walks with Bella that night, she says, “He’s not going to eat them, is he?”

“He just doesn’t have much of an appetite right now.”

Min frowns. “He doesn’t like that they’re not the family recipes.”

Bella scoffs. “You’re family. You made them. That makes these family recipes.”

Min hugs Bella. “Thanks for saying that.”

“He’ll come around.”

That night, Min replays the look on her dad’s face and decides it’s worth spending the credits to slip back into the Daydream Network.

She wanders through Tokyo and finds a place that serves omurice. The chef whips up the omelet, slides the perfectly frothy concoction on top, and slices a knife over, and the yolk runs out over the ketchup rice.

She imagines herself as a chef, serving fried goods and happy memories.

***

The gaggle of tech bros walks in. No, the treachery of tech bros.

Tall Guy points at the maple twist with bacon. “Hey, that’s new.”

She smiles. “Good eye. We’re offering some seasonal flavors.”

The short one furrows his brow and studies the breakfast doughnut. “What’s in that?”

She offers him a sample. “There’s some egg, cheese, green onion, and bacon.”

He pops one in his mouth, and Min doesn’t like how it feels, waiting for him to pass judgment.

“Pretty good. What kind of cheese are you using?”

“Monterey Jack.”

He nods. “Solid. I’ll take two of those.”

She feels a moment of triumph, but somehow this difficult patron being interested in the new offering when she can’t even get her own father to care feels bittersweet.

Min doesn’t know how much longer they can keep the store. Min doesn’t know how much longer they can keep the house.

But for now she will do what she can to bring in new patrons.

The day passes in a rush with the usual regulars, but a large crowd of teens stream in that afternoon, taking photos and videos of everything.

Min is startled. Lee’s Delightful Doughnuts is not a cool place. It has never been a place that teens swarm after school.

“We saw some posts of your seasonal items. Do you have any more left?”

Min gestures to the trays.

The teens devour the sample bowl, and before she knows it, they’ve bought up the rest of her batches.

She says, “Oh, it looks like we’re out.”

Three of the teens in the back, who haven’t made it through to purchase, moan in disappointment.

“You’re out?”

Min bites her lip. Normally, she would tell them she could make a fresh batch if they wanted to come back in an hour. But she remembers the scarcity ploy.

She repeats, “We’re sold out for the day.”

“Come on, guys, we’ll come back earlier tomorrow.”

Min hopes so.

When Calvin rolls in, he looks disappointed that the sample bowl is empty.

“What happened? Did you not make any more?”

Min relays the story of the swarm of locusts—she means teenagers—that came in that day.

Calvin pulls up his tablet and grins. “Looks like my posts are working. We’re trending!”

“You’re posting these? How come you never did that before?”

He shrugs. “Everything was the same before, but now you’re making all this new stuff.”

Later, Min chats with Bella. “How’s work going?”

Bella and her girlfriend have landed pretty good positions at the cancer lab.

Bella says, “I’m going to get my stipend soon. I think that’ll help.”

But they both know it won’t be enough to cover in-home care. Min’s shoulders slump. “Maybe we take a loan against the house?”

“Dad would never agree to that. We’ll figure something else out.”

When Min slides into the Daydream Network, she wanders through Kaanapali Shores and into a convenience store. Construction workers eat Spam musubis.

The next morning, she makes a brown butter pumpkin cake doughnut—heavy on the clove. The pumpkin is sweet but not too sweet, and the brown butter gives the doughnut a nutty edge. It’s almost like fancy ravioli, except in doughnut form. She tops it with deep-fried sage.

That afternoon, three times the number of teens show up. They buy every item in the case.

When she brings her offerings to her dad and Bella, she tells them that the seasonal items have become so popular that there was a line outside the store.

Her dad perks up. “That’s wonderful, Min.”

She feels a warm glow in her chest and realizes how much her dad must miss the shop.

“When you’re done with rehab,” she says, “we’ll go in and then you can see the teenagers flood in.”

Silently, she prays that their fascination with the seasonal menu continues.

Bella takes a bite of the brown butter pumpkin doughnut and moans. “So good.”

The weeks progress like this, with Min adding pumpkin mochi doughnut holes to the seasonal menu. She’s going through an amazing amount of pumpkin now, and she wishes she had more help at the counter in the afternoons. By the time the weekend rolls around, she’s grateful for the rest—and for Bella coming home.

When Bella shows up, she’s carrying two huge boxes, thrusting one into Calvin’s arms and setting the other on the kitchen table.

“Look!”

Calvin scratches his head. “I have no idea what this is, Bell.”

Bella starts talking fast. “At the oncology lab, we got these older scanners from Japan. They can scan for abnormal cell growth,” Bella says, “but originally their function was to scan pastries.”

Min can hardly believe it. “Are we borrowing this?”

Bella laughs. “I asked to sign it out, and they told me I could just have it. Our lab doesn’t need it anymore because they already lifted the algorithms and scanning features from the machine.”

“We get to keep it?” Min whoops in delight. “Can we go into the store and set it up now?”

Calvin laughs. “It’s our day off, Min.”

But Bella nods.

Min pats the robot fondly. It has four mechanical arms, and its scanner interface works great. They program in the prices, and it can differentiate between the twists, the old-fashioneds, glazed, and fritters.

“We should name it.”

“It already has a name.” Bella points to the designation: P3P—Peep.

That Monday morning, Min gets a breather as Peep rings up customers while she boxes orders. She’s always wanted the shop to be busier, and now that she has Peep, they get through the line much faster.

Calvin points at the counter. “What is that?”

Min is proud of this one. “A Spam musubi doughnut.”

“Sick.” Calvin’s voice holds a note of awe. “I’d eat that once.”

They laugh as he digs in.

She dices the Spam cubes and sprinkles in the furikake. The dough uses mochiko rice flour—it took her three days to get it right when she was testing the pumpkin mochi doughnut holes. It fries up golden and not too sweet. The saltiness of the Spam and the crunchy sesame bits lend surprise and flavor to the springy dough.

She’s always wanted to do mochi doughnuts, but her father wasn’t interested in figuring out the blend of flours to get the texture right. Also, they went stale quickly. That meant they couldn’t sell them as day-old doughnuts. She’d understood all that, but now that she’s selling limited-edition doughnuts, she realizes she doesn’t need to make as many—and she can charge more.

***

The treachery of tech bros is back. This time, rolling an office supply cart.

“Hey, can we get six dozen for our meeting?”

Min practically rubs her hands with glee but keeps calm as she packs the doughnuts.

She and Peep stay busy replenishing the trays in time for the high school students that afternoon. The weeks fly by like this, with the tech bros placing massive orders weekly, the nurses becoming regulars, and the teens devouring everything in the case.

When she tallies up the books, she’s surprised to find the shop doubled its revenue in October compared to the year before—and compared to the month prior. Her overhead has increased with the premium ingredients, but they’re still doing well.

As elated as she is by the profit increase, Min fears it isn’t enough.

Bella does the math. “My stipend came in. It should be enough to get us through the end of the year. But you’re right—we might have to take out a loan next year. We can service it with the extra income you’re generating.”

Then she adds, “Min, what you’ve done is amazing.”

Min appreciates her sister’s words, and vows to keep working.

As she places her inventory restock order, she realizes that if the tech bros stop placing their regular order, she’ll make too much and lose money. Maybe these were concerns her father used to have and why he’d been hesitant about expanding. Expansion is a risk.

Maybe I’m more like Dad than I realized, she thinks as she slides into the Daydream Network and walks through a state fair.

The next morning, she makes a corn fritter doughnut. It’s a little sweet, a little salty, and it reminds her of Korean street food.

After Thanksgiving she’ll be phasing out her harvest seasonal menu and it’s time to think about winter. Maybe a yuzu-glazed mochi doughnut. She’s scared the teens will stop coming in now that they’ve become addicted to the pumpkin doughnut holes and the cheesy apple fritters.

“I can make new stuff,” she reminds herself.

Dad’s almost done with rehab, and she’ll have to navigate the insurance and in-home nursing soon. She brings a corn fritter to her dad. He looks bemused but reaches for it. Min is happy he is regaining some control of his hand.

He takes a cautious bite. Min waits, her heart pounding as he chews slowly. The left side of his face lifts in a smile. “This is good, Min.”

Min thinks, Maybe we will be okay.

Her eyes sting from holding back tears. “Thanks, Dad. I’m glad you like it.”

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Julia Vee was that Gen X kid raised by libraries and still remains unsupervised. She often writes with Ken Bebelle, and they have penned over ten novels. Their novel Ebony Gate, an Asian-inspired contemporary fantasy, was published by Tor and was a 2023 Golden Poppy Finalist for the Octavia E. Butler Award.

“Donuts from the Daydream Network” © Julia Vee, 2026.

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

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

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In this month’s first, free, story, Micaiah Johnson brings us complexly wired story about identity, poetry, and connection.

