Most of all, he liked her, the maiden named first for a salad. Not only lust and love, then. For liking surely was the most dangerous. Lust might burn out and love grow accustomed. But to like her was...
I should know better than to try and measure the breadth and depth of love by its noise and dramas but there are times that I crave it, as if it’s proof that love is alive.
I also love ‘Mr. Fox’ and the advice that his bride-to-be sees carved above the door to his house: BE BOLD, BE BOLD. She goes inside, of course, and then she sees more advice: BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NO...
His new stepsister, Darcy, stood in the door that went down to the second floor. Her hair was black and knotted and stringy, and, no surprise, she was wearing one of her dozens of princess dresses. Th...
Before. Yes, before, I sailed my little boat on a placid sea of ignorance. Was I blissful? Oh my, yes. Before the truth floated like jetsam towards me, fouling my rudder . . .
Wilderness remained a place of evil and spiritual catharsis. Any place in which a person feels stripped, lost, or perplexed, might be called a wilderness.
When the zombies win, their quest to eat and infect human flesh will continue unabated. They will have known only gorging, only feasting; they will not understand the world as anything other than a sc...
WHEN WALLY BENNETT was a kid, his parents taught him to say this prayer: Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. He...
Then, just now, I went into my bedroom to find something else, and Lovecraft looked down on me. He’s dull metallic grey. His head is elongated, his eyes blank discs. It’s a bust of the author I receiv...
The beer got him, and, for a moment, a rush of idiot compassion urged him to hug a pinch-faced man in brown overalls who sat on a stool surrounded by primitive paintings of Jesus engaged in various fa...
That’s one of the things that lies in the deeps, never far enough from the surface; the only real difference between the broken ones and everyone else is that the broken ones know there isn’t one.
She understands why people hate her, now. By existing, she reminds them of their smallness. By being different, she forces them to redefine enemy. By doing her best for herself, she challenges them to...
Primitive peoples did not inspire Rudge, who saw in them the worst aspects of human nature, reminding him that superstition, ignorance, violence, and cruelty were inherent human traits, first impulses...
Poor is a word they never said, or common. But the wife has worked so hard to make her vowels shallower and to lift her r's and to bring back her h's that she hardly speaks anymore; every time she ope...
Once upon a time, there was a ghoul who fell in love with a daughter of the port of Innsmouth. To say the least, her parents would hardly have looked upon this as an acceptable state of affairs. She,...
On a bleak day in April, just before the first crocuses broke through the sodden gray of autumn leaves, Ann, that was her name, Krey’s love, got Stage 1 of Dying Stupidly. A scratch from a squirrel sh...
Normally, when I'm doing something that's very much to do with me and the things I enjoy, I have to do it alone. Other people seldom understand the things that give you them most pleasure, and I for o...
Love that can’t trump intellectual integrity isn’t worth the name.
Kelly Link is the author of three collections: Magic for Beginners, Stranger Things Happen, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have appeared in A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales; Noi...
I’d go with her, like a flash I’d go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel’s sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across...