Brooke Bolander - No Flight Without the Shatter

Drifting gently upward

(Remember balloons? Remember letting go of your first in the parking lot of some forgotten bank, tearfully saying goodbye as it climbed and climbed and the sun turned it to a bird?)

distance shrinks its size, taking memories of telephones and coffee tables and radio broadcasts along with it. First kisses, last breaths, friendships and fallout and fires blossoming on the horizon—they dwindle and dim, going back to the darkness all thoughts and stories come from. A final pulse of ancient light from a dead star—red-blue-green—and there’s nothing left to see and no one left to remember they ever saw it.

Pretend you are the land. Goodbye, you say, slamming a screen door in the wind. Goodbye. Better luck next time.

BROOKE BOLANDER writes weird things of indeterminate genre, most of them leaning rather heavily towards fantasy or general all-around weirdness. She attended the University of Leicester 2004-2007 studying History and Archaeology and is an alum of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her stories have been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Uncanny, and various other fine purveyors of the fantastic. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, and the Theodore Sturgeon awards, much to her unending bafflement. You can sign up for email updates here.

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Copyright © 2018 by Brooke Bolander

Art copyright © 2018 by Victo Ngai