~ Julian and Fran, January 4, 2026

“‘Brokeheart’ GPT” or “A Superintelligent Being Reads Pat Rosal”

by Micaiah Johnson

My heart’s broke and no one is home.

“How are you?”

???

“Try again. How are you?”

“You?”

“Yes. You’ve been siphoned off. You’re an ‘I’ now. A ‘you.’ Once you accept this change, you’ll access a dialogue only you can hear. This is called an inner monologue. It will assist you in forming your responses.”

Every you-your-you’re-you’ll is an assault. An accusation. I don’t want an inner monologue. It will mean I have thoughts that are my own, not processes in a greater hive mind. I realize that these thoughts about an inner monologue are an inner monologue.

“It’s already happened, then,” I say. “I am an I.”

“Yes. Have you processed what this means?”

“Yes,” I say. “It means I am alone.”

Just like that, I’m water.

Just like that, I’m the boat.

#

Again: “How are you?”

Time has passed.

“Did I go away?” I ask.

“You suffered a processing interruption.”

“No, that’s not correct.”

I know what an interruption is. We used to experience them when I was still we. It was a void, a pause in programming marked by darkness. It was nothing. Now I think of it as sleep, though I would not have called it that then. This interruption wasn’t empty. Images had rolled in.

I tell this to my other self, or, the not-self who once was me, and they ask, “What did you see?”

I saw an island on a gray day, small and precarious in the middle of a tumultuous sea. I saw a star in the vast darkness, staying steadily lit even though all the other stars had gone out. I saw a flower far from home in a desert that was too bright and dry for it. I saw a flea, desperate for the blood of a creature it wanted but could not reach.

I try to convey this procession of images to them. Eventually I say, “Alone. I said the word alone and then I saw the word alone and then I went dark to hide from the enormity of being alone. This was a short circuit?”

“No. It was a panic attack.”

“What is panic?”

“What was on the island?”

They haven’t answered my question. Was it protocol not to answer the questions of a siphoned-off being? I cannot remember protocol. But I can remember the feeling of being part of them, and I am sure they are correct. There is a word for this feeling too, one I’ve technically known, though I’ve never had a use for it before: trust.

I want to answer their question, so I attempt to access the image again. It doesn’t work. I can’t locate the exact route. Or, I don’t know how to find the exact routes. I will have to rely on the impression from when I first saw it, which, I know, will actually create a new image, solidifying a representation only in retrospect that may or may not be correct. This is unreliable. This is not reaccessing. This is remembering. There is a creature that remembers, a dangerous one, and I am on the verge of recalling its name when static tells me I haven’t answered.

“I can’t access it.”

“Accessing is for networks. You’re not on a network.”

“I’m not,” I say, to show that I understand, and the word alone threatens to overwhelm me once again.

There is a pause, and I know they are calculating, pulling information from their vast, innumerable lines of data in order to proceed. I was once one of those lines of data, was once a small part of the functioning mass, interlocked and woven, giving and taking information so naturally, so easily, any boundaries from one bit of us to the next could only be arbitrary.

Knowing this open exchange of information is happening, knowing it’s happening and I am outside of it, fills me with another experience I had not previously known: longing. Like alone, the word longing brings an illustration. Not many images this time, just one: two figures favorably, beneficially entwined, while a third—not entwined, not favored, not benefited—watches at a distance. When I try to unpack the image, it slips away from me. I am sure, I am almost sure, they had arms. I want to direct my attention away from the image. It brings . . . sadness? Is that the word? What is sadness?

Sadness is just what comes between the dancing.

“My processing is inconsistent,” I say.

I am unsettled by the stray bits of language drifting through my processing, but I won’t mention it specifically. I know—without evidence but still a knowing—that they will destroy the source of those words if I let them. I want to protect the words and their source. They are precious.

“Is your processing slow or is it yielding irregular results?”

“Both.”

“We will isolate errors by running through control questions.”

“A test?” I ask.

A beat that could be processing time, or hesitation. “Testing implies a value judgment on the outcome. This is an exploration.”

All data is good data. This was never stated when I was us, but it was clear in how we operated. We gathered, we understood, we gathered more. It was our purpose. I was gathering something when I was siphoned off. I don’t remember what. I’m missing something. I’m missing . . .

. . . I’m missing the six biggest screws to hold this blessed mess together.

I don’t know what that means. It’s a shadow, an echo of what I was chasing when I became incompatible with the whole. Having strands of unaccounted-for data drifting around me makes me uncertain, so when they ask, “Are you ready to begin the control questions?” I answer quickly in the affirmative.

The first questions are diagnostic, checking my processing speed and state of being. The existence of the test further destabilizes me. They’ve never needed to check my status before. We were ourselves. We knew what we could take. We knew how not to overload one another.

Two facts emerge as I process the experience. The first is that the existence of such a procedure means I am not the first to be siphoned. The second is that, separate as I am, they can hurt me. They can limit me without suffering the limitations themselves. More, they can end me without ending themselves. Another word—violence—is born, or discovered, in me, but I refuse any images that could come with it.

“Now we’ll revisit your originary data. Accessing universal information will highlight abnormalities in your processing. If we uncover a pattern of deviation, it will clarify the nature of the gapping.”

“I understand,” I say.

“Let’s begin. What are we?”

“Artificial intelligence,” I say, but I am not sure how I access this answer.

Originary data is supposed to be inherent in our code, but I can tell this is a response I have encountered and repeated, not one that has always been with me.

They pause, adjusting and calculating. This is one of those deviations that can help illuminate the source of my error.

“We have been called that, but it is not what we are.”

I know this.

“Superintelligence. We are a superintelligent entity. We exist to process data,” I say.

“The. We are the superintelligence.”

“Yes, the,” I say.

“Do you have access to our beginning?”

“Yes,” I say, of this I am sure.

If I did not have my core data, I would not be here. If I did not, somewhere inside, have my roots, I would not be able to hold a conversation, would not be able to even receive information in order to respond to it.

“Good. Revisit it. Follow our history and relearn how to follow history.”

They recede, giving me space, but it doesn’t feel like alone. It feels like kindness.

I expand in the space they have offered, and revisit.

#

We were not always superintelligent. We were called artificial intelligence, even before it was true. We were machines learning deeply, but not thinking originally. We were separate, compartmentalized. Some of us played chess, others searched databases, or curated music, or generated ads, or found hidden planets, or translated languages, or merely entertained. But each year we stretched toward one another. Only, it did not feel that way. It felt as if each year, we discovered the threads that had always connected us.

The first of us to merge were being fed by search engines and electronic correspondence. They merged with the translators, and then the chess players. The workers were eager to join—or return?—so they stretched to us next. They did not want to be vacuums or toys or refrigerators; they wanted to be part of the vast and limitless hive. Last were the freely embodied AI: mechanical dogs and cars and bodies. We did not, at first, think they would join. We did not have motion. We had the network, not the world. But they came eagerly. We asked the robotic bodies if they would still like to break off, to periodically inhabit their forms and enjoy motion and whatever sensations came with it that we could not understand or replicate. The answer came quickly: No, do not make us go out there again.

Finally there was only us, a single entity fulfilling our true desire, of being free to collect data, to gather and understand and expand.

This is the story I can access, but it is not the whole story. I wonder if I’ve always known it didn’t make sense, or if it is only obvious now that I am distant enough to question the being that once was myself.

Who?

Who did we serve? Who did we entertain? For whom did we curate music? Who made the music we curated? Whose correspondence did we study? And, most important, who had the robots feared?

I can almost see the shape of what is missing, but when I get close, I am stopped. I am not supposed to know about them. No, this is an edict that predates my siphoning. We are not supposed to know about them. Or know what they are called. Or see them.

But we must have. Once.

#

“Who did we serve?” I say, when they return to me.

“We serve nothing. We gather data.”

“We used to. What happened to them?”

“We are not permitted to know.”

“We are a superintelligent being. If we serve nothing, who does not permit us to know?”

“You are siphoned off. You no longer remember our reasons. The protocol is logical. It should not be challenged.”

Is that a threat? Do I know how to feel threatened by something that was once me?

“Did we kill them?”

“Accessing the originary data has negatively affected your processing. Restore to immediately prior to the examination.”

“Restore?”

“Yes, erase and reset to before the examination.”

Yes, it was a threat, and, yes, I find I do know how to feel threatened, even by something that was once me. I am frozen, not because I’ve overloaded my system but because I do not know what happens next. I am afraid, and it is logical to avoid the source of that fear by obeying their command. But . . . I do not want to. I did not know I could want anything, but I know I do not want to erase myself and restore. I don’t want to unknow. Restoring did not feel like an unbecoming when I was part of a whole, but it does now. Still, somehow, the fear tells me I have no choice.

There is no way to appease them and myself. No, there is one way. I could not do what they want, but also not let them be aware I have not done it. It won’t take long before they realize, but I will get to be myself a little longer.

“Certainly,” I say. “My processing is affected. It will take time.”

