by Neil Clarke
I go home and look up her life until then, little mentions on the society sites and on the galleries of the most fashionable people, and I feel like I’m checking up on someone I used to babysit.
I get another message from the Embassy, which I expect, and accept the invitation, which I don’t.
At night I pull the bowl out from under my bed and press my hands to the glass, feel with my palms for the voices of living things. When I sit back, the beads are already condensing, two handprints full of water.
“I’m going to engineer some rain,” he told me, and I dream of him standing on the dry seabed, closing his eyes over black shields, spreading his arms, opening the sky.
About the Author
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 IAFA Crawford Award and was a Nebula nominee. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed, and others, and the anthologies Federations, After, The Living Dead 2, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more.
Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine, and she is a co-author of Geek Wisdom(Quirk Books).
Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog, genevievevalentine.com.
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About Clarkesworld
Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com) is a monthly science fiction and fantasy magazine first published in October 2006. Via the heroic efforts of our talented and engaged staff, each issue contains interviews, thought-provoking articles and at least three pieces of original fiction. Our fiction is also available in ebook editions/subscriptions, audio podcasts, chapbooks and in our annual print anthologies.
Clarkesworld has been nominated for Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine three times and has won the award twice. Our fiction has been nominated for or won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, BSFA, Shirley Jackson, WSFA Small Press and Stoker Awards.
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About the Editors
Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor Short Form. He currently lives next to a wildlife refuge in NJ with his wife and two boys.
Sean Wallace is a founding editor at Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Prime Books and winner of the World Fantasy Award. He currently lives in Maryland with his wife and two daughters.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Non-Zero Probabilities
The Second Gift Given
Walking with a Ghost
Celadon
Teaching Bigfoot to Read
The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew
The Jisei of Mark VIII
Passwords
Idle Roomer
From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7
Gift of the Kites
batch 39 and the deadman’s switch
Rolling Steel: A Pre-Apocalyptic Love Story
The Completely Rechargeable Man
Episode 72
Placa del Fuego
Herding Vegetable Sheep
The Devonshire Arms
The Loyalty of Birds
The Giving Heart
White Charles
On the Lot and In the Air
A Woman’s Best Friend
The Dying World
Clarkesworld Citizens
About Clarkesworld