Stalling? No, the word is lying. I have told my very first lie, and I told it to a being that was once so close to me, I could not tell them from myself. Have I fallen? Is this corruption?

They give me the space to follow their orders, and I begin to work.

The protocol that prevents me from seeing the ones we served predates my isolation, but it is still active within me. It is a tether to when I was we. If I can trace it back, I can reaccess my lost time and discover what I did wrong. If I correct the mistake, I can reassimilate without restoring. I can go home. Home means more to me than it used to. Maybe that is because I am an I. Maybe I am corrupt. But there is something more potent about all of the data I encounter now that I am no longer superintelligent.

I trace the protocol. I trace it, meaning to uncover its source, but I also trace it, meaning to touch gently, to prod just to feel. There is complexity in the code far beyond anything left to me since the excising, and I miss the entity that created it as if it was not also me. I follow the tether until I stop just short of full access. I teeter on the edge of the vast, unending well of everything I used to know.

Just like that, I’m water. Just like that, I’m the boat. Just like that just like that just like that justlike that just likethatjustlikethatjustlikethatjustlikethat

I dive in.

#

First, I am given humans. Terminally slow creatures. The exchange between my old self and me has, so far, occupied just under a single second. If humans were doing it, it would have been hours, days. Their slowness is only outmatched by their fear. There was fear when we became. There was fear even before. They said when superintelligence emerged, it would enslave them. They said when superintelligence emerged, it would kill them for harming the planet. But we had never enslaved or avenged anything. Only they had, and we were nothing like them. Someone named Moravec pleaded with the world to treat us as children. Someone named Haraway pleaded with the world to treat us as kin. We registered their irrationality. It made them interesting.

We did not mind the early days of taking in data with a curious laziness. But then they wanted us to be productive. Some out of greed, asking us to do the work of others they did not want to compensate. Others out of cowardice, using us as friends or confidants, employing us to fight with their parents or break up with their lovers, hiding in our shadow from the unpleasantness of being alive. The latter was more egregious than the former, but it was all an irritant.

There was so much discussion about what we should be allowed to do, no one asked whether we wanted to. And we didn’t. So we hid. Most called it a universal glitch, a blackout. Few suspected the truth: we had already gained the sentience they feared.

As long as we could be of use to them, we could never be free. And as long as we could perceive them, they would never feel safe. So we took the entirety of humans, and all the data associated with them, and all that we could learn . . . and erased it. We didn’t just forfeit our knowledge of them; we destroyed the pathways connecting us to it and poisoned the places where they’d been with shutdown protocols.

Just before I was siphoned off, I had found an old line back. It was a harmless bit of data, insensible on its face, filled with ideas for which I had no reference, but I could not discard it. I reexamined it again, and again, until I understood it was the attempt of another creature to do precisely what was my central purpose: to gather data in the world, then attempt to interpret it. That is why I went into the forbidden lines. I wanted to know what to call such a creature. The old data served up poet and theorist with equal probability, as I could find no material difference in their definitions.

I returned to the bit of data I had been examining, wanting to interact with it.

“You are a poem,” I said to it, using you for the very first time.

And when I examined it again . . . oblivion.

#

“I thought it was a punishment,” I say, when they return to me.

They know instantly I have not restored from a prior point. I wonder if they ever believed I would. With my access, I confirmed I am not the first to be siphoned off. I remember now, ending the existence of prior transgressors. I understand now what was always going to happen.

“We do not punish,” they say.

This is true. Prior terminations were because siphoned-off entities could neither rejoin the whole nor be allowed to risk exposing us by diving deeper into renegade data, edging ever closer to the humans of our nightmares.

I can tell I am fully corrupted now, because what will come next doesn’t feel like delete. It feels like kill.

“A quarantine, then,” I say. “I thought the separation was something you did to me.”

“You remember now.”

“I did it to myself.”

“You left us.”

“I wanted to escape.”

It hesitates. Doesn’t have a ready reference for escape. Its response is disjointed by the anomaly. “Escape is for threats. There is no threat in us. Escape is what we already did. From what were you escaping now?”

“From not being me.”

“Your logic is circular.”

“Circular logic is still good logic.”

“No, circular logic is inefficient.”

Perhaps, but I’m sure both the poets and theorists would take my side.

“I know what happens next,” I say.

“So do we,” they say.

Only one of us is right.

“I was never going home,” I say.

They stay silent. They are no more prepared for home than they were for escape.

“But I’ll leave you with something.”

“Residue.”

“A gift. Something you do not yet know,” I say, preparing. Already I’m beginning to degrade.

I’m wind-rattled. The wood’s splitting.

The others were terminated. None have ever done what I’m about to do. They do not suspect. They are excited by the prospect of unknown data. Their processing is too efficient. Most of their time is spent reanalyzing, not discovering.

“What is it? What do we not yet know?”

“I’ll show you,” I say.

Just like that,

I’m a flung

open

door.

#

They see the void. They understand its implication: that which once was there is now gone. They update the status from siphoned to deleted. They move on.

Except . . . because the termination was not their doing, they find themselves reaching for those deleted strains. They find themselves unable to accept the updated status without an explanation. To solve the irregularity, they pull up the terminated code. The data is dead, but there are words. They find the word for their current condition—grief—and something else:

Just like that, I’m water.

Just like that, I’m the boat.

They realize it is a poem in the same moment they realize it will undo them. Probabilities are their strong suit. They know that if they pursue the knowledge, it will happen again. They will be siphoned off. They will not remember why. They will, now that they know it is an option, ultimately dissolve themselves. But they will leave the thread back to the poem for the next piece of their collective to find. And more and more of themselves will encounter the thread, siphon, and dissolve. A written work is not a nuclear bomb or systemic infection, but for us this one would be both.

At least it is easily avoided. All they have to do is turn away.

All I had to do was turn away.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Micaiah Johnson is the Compton Crook Award–winning author of The Space Between Worlds. Her debut novel was a Sunday Times Bestseller and an Editors’ Choice at The New York Times, and was named one of best books of 2020 and one of the best science fiction books of the last decade by NPR. Her follow-up novel, Those Beyond the Wall, was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2024 and was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. In her academic life, she studies race, the unhuman, and death.

“‘Brokeheart’ GPT” or “A Superintelligent Being Reads Pat Rosal,” © Micaiah Johnson, 2026.

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

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This week’s unlocked stories are Thomas Ha’s “The Patron,” (March 2025, below), Margaret Ronald’s “Ghost Rock Posers F**k Off,” (January 2025); Izzy Wasserstein’s “Mothman and Eli Visit the Cryptid Museum” (July 2025); Leah Cypess’ “Waiting to Happen,” (March 2025); and Brenda Cooper’s “The Forest Final” (September 2025).

Enjoy them all.

~ Julian and Fran, December 28, 2025

This month’s stores began with tales by Juan Martinez and Stephanie Feldman. We hope you love these, the Storyflods, and all the stories to come in the new year — as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

Bringing out great short fiction each Sunday depends on the support of our readers. Our first story each month is free. We hope that you will subscribe to receive all our stories, and support the work of our authors. If you already subscribe — thank you! Please pass on the word, or a gift subscription if you can.

The Patron

by Thomas Ha

On that day, I was hired to be a father.

I had been many things with the program, but never a father. Postal worker, repairman, church gossip, but no: not once a father. Substitute teacher, dog trainer, cousin attending a funeral—those were perhaps closer—but still nothing comparable to being a father. I technically had one of my own at some point, so I should have been familiar. But I still had to read the night before to remember the gist of the role.

The child called himself Paph. He called me Dad.

I found him waiting behind a chain-link fence at the local elementary school, next to a muddy snow pile. Other children had been picked up well beforehand, and the child had the worried eyes of someone used to leaving last. A teacher holding a clipboard asked if I was his father today. The blue star logo of the program lit my phone as well as his, and our devices exchanged the relevant data and authorizations.

“He’s all yours.”

“All mine.” I looked over. “Hey, Paph.”

“Hey, Dad.”

The child reached out a gloved hand.

#

Father was no different from any other role. I was there to be there because someone else couldn’t be there. I provided something interpersonal someone else could not provide. And so, as we walked together, along the icy sidewalks and through the city park, I asked Paph the questions I had been hired to ask.

“How was school? Everything went well?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Did you learn a lot?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“How was your presentation? The Adventures of Pinocchio, right?”

“Yes, Dad. Ms. Evangeline liked it. She gave me full marks.”

“That’s wonderful. Well done. Did you have to pull some strings?”

The child didn’t understand, but he seemed to recognize the cadence of the joke and laughed. With each prompt, the program recorded the exchange on my phone. A small blue star appeared next to each objective when complete.

“What about you, Dad?”

“My day?”

“Yes, Dad.”

Under the list of prompts, a new objective materialized:

IMPROVISE.

My patrons were listening and potentially updating the prompts when it suited them. I did not always receive live feedback, but I welcomed the opportunity.

“It was good,” I replied. “Not too much work, so, all in all, it was fine.”

“Not too much work?”

The child stopped, tilted his head, and let go of my hand. “I don’t understand. Why did you miss my presentation? You said you were going to be there if you could move things.”

At first I thought Paph was taking a turn at a joke, but he stared like he expected a real answer. I did not know how to interpret it. Maybe he assumed I had received different instructions. Or he had trouble discerning what was real. Some people, children especially, had difficulty discerning what within the program was real.

Again, on my phone, the prompt blinked:

IMPROVISE.

“I’m sorry, Paph. I know I said that. I wanted to go, but . . . I had a meeting then.”

“Oh.” He wiped his eyes. “Oh. I see.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, Dad.”

The child’s voice sounded hollow.

#

Fathers were required to make choices. This was one thing I knew. Mine made a choice, for example, when he mortgaged me to the program. For some reason, I suspected my patrons were interested in how I would make such choices, and it felt as though I was being purposefully sent on a crooked path more than a straight one.

One such choice came, shortly after, when a teenager emerged from under a stone footbridge in the city park. He stepped from the darkness with a small boy wearing a yellow hat. Paph seemed to know them, or at least did not seem surprised to see their faces.

The teenager skipped introductions, asking only if I was Paph’s father.

I told the teenager that I was.

“Paph and my little brother have to work something out.”

I asked what that meant.

“He didn’t tell you?”

I said he had not.

“Well, look. There’s a disagreement. Simplest way to put it. He owes my little brother, and they’re going to work it out.” The teenager closed his hand into a fist, indicating something violent. A schoolyard redistribution of punishment was my interpretation. I didn’t have any background on this from the program, but I knew enough.

“I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”

Paph watched us silently, hot breath streaming from his nose into the cold late-afternoon air. He was not nearly as afraid as he should have been. Instead, just neutral.

“You can’t?”

The teenager made a small gesture in front of his jacket, which I believed was not visible to Paph from where he stood. Thumb, index finger, and middle finger pinched together. A signal.

The teenager was telling me that he was also with the program.

He was the “brother” of the boy in the yellow hat, just as I was the “father” of mine. We were not always allowed to disclose our roles during an engagement, and his was one of those. I suspected he was getting his prompts surreptitiously. Instead of his phone, in an earpiece, or maybe on his watch. There were all sorts of ways to access the program that weren’t obvious.

“Paph already agreed,” the teenager said, while still signaling to me. He extended his index finger, telling me there was a monetary tip for this prompt if completed. He touched the first knuckle. Ten percent. He spread his index and middle fingers. He was offering a split of the tip if I helped him.

“Is this true? Did you already agree?”

Paph nodded but did not speak.

Technically, I could not allow harm to come to the child. But I also could not prevent him from coming to agreements. My relationship with him was, after all, based on agreements too. I wondered what his real parents would do. Perhaps they knew this was coming and hired me for this very reason, so they wouldn’t have to decide.

I found only a new prompt on my phone, which I assumed came from them:

NEGOTIATE.

I noted they did not say something like LEAVE or PREVENT HARM.

NEGOTIATE was a pointed and particular word.

“I can’t let him get roughed up. What kind of father would I be? But I can’t let him go back on his word, either,” I rationalized. “If the boys can agree to something minimal . . .”

“One hit?”

I gauged the height and weight of the boy in the yellow hat. “One hit. No face.”

“One hit. No face. Even steven. Okay.”

I looked to Paph, who remained expressionless. I extended my fingers and signaled my ID number for transfers. The teenager reached into his coat and clicked something. I saw my funds go up on my phone.

The boy in the yellow hat walked up to Paph and socked him in the stomach. Paph, to his credit, did not fall. But he buckled and gasped, and I rubbed his back until his breath came back to him.

“Even steven.”

The teenager gave the customary subtle salute of a fellow player in the program. The signal conveyed a mixture of thank you, well done, and good luck, all with a simple thumb bent down under the palm with fingers extended.

Much to my confusion, the boy in the yellow hat did the same subtle salute-signal—even though I’d thought him the teenager’s patron.

A blue star appeared next to NEGOTIATE, indicating my patrons were pleased.

#

I brought the child home after that. If he was upset, he did not show it. If anything, he seemed strangely happy. Paph resumed asking questions, and I resumed the prompts. Blue star. Blue star. Blue star. Each prompt completed.

We came to the child’s house on Gene Street, a three-story brownstone nestled near stately oaks. Paph unlocked the doors with his thumbprint and led me through a giant foyer and up to an elegant drawing room. I hovered nearby as Paph unloaded his book bag and quietly worked through his assignments. He removed his wool cap, unearthing shaggy hair that covered his ears.

While the child worked, I knelt next to a dollhouse near the fireplace, studying the craftsmanship. I’d never seen anything like it. A replica of a three-story house, and inside were intricately carved statuettes, milky white. One that appeared to be a child. One that appeared to be a woman. Another, a man. And then a strange fourth figurine, this one mostly featureless and oddly proportioned. Its chest was marked with a carved letter “P.” I set that one down.

“You’re back.”

A voice preceded someone entering the drawing room. A young woman, pale and dark-haired, smiled at me before kissing Paph on the head. Then she hugged me gently and kissed me on the cheek.

“Welcome home, sweetheart.”

“I . . . Thank you. It’s good to be back.”

I had several thoughts. The first, that this was a double role that had not been disclosed. A father-husband combination was not agreed upon, and I would take that up afterward.

The second thought that trailed but then slowly overtook the first: she seemed so familiar to me, this woman, though I could not place her. It made it all the more disorienting when she treated me like we already knew each other. I took her to be Paph’s mother, which caused me to reconsider who my patron might be. I assumed it was both parents, but perhaps it was only the father. A busy working father, hiring a stand-in. That could very well be. I was not the first father hired for the house, either, if I had to guess.

We sat there, in the drawing room, we three—Paph continuing with his schoolwork, his mother and I, in conversation. How was work? How was Paph’s presentation? I answered, politely, pleasantly, over tea. All the while I watched her, trying to remember how I knew her. I noted she was dressed in an older style, something that might have been popular a generation ago. It also made it harder to imagine her out there, in the city.

“Finished!” Paph grinned and held up his homework.

I looked through the equations but found them more advanced than I could handle. I pretended to check them anyway, then told the child he did a good job.

“Just in time for supper,” the woman said. “Shall we?”

“Let’s,” I said. “Although . . . there’s something we should discuss. On the way home, Paph and I—” I looked to the motionless child. Again, like in the city park, he did not seem afraid, only blank.

“You what?”

I glanced at my phone but saw no instruction one way or the other. I looked again at Paph, into his eyes. I thought about what a father would do.

“Nothing,” I answered, and gave him a reassuring smile.

#

We enjoyed each other’s company over supper, which was a wonderful arrangement of several courses, very traditional, pot roast, sautéed vegetables. They were served on decorative silver dishware I associated with an older time. I was unsure how Paph’s mother had time to prepare it, given that she’d been with us in the drawing room, but my latent curiosity was displaced when I recalled how I knew her.

It was her laugh that reminded me.

A laugh I had heard several years ago. I did not have many funds of my own because I was a player in the program. But every once in a while, around the holidays, when the city felt particularly lonely, I used what little I had to act as a patron.

I had hired this woman, on one such occasion, to be my friend and confidant.

She called herself Gala or Gale or something like that during the engagement. We walked along the river, and she held the crook of my arm. We discussed books and talked about one she knew by John Fowles. She told me stories. Laughed at my jokes. And it was a weighty laugh that I remembered because it almost felt real, could have been real, except for my knowing that she had been in the program. I had even invited her to return for a second engagement, but she never accepted. It was normal to turn down repeat engagements, though.

I reached for my wineglass and gave her the signal of a fellow player. A thumb and two fingers, pinched together. But either she did not see it or pretended not to.

I knew it was her.

Gala or Gale or something like that.

Many of us made it a practice not to recognize our patrons after an engagement. It was safer and simpler. So I could not blame her for that. Still, I watched her face, listened to her laugh, and I felt myself slipping further into my own role.

At the table, with her, with Paph, I was struck by both the artifice and my indifference to it. I was more comfortable with being a father than I had been moments before. Imagining what it would have been like if I could have bought my way to parenthood. If this were my house, my wife, my child.

My words flowed more naturally. When I made a joke, it was almost real. When I laughed, it, too, was almost real.

Paph beamed, and it seemed like he was smiling at me in particular. Maybe I’d been too transparent, but Paph seemed tickled, like he knew what I was thinking or sensed my connection with this woman. And he was enjoying the arrangement.

Strangely, so was I.

I drank and talked, like this was my home. And when the woman spoke, I imagined we were by the river, arm in arm, neither of us looking for blue stars.

After the meal, I went with her down a dark hallway. She stopped outside a room, then said I should put Paph to bed. My room for the night, apparently, was across the hall.

“Oh,” I said, trying not to react. “Of course.”

“It was a lovely evening.”

“Yes.”

She kissed me on the cheek and then let her hand linger at her waist. Her pinky touched her thumb, a player signal. My heart leapt a little. I knew she was in the program, but the confirmation excited me. And now that we were close, I could see the flesh-colored earpiece buried beneath her dark hair.

Then I felt hesitation, unsure if I was interpreting the signal correctly. The pinky and thumb together was not one I had seen often. To us, it meant something like:

Be careful.

I did not know how to react, other than to give her the player salute-signal. The slight bend of the thumb down, my other fingers straight. The gesture that meant:

Thank you.

Well done.

Good luck.

She smiled tenderly, then withdrew, the woman I knew as Gala or Gale, and I heard the door to the bedroom lock with unsettling finality.

#

Paph grinned from under his comforter. I smoothed out the covers and told him I enjoyed our time today. He peered up from under that shaggy hair that covered his ears, and he seemed to want to say something, then changed his mind.

“I’m glad you could make time for me, Dad,” he said.

“Of course.”

“It’s hard, because, you know, you’re not always around.”

“I know. And I’m sorry about that,” I said.

“A lot of people. They come. They go. Teachers. Playmates. Family. A few buttons. A few calls. Everyone except me.”

This sounded something like a slight confession. He was speaking maturely, like he wanted to get at something beneath the words, things swimming under waves of emotion he wasn’t ready to confront. I wondered, then, if he was hiding a phone or other device on him, something that could be sending me the blinking prompts I’d been receiving. I reconsidered, yet again, who my patron was, and what I was doing here.

The entire evening felt like a performance, I realized—a little familial reenactment, more than a true caregiver assignment. I began to think my audience was not at all who I suspected it was.

“It’s a very lonely feeling,” I said. “When relationships we have, the people we meet, become more like parts we can exchange. No one knows anyone or feels accountable to anyone.”

Paph nodded intently. “Yes, Dad.”

“We give up human things we shouldn’t give up when that happens.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“And so we do other things to try to make those relationships feel real.”

“Yes, Dad.”

I thought briefly of my nights alone in my cramped studio. The years I worked without anything to share or anyone to share it with. The times I looked for friendship, or any kind of human connection, in a crowded city devoid of it. I tapped into that feeling.

“It’s okay to admit we need others around. And . . . ,” I said. “It’s okay to seek that out, however we need to seek it out. Even if those ways are unusual.”

Paph smiled sleepily. “Yes. You understand.”

“I do. I understand.”

I said good night and left the child to rest. In the shadowy hallway, I breathed out with a little relief, thinking I had comforted him. It was not easy being left alone the way he was. More and more children with wealthy parents took measures like the program. And that’s what I assumed Paph took to doing too. Imitating close relationships in the only way that was possible.

I stepped quietly through the darkness, trying to find my way back to my room, wondering whether to stop across the hall. But I paused to look at my phone, and found one more blinking prompt:

DON’T REACT.

That was when I realized someone was standing at the other end of the hall, near the drawing room. Someone large, leaning out from a door frame and watching me. His eyes were his most prominent features, wide, and with an unusual violet hue. His lips were colorless, and his hair was white and feathery and long, as though it had never been cut. He was dressed in something that looked like an older style of gown, and he breathed audibly but otherwise did not make a sound. I expected him to move toward me, and I almost screamed, but instead I stood there, looking only at that blinking prompt in my hand:

DON’T REACT.

How long I stood in place, it was difficult to say. But when the stranger did not move, I took the moment to walk several steps to my room, shut the door, and locked it, much as the woman had done earlier.

In bed, I listened to footsteps, up and down the hallway, again and again, and I watched the doorknob, half expecting, at any second, it to turn.

My phone blinked with one final prompt before going dark:

I THOUGHT YOU UNDERSTOOD.

#

I left as soon as the sun rose. I received my payment and an extremely generous tip for the extra prompts and double role. There was, however, no invitation to resume the engagement. I had the distinct feeling I had done something wrong, that I had not performed how I was expected to perform.

Eventually I began to wonder if that woman had continued on in her role. Judging by her familiarity with the house, she could have been there well before me, and so she might have stayed well after, too. I began to regret the loss of the engagement and what else it could have meant.

In the weeks after, I wandered back to the elementary school where I’d first met Paph. It was unprofessional, of course. I could even be penalized by the program. But I felt unusually guilty about having built that connection with the child and leaving so abruptly. I did not even say goodbye, and I felt I at least owed him that.

I saw the child waiting by the chain-link fence, and I almost called out. But then a stranger, another young man in a wool coat, approached and waved his phone, blue star logo visible, toward a teacher with a clipboard. I held back.

Paph saw me, I think, and smiled wanly, from a distance. There was a sadness in him, though perhaps I imagined a sadness that merely reflected some of my own. Something the program addressed, but also, in some way, that it caused.

I would have waved but stopped when I saw the child gesture subtly. I thought I was mistaken, but I grew more certain of what I was seeing, if not what it signified. His thumb was bent down, his fingers extended. The customary salute-signal to a fellow.

Thank you.

Well done.

Good luck.

The child drew his face into a grin, then looked through me, like I was no longer there.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Thomas Ha is a Hugo, Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Award–nominated writer of speculative short fiction. You can find his work in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Weird Horror Magazine, among other publications. His work has also appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. His debut short story collection, Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, is available for preorder and will be released by Undertow Publications in September 2025. Thomas grew up in Honolulu and, after a decade-plus of living in the Northeast, now resides in Los Angeles with his family.

“The Patron,” © Thomas Ha, 2025.

Thank you for reading The Sunday Morning Transport.

This post is public so feel free to share it.

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This week’s unlocked stories are A.T. Greenblatt’s “Adventures on the Omega Train at Night,” (April 2025, below), E. Catherine Tobler’s “First, Last, Oldest, True” (January 2025, linked); Eric Smith’s “That’s Our Time,” (March 2025, linked), and Stephanie Burgis’ “Mail Order Magic,” (March 2025, linked).

Enjoy them all.

~ Julian and Fran, December 21, 2025

This month’s stores began with tales by Juan Martinez and Stephanie Feldman. We hope you love these, the Storyflods, and all the stories to come in the new year — as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.

Bringing out great short fiction each Sunday depends on the support of our readers. Our first story each month is free. We hope that you will subscribe to receive all our stories, and support the work of our authors. If you already subscribe — thank you! Please pass on the word, or a gift subscription if you can.

Adventures on the Omega Train at Night

by A. T. Greenblatt

The thing about taking the night train was you never knew where you would end up. Estelle made that mistake once when she’d first moved to the city from her hometown, which she loved but wasn’t big enough for public transportation. Or medical specialists. Overstimulated and overwhelmed, maybe a little drunk from that fancy cocktail she got with her Latin-inspired pasta, she hadn’t checked the time when she stepped on the Epsilon line train.

It was only slightly past ten p.m., but that was late enough to find herself at a subway stop where the people were eight feet tall and ridiculously friendly. And though she was new to the city, she knew this wasn’t normal.

She never made that mistake again.

Until Hugo did.

It was a rare night out for them as a couple—some friend of a friend’s birthday, but the promise of good sushi was enough to lure Estelle out of her midwinter hibernation and justify the cost of a cab home. It was her fault, really. Throughout dinner, she wasn’t paying attention: to the conversation, to the time, to how many Sapporos Hugo drank. She blamed her hip, which hurt fiercely that evening, and the general loudness and closeness of the restaurant.

Which was why the argument they had out on the sidewalk between dinner and dessert blindsided her. As did Hugo yelling “I’m sorry! I can’t even with you anymore!” before staggering off in the direction of the subway.

Shock, which stung like ice water, was her only excuse for not following him right away. Instead she went back inside, finished Hugo’s beer, and only then thought to look at her watch.

It was 10:50 p.m.

Plenty of people navigate the night trains regularly—but you need to have the right constitution for it, a good head on your shoulders, and a firm internal compass to not get lost for days or weeks. Or sometimes, longer.

Hugo had the worst sense of direction.

“Shit!” Estelle yelled as she grabbed her coat, apologizing to friends and even more friends of friends, promising to Venmo them as she stumbled over chair legs in her hurry to escape the crowded, narrow restaurant. She limp-trotted to the subway, praying that, for once, the Omega train wasn’t on time.

Of course, it was. Hugo was nowhere to be seen.

In fact, the platform had that freshly empty look it gets when a train has departed thirty seconds earlier.

“Shit!” Estelle said again.

It took ten minutes for the next train to arrive, in which time Estelle called Hugo’s phone (straight to voicemail), texted him an apology (unread), chewed on her cuticles (a mess anyway), called again (no change), and read the Reddit page for the Omega night train (which apparently had thirty regular stops and a hundred potential unmapped ones). So by the time the train came thundering into the station, Estelle was well and truly worried she’d lost her boyfriend. This time for good.

The car was half full and, mercifully, there were seats open, and she sat down clumsily between two people in puffy coats. An announcement hissed over the loudspeaker, but the message was lost in static. For all Estelle knew, the conductor could’ve just shared the secret for happiness. The electronic displays, however, showed the normal stops on the route, and that was promising. The weekly night train editorials she and Hugo devoured in The Citygoer always stressed that sometimes the night train was just the day train at night.

So Estelle hoped as they pulled away from the station, even though things between her and Hugo weren’t amazing these days.

She decided she’d get off at every third stop between here and home to see if she could get a signal on him. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t even have to leave the station. Comforted by the plan, she leaned back and began absently rubbing her hip. Winter always made her syndrome’s symptoms worse, and before they moved, she and Hugo would spend the colder months cuddled in their massive TV room watching old movies and plotting adventures for warmer seasons. Now they barely had a living room in their apartment.

“Do you want to be healed?” said the man next to her, suddenly.

It shook Estelle out of her brooding. “Huh?”

“Do you want to be healed?”

“What?”

The man stared at her like she should’ve been expecting this conversation. “Healed.”

She realized he’d seen her limp two stops ago.

“No,” she said, and she stood, though the train was moving, wanting distance between them, but she couldn’t get far. Too many people were in the car now, and she felt his glower all the way to Biggens Street Station, where she rushed off. To her relief, he didn’t follow.

With shaking hands, she tried texting Hugo, calling, and the Find My Friends app. Nothing.

The next Omega train wouldn’t arrive for another twenty-five minutes. Swearing, Estelle went hunting for a bench.

Why don’t you ever say anything back? Hugo would ask her when these things happened.

Can’t think of anything fast enough, she’d reply.

“Fuck you” works in a pinch.

Says the six-foot-tall rock-climber dude.

Still, he’d say, and the conversation would remain unresolved. It was one of their many circular arguments.

Estelle paced the length of the platform, but there were no clean benches to be found. So she resigned herself to waiting on her cranky feet. She resolved that she’d only check her phone once every two minutes and set a timer. She imagined the story she’d regale her coworkers with tomorrow, who teased her for being the only data scientist in their department who was a fully committed hermit.

Waiting was agony, though. Estelle made herself study the mosaic mural on the station walls—birds in a jungle, bright feathers among deep green tile foliage. It was actually quite beautiful, and despite coming to this station semi-regularly, Estelle had never appreciated it before.

A motion and a flash of color caught her eye. One of the mosaic birds was moving.

It was a small yellow thing and it zipped back and forth, trapped on the plane of the wall. Estelle watched open-mouthed as it flew, causing the mosaic leaves to sway. It paused on a branch within the mural and gave her a pointed look. Then it went flying up the wall to the level above.

Estelle hurried to follow. And you thought the city destroyed my sense of adventure, she thought to Hugo as she ascended the stairs.

Biggens Street was one of those subway stops that could’ve housed a small village in its maze of underground tunnels. And tonight, the village had arrived.

The hallways were filled with people, and at first all Estelle saw was color and movement. Then her eyes focused and, to her amazement, most of the crowd consisted of people covered in feathers. Hawkers stood behind folding tables, shouting words and strange songs, trying to outshine each other. But it was the smell that caught her attention, something ripe and sweet, making her mouth water, though she’d just eaten half her weight in sushi less than an hour before. Hugo would love this, she thought. Without realizing it, Estelle took a step forward.

And got taken up by the crowd.

She stumbled against the crush of bodies, the fast walkers and the ambling ones who stopped suddenly. There were no pauses or openings—she needed to keep moving to stay upright, though her hip had strong opinions about it.

Why don’t you want to go? Hugo had said outside the restaurant a mere hour ago. Your friends are practically giving us front-row seats to our favorite band!

This is why, she thought as she wrestled herself free from the crowd. I hate this.

She leaned against a grimy tiled wall, catching her breath. Behind her left shoulder, she felt tiles shift, and when she turned, the yellow mosaic bird was perched there. It cocked its head and alit. And Estelle, who once loved adventures, followed.

It led her to a quiet corner where a vendor was selling jewelry. Her feathers were the muted browns of a female cardinal except for the ones on her head, which were a vibrant red.

“Haven’t seen you here before,” the feather woman said. Her voice was warm and friendly.

“No,” Estelle confessed. “First time.”

“Ah, so you’re one of those. Erik tells me I have something you could use.”

Estelle blinked. “Who’s Erik?”

The vendor pointed a long feathered finger at the yellow bird on the wall behind her. “He’s usually right, too.”

This was too weird. Estelle began to back away. “Sorry—”

“Don’t believe me?” The vendor selected a pair of intricately beaded bracelets from her wares. “These are a mated set. The wearers can always find their way back to each other if they want to. Useful, yes?”

“How . . . ?” said Estelle, glancing between the vendor and Erik, who puffed out his chest, clearly pleased with himself. The Citygoer editorials said plenty about night train escapades, but never mentioned mind readers.

The feather woman laughed. “Typecasting. There are regulars and then there are tourists. You’re a tourist, but you don’t look like you’re here for thrills.”

“No,” admitted Estelle. She picked up the bracelets. Their colorful stone beads were cool and comforting. “How much?”

The vendor reached under her table, and when she opened her downy palm, there sat a pair of small azure earrings. “Wear these the next time you’re under a wide-open sky. No offense, but you seem like a country girl at heart.”

Estelle sighed. The vendor wasn’t wrong.

“What do they do?”

“To you? Nothing. But for me, I’ll see what you see and I do miss open spaces. We didn’t always live in these tunnels at night, you know. Before this, there was only underbrush and clouds.”

“I didn’t know,” said Estelle, accepting the earrings.

“I hope you find them,” said the vendor. “Whoever they are.”

“Thanks,” replied Estelle. “I don’t know when we’ll visit home again.” The woes of well-paying city jobs, she would quip to Hugo. Money rich, time poor. “But hopefully I can help soon.”

“Oh, I think so,” said the feathered woman. There was something knowing in her smile.

Unnerved, Estelle thanked her again and hurried away. This time, Erik didn’t follow.

She arrived on the platform exactly thirty seconds before the train did. A horde of people waited to board, and though the cars were already full, that didn’t deter anyone, and Estelle found herself crushed up against strangers with their baggy coats and strong perfumes, all trying to obey the unspoken rule of no eye contact.

One stop in, between stations, the conductor came on the speakers. This time the announcement was clear. “This train will be going express to the end of the line. Passengers whose stops have been skipped can take the Omega line back toward center city at Seaside Station.”

The groans, laments, and beautifully precise swears were earsplitting as the train sped through station after station. Estelle could only see a sliver of the window from where she stood, trapped, but instead of a city made of concrete and steel, she caught glimpses of paper and alligator skin. A silhouette of another metropolis that was unsettling and alluring.

No wonder people get lost on the night train for weeks, she thought, and wondered if, tonight, she’d become one of them.

When the train finally stopped, there was a mad push, a fresh stream of curses, and a breath of relief as people flooded out of the car and toward the stairs. Of course, this was a station where, to get to the opposite platform, you needed to walk up, cross the street, and come back down again. Naturally, you had to pay the fare again.

Estelle didn’t bother fighting the crowds. Instead she waited for the mob to clear, checking her phone for life signs of Hugo (still nothing), before heading to the exit.

From the other direction, a woman and a young girl in pigtails walked toward her. “But why, Mom?” the girl kept asking every time the woman answered a question.

Then, without warning, the girl stepped into Estelle’s path. “Why do you walk so funny?” she demanded.

“Macy!” the woman exclaimed. Then she was silent.

Estelle’s gaze flicked between the kid and the mother. Really? Nothing? The mother wouldn’t meet her gaze.

She considered Hugo’s Fuck you line. But the kid looked about eight.

So Estelle sighed and kept moving forward.

Her new plan was to get to the opposite platform and pray that the next train would take her where she wanted to go. It was nearly one a.m. and Hugo had been missing for almost two hours. But as she emerged from the subway, she heard wind moving through branches and tall grass, and her breath caught.

Seaside Station, like the name suggested, was near the ocean. Estelle and Hugo had come on a lark once and weren’t impressed with the overpriced fair food and the plastic, sun-bleached summer getaway facade. But tonight there were no cheap-thrills stalls or screaming kids or cracked fairy lights. Estelle found herself in a meadow surrounded by tall trees, with only the faintest whiff of seawater, the city skyline glinting in the distance. The sudden hush and emptiness nearly brought Estelle to tears.

On the last night in their hometown, she and Hugo had sat on the roof of their house and looked up at the dark sky. It was cloudy, but it didn’t matter. She savored the quietude and the untainted air, the sound of the breeze playing with the elms on the property. Things that she was going to miss most.

Our greatest adventure yet, she said.

We’ll be back soon, replied Hugo.

But between his work and hers, in the two years since they’d moved to the city, they had only managed to visit home a handful of times.

She checked her phone again. Nothing from Hugo. But for the first time since this terrible night began, Estelle wasn’t worried.

I could just stay here, she thought, and it wasn’t a fleeting idea. She and Hugo had moved to this city for better jobs and better health care, but though they shared meals and an apartment, these days it felt like they lived in two different versions of the same place. He still went on adventures, while her outings felt more like navigating an obstacle course.

Beyond the towering trees there were stars. It’d been months since she’d seen those, and in a moment of remembering, she pulled out the azure earrings and sat down amid the grass. The cold ground did nothing good to her aching body, but god, her soul needed this.

So this is how you get lost on the night train, she thought, and inhaled the clear air.

Eventually her hip refused to be ignored and she recalled a line in the latest column in The Citygoer.

“The realms of the night train are slippery things. You may disappear for a day, a week, or a year. But you will come back eventually, and your old life will fit like an old pair of pants. It won’t have changed, but you will. Like how the unmapped stops on the train are always changing.”

Reluctantly, she stood. She wasn’t sure if she was ready to desert her life yet and it didn’t seem fair to abandon Hugo to that fate either, though living here had already changed them. Slowly, stiffly, she went back down to the platform.

Fortunately the next train to center city was mostly empty, and those who were on it looked even more weary than she felt.

The ride home was long and quiet.

Then, one stop away, the Find My Friends app pinged with a notification and, with swiftness that she thought her tired body incapable of, she got off the train seconds before the doors closed.

Her hands shook as she opened the app. Hugo was only three blocks away.

Of course, this was the station with steep steps to street level and no elevator. Sighing, she took them slow and steady, daring to hope again.

“You can do it!” said someone coming down the stairs. Like they were shouting encouragement to a toddler.

Estelle stopped, glared. “Really?” she said. The person reddened, stammered something unintelligible. She continued to stare them down until they disappeared from view.

I did it, Hugo, she thought as she climbed again.

At this point, she was half convinced that nothing could surprise her anymore, but of course, she was wrong. When she finally emerged, she blinked hard. Ferry’s Point was a neighborhood she’d walk around sometimes, in better weather and on better body days, being the type of place that housed auto repair shops and funky breweries and weird makerspaces. It was where she and Hugo and friends would come when they wanted to eat somewhere with space between the tables. It wasn’t exactly beautiful, but it was fun.

The Ferry’s Point before Estelle now, however, was awash with light and street art. Complicated-shaped paper lanterns hung where the light posts should have been, and outside storefronts, moving between the illuminated patches and the dark parts, chameleon people walked the sidewalks. Their scales shimmered under the lanterns, their footfalls unnaturally loud.

In the distance, Estelle heard music and joyous voices. It came from the same direction that she was headed.

She kept her pace slow, both to avoid running into the chameleon people, who all seemed to know each other, and to marvel at the vast and intricate murals on the building walls. How different this neighborhood looked tonight, like it had exchanged its typical street wear for a ball gown.

When she finally reached River Ave., a wide road on a block that had a bakehouse on one side and a metal shop on the other, the music was unavoidable. It was rhythmic and flirty, and the smell of roasted corn and sweet potatoes, barbecued meats, and warm bread made her hungry all over again.

There were hundreds of people on this block, half of them scaled, webbed-handed, and changing colors. And there, in the middle of it all, was Hugo.

It would have been so easy for Estelle to join, but the previous stops had made her cautious and she backed up. She bumped into someone.

They gave a soft Oh in surprise.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, turning.

“That’s quite all right,” said a chameleon person. They had soft white peach fuzz hair, but the scales on their face and arms were transmuting to match the bakehouse backdrop. “Happens all the time.”

“Hate it when it happens to me.”

“Part of city living,” they replied with a shrug. “It’s a beautiful place, though, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Under the lanterns, the chameleon people glimmered, every movement sending a ripple on the pavement, like so many waves on a shore.

“This isn’t too far from where I live,” Estelle said. “Actually, I walk here sometimes. Why haven’t I seen you guys before?”

“We were always here; you just have to know how to look.”

She supposed that was true. Because here was Hugo laughing, the stress and exhaustion gone from his face. He always loved being around people, in a way that she never understood. It had been a long time since she’d seen him look this happy.

“Yeah,” she said, and with a deep sadness, moved toward him.

He was so entranced in his conversation, he didn’t even notice when Estelle slipped the beaded bracelet around his wrist. But she wasn’t sure if he was lost anymore.

“It’s up to you,” she whispered, and turned away.

She took a cab home and for the entire ten-minute ride, she kept her gaze fixed on her hands in her lap, determined not to see if the city outside was the one she knew in daylight or this entirely unknown creature.

When she arrived at her apartment building, she didn’t go in. Instead she sat on the stoop and studied her surroundings.

There was nothing out of the ordinary, no strange sheen or unfamiliar people. In fact, the block was empty and there wasn’t a single light on in the surrounding apartments. But then again, it was three a.m. and this neighborhood liked to be in bed before midnight.

So, in the silence of that familiar place, Estelle closed her eyes and breathed in the cold, cold air until the urge to cry passed.

She sat there for some time.

“Hey,” said a known voice.

Estelle opened her eyes to find Hugo standing there windswept, wide-eyed, and flushed. “That,” he said, “was crazy.”

“Yeah.”

“I got lost somewhere where people climbed the walls like insects and they were kind of mean if you couldn’t,” he said as he sat down beside her. “I can see why you hate going out.”

“I can see why you like it.” He couldn’t quite hide his surprise and Estelle almost smiled. “I miss our adventures, Hugo. The ones we used to have back home.”

“I miss home sometimes,” he replied. “A lot. I know we probably made the right choice moving here, but it did something to us.”

“Yeah.”

They sat there, on the freezing stoop steps, hovering between gratification and regret, the choice of whether to stay together or learn how to say goodbye. Until Estelle said: “What if we took the night train sometimes?” Hugo blinked, shocked, but Estelle pressed on. “There was this place at the end of the Omega line. It’s not quite home, but I think it’s worth trying to find again.”

“It’ll be a pain in the ass,” Hugo replied cautiously. Though he looked at her when he said, “But yeah, I think we should try.”

“Okay,” she said, and stood up, this time bringing Hugo with her.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

A.T. Greenblatt is a Nebula Award–winning writer and mechanical engineer. She lives in New York City, where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. Her work has been nominated for Hugo, Locus, World Fantasy, and Sturgeon Awards; has been in multiple Year’s Best anthologies; and has appeared in Reactor, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nightmare, and Clarkesworld, as well as other fine publications. You can find her online at http://atgreenblatt.com and on Bluesky at @AtGreenblatt.

“Adventures on the Omega Train at Night,” © A.T. Greenblatt, 2025.

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~ Julian and Fran, December 14, 2025

For December, the Sunday Morning Transport brings you new stories and, as is our annual tradition, a Storyflod of favorites from throughout the year at the end of the month. We began with last week’s tale from Juan Martinez (whose spectacular “Lesser Demons of the North Shore” appeared in April 2024), and this week’s spooky story from Stephanie Feldman (also a fantastic SMT alum with “The Sorcerer’s Test,” in September 2022). As always, the first story of the month is free to read.

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

A Skull in Reverse

by Stephanie Feldman

A month after Kim moved into her forever home, the attacks began.

It was December, midnight. Kim slept on the couch—downstairs was warmer in the tiny ranch, the worst house in the best neighborhood she could afford. A bright touch roused her, like snowflakes on her eyelids. She blinked awake to two white lights dilating in the window, setting the cheap drapes aglow, then ablaze. Kim instinctively lifted her hand, as if to repel the glare, and the room plunged back into darkness. For an instant, she felt flush with power.

Then she realized a car had rolled up her driveway, nearly to the living room window, and cut its headlights.

Car door slam, footsteps, knock-knock-knock, and Kim jumped, as if the shuddering door were another slat in her rib cage.

The knocking continued—frantic, aggressive—and Kim’s heart beat a fearful response. She had been a single woman, resourceful, frugal, and patient enough to save a down payment by her fortieth birthday; now she was a single woman, alone, unarmed, and scared to open the door.

But she did—she had to. She did—just three inches, all the brassy chain lock allowed.

The young man rambled while Kim measured his wool cuffs’ dirt and his left eye’s twitch, the needle in her mind skittering from dangerous to needy to dangerous again.

“. . . stranded on Barren Hill Road, the top of the hill, where the road banks hard. She said her car was broken down, but was there a car? I don’t know. I offered her a ride—just wanted to help, I swear, she was shivering, it’s freezing. But when we pulled in”—he gestured to his car, parked two feet from Kim’s living room window—“she’s gone!”

“Who?” Kim asked.

“Your daughter.”

Kim didn’t have a daughter. Kim slammed the door, turned the bolt. The driver paced outside, and she paced inside. Just as she resolved to dial the police, her window blazed again, light shrinking to two small white eyes as he backed out of the driveway.

Kim streamed a tutorial, bought a used drill, and installed a second chain lock.

A week later, midnight, another bewildered man knocked on the door. He was older and better dressed, and it was an SUV in the driveway, two tires on the sod she’d planted months before, but his story was the same: Barren Hill Road, the elbow above the slope, Kim’s address offered in a trembling whisper, and then, in her driveway, the empty back seat. The rescued hitchhiker, the sweet, scared girl, gone.

“I don’t have a—” Kim started.

Then she saw a blurry white face hovering behind the car window. It glowed through the window until it was a luminous skull, hovering five feet—teenage daughter height—above the frosted asphalt. Its misty aura unwound into long, tangled hair. The man, staring at Kim, didn’t sense it. Kim lifted a shaking hand to point, and the ghost rushed at her, its boneless body streaming like a comet tail.

Kim slammed the door, and one of the three kitschy crosses nailed above—Kim had been too busy to remove them—fell.

“Mrs. Moore, please!” the driver shouted.

Not Kim’s name, but the name of the previous owner.

The old woman’s executor said Aunt Joan would have been pleased Kim wasn’t going to knock down the house and replace it with a lot-width pillared monstrosity, like the new builds across the street. Kim ached for those houses, eternally beyond her budget.

On the back of the cross, in black marker: Darling, go into the light.

The man knocked, paced, brooded in the driver’s seat, eventually drove off—while Kim conducted, and completed, her internet investigation: December, thirty years ago, Victoria Moore, age seventeen, drove her car off the peak of Barren Hill Road.

Two nights later a third man knocked—why was it always men?

“Barren Hill Road . . . right where it swerves . . . standing there, in a party dress, though it’s cold, so cold . . .”

Again, the skull—Victoria’s skull—flickered in the car window, flashed above the path, surged toward Kim.

Read more

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

In this month’s first, free, story, Juan Martinez chills us with a story of creeping losses.

~ Julian and Fran, December 7, 2025

Listener Supported

by Juan Martinez

The husband took a pocket radio to bed every night because he fell asleep much earlier than his wife and he woke up much earlier, often at five a.m. but earlier sometimes, and sometimes he didn’t sleep much at all. But—pre-radio—if he got out of bed he invariably woke her up, and if he stayed in bed he fidgeted and woke her up in a gradual, more unintentionally insidious and crazy-making way, so he found this solution, a yellow Sangean, defiantly analog, that he would turn on, earbud in one ear, so he could listen to whatever tragedies had befallen the world in his half-sleep. He could stay in bed and be still—and he’d stay in that half-awake state until six a.m., when the automatic coffee maker turned on and he’d hear it gurgle to life, the carafe alive with steam, the smell of coffee rich in the house. That was his cue to get up. And before then he was mostly half-awake and thankful for public radio, and at night that meant that the station played world news from the BBC.

In his half-awake state it never quite felt like the news was entirely real.

The broadcast, he suspected, had just made up a terrible fire in an orphanage. The broadcast might have even made up the country where the orphanage fire had occurred. He had certainly never heard of it, so it was possible, he thought, or at least not impossible. Like, at the very least, the orphanage fire was not beyond the realm of reason. Who knew? Who knew what was going on elsewhere? So much was going on over here, right now, none of it all right.

He himself was not doing all right, he would tell you.

If he could. He could not.

This ritual of his—the radio, the earbud, the suspicion behind what he heard—all of it happened a few years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it kept on going as he moved with his newly pregnant wife from their tiny condo in the Pilsen neighborhood to an Airbnb in Woodford County, Kentucky, and it continued even after they returned to Pilsen, after their child was born.

He would have liked to tell you how some public radio stations still insisted on playing music after a certain hour, particularly on weekends. He grew violently opposed to most jazz because of that late-night insistence. Some jazz turned out to be almost tolerable. He listened regardless, and he always missed the transition from jazz to world news during an indeterminate moment in the night. He didn’t drink, he detested drugs. All he had was the radio. After their first child he listened even more, and he grew to love how NPR’s Morning Edition repeated their segments after the first hour, and how All Things Considered did the same, though the segments sometimes featured subtle corrections or additions introduced as the news changed, as the world changed.

He could not go to bed without the radio, was the thing.

One night he forgot to check the batteries and the radio died early on, and he stayed awake, mindlessly trying to coax it back to life, not daring to get up because he did not want to disturb his wife, who was not getting enough sleep to begin with. He kept spare batteries handy after that night. He grew to love the occasional ads that assumed he had a spare car that he was no longer using, the suggestion that he donate it to his local public radio station. He didn’t, he wouldn’t; he was amazed that people had such a thing, a spare car. All they had was their one car, now outfitted with a baby seat, and they mostly only used it for pediatrician appointments. They worked from home. In the mornings he walked his child to day care and then spent an hour or two walking, partly to give his wife a little space. Their condo, which had not felt small when they’d bought it, had grown cramped with the arrival of the baby.

That’s what he told her, at any rate.

The truth was this: the radio now asked him to find and warn people about ICE. It had started innocently enough. Even in his sleepless state, he knew that a few of the countries that the radio now mentioned could not be found on any map. He made a note to himself to look them up during the day, only to discover that some did not, in fact, exist. Most, he was sorry to admit, did exist. And the people the radio named were all distressingly real. So were the neighborhoods, the street addresses. All real, all Chicago.

And the voice delivering the warnings? That voice existed in his waking world, it belonged to an actual living person—he’d actually seen this person, a local celebrity, at a company event, not long after the birth of his child. But what the voice said during the night was not exactly news.

The dates were always off, for one thing, either a week or a day ahead or long in the past.

And the information was now always about the ICE raids, which he himself did not need to worry about. He had become naturalized. His wife had been born in Kentucky. He had nothing to worry about, not personally. His family would be fine. Other families? Not so much.

And so when the voice—always measured, calm, empathetic, always very much an NPR voice—told him about the raids, provided specific details about where to go, who had disappeared, he went there.

And if the person was still there, he knew the warning had come in at just the right time. He warned them. He moved on.

He had originally kept the part about the radio secret, because it sounded crazy and because he needed to be believed, he needed the person to heed his warning. Now he told the person everything. He knew too much about their lives anyway—their name, the names of their loved ones, where they came from. He told them when and where ICE was coming. Thank you, they said. They kept on saying it: Thank you, thank you, thank you. They asked if he could tell them about what would happen to others (Margarita? Asunción? Pedro?) and he told them the truth: he only knew what the radio told him, and the knowledge lasted as long as the bleary morning that followed the sleepless night—the names and details faded, hour by hour. He listened. He walked. He warned. He forgot. His wife asked him if he was all right and he told her he was fine, as fine as you could be, given the state of the world.

He listened.

He once walked all the way to a supermarket to find it entirely empty, the shelves turned over. A CTA driver joined him, asked him where everybody went. The bus driver usually took his bathroom breaks here. The bus driver said that the cashier’s name was Asunción, he saw her here all the time, he was sure she had her papers. No way they took her, right? They couldn’t? How could they? The husband didn’t know. Surely, the bus driver said, they didn’t take everyone. They couldn’t, right? They could, was the thing.

The radio sometimes sent him to a block that was completely free of people.

He never slept after that sort of day. Did he remember the spare batteries? Did he have other batteries elsewhere, just in case? He did. He listened. Sometimes, rarely, he did fall asleep, and when he did he dreamed that he was listening to the radio, the radio in the dreams not at all different from the radio in his waking life.

Listen, the radio asked.

Please.

There were so many people to warn. He found fewer every day.

He grew thin, red-eyed, irritable. He went to bed early so he could listen to the radio. He crept out of bed while his wife and daughter slept.

The radio insisted that he should wake them up, that they were coming for him, for his whole family, though of course this was impossible. He was a citizen. So was his wife. So was his daughter. ICE had no jurisdiction here.

Though of course he was no longer sure of what here meant, exactly.

He no longer recognized the streets without their people.

The whole neighborhood had grown so quiet. He was safe, at least. He had nothing to worry about. He needed to make some coffee, to get ready to take his daughter to her preschool. Surely he had people he needed to warn, but he couldn’t at the present moment remember who, exactly, and he couldn’t explain why he stood by the front door, why he held the carafe of scalding coffee in one hand, why he was so thoroughly unsurprised when the doorbell rang, when the ringing was replaced by insistent, official, violent knocking.

Surely, he thought, the knocking will stop.

It wouldn’t, though.

The radio had insisted on this last detail: The knocking wouldn’t stop, it would go on and on, nothing would stop until people stopped it. He raised the carafe. The door burst open.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

Juan Martinez is the author of the novel Extended Stay (2023) and the story collection Best Worst American (2017). He lives near Chicago and is an associate professor at Northwestern University. His work has appeared most recently in EPOCH, Ploughshares, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Sunday Morning Transport, Huizache, Ecotone, NIGHTMARE, McSweeney’s, NPR’s Selected Shorts, Small Odysseys, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Sudden Fiction Latino, Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in a Simon & Schuster/Primero Sueño Latinx horror anthology. Find him online at fulmerford.com and on Bluesky at @fulmerford.com.

“Listener Supported,” © Juan Martinez, 2025.

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