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Brochures fanned across the lace tablecloth in Grandma's dining room. Up close, I saw the recruiter's immaculate makeup starting to crack, the silver showing against auburn at the part in her hair. She slanted forward with briefcase on knees and wei… Escape Pod 620 Promise (Artemis Rising) - Escape Pod via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2FVKRgT

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io It was the middle of the night and everybody was knocked out. Marcus, my big brother who died the week before last, had his door cracked. I heard him snoring under the hum of the refrigerator. The carpet creaked under my feet as I stepped into the d…

Andy tattooed his left forearm with Lori's name on a drunken night in his seventeenth year. "Lori & Andy Forever and Ever" was the full text, all in capital letters, done by his best friend Susan with her homemade tattoo rig. Susan was proud as anyt…

Points of Origin Most people who have reached their eighties without raising children have every right to believe that they will go on not raising them, and Judith and I were no different until the day they turned up with the social worker, neatly s… via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io

When I met her, I was twelve. There was no one else to take care of me. Before she showed up, she was preceded by this man in a pinstriped suit. A harbinger. He sat me down in his sterile office and he said, "Time Law is not a joking matter. via Poc…

Tagedouchet teased her father as she leaped over the long stick he swung at her ankles, raising a puff of sand with her sandals, the gritty substance drifting between her toes, and landed, folding her knees, narrowly dodging the swing of her father'…

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Naru Dames Sundar writes speculative fiction and poetry. His work has appeared at PodCastle, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons and is forthcoming at Shimmer Magazine. He lives in the redwoods of Northern california. You can find him online at www.shardof… Escape Pod 605 Straight Lines - Escape Pod via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2j3bBC4

The two biggest applications for predictive software are killing people and selling things. Rita was quite successful at the latter. She founded a nail-polish-of-the-month club that used an online personality quiz to determine customer preferences. … Escape Pod 642 Oracle - Escape Pod via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2NcAmp7

Raya eases power into the singularity engine and all her senses sharpen with the glorious, brutal reality of the moment: dead ahead there's the blacklight-purple disk of Wolf-Rayet 104, twenty-eight subjective minutes before it goes core-collapse su…

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io And Yet A. T. Greenblatt Only idiots go back to the haunted houses of their childhood. And yet. Here you are. Standing on the sagging, weed-strangled front porch that hasn't changed in twenty years. Every dip in the floorboards, every peeling strip … Escape Pod 674 And Yet - Escape Pod via Instapaper http://bit.ly/2Vxspir

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Aulis shuts out the frenetic buzz of the arena where she's competing for an Oikotekt placement in the space navy. Only an Oikotekt, a person of powerful imagination, can hold onto a picture of the universe as it is supposed to be against the reality…

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Sometimes at night when my mind is calm, I think I hear the octopuses. Around the world, the great network of molluscan philosophers. I had many reasons for moving to the Pacific Northwest -  weather, closeness to potential clients and my big brothe…

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Escape Pod 688 A Most Elegant Solution - Escape Pod via Instapaper https://ift.tt/32iW2I5 I always said I wanted to be one of the first to die on Mars. I never wanted to be the last. But here I am. I can't even tell the others apart now. I know that inside those vaguely undulating metal cocoons are the bodies of the rest of my team-Marsh…

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io When Leon Kenner left the planet of Acceptance, he asked me to go with him back to Earth. I belonged with people like me, like him. No, that isn't where I should start. Stories should be told in chronological order to make them easy to understand. v… Escape Pod 689 Spectrum of Acceptance - Escape Pod via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2JE4lXF

via FREE Fiction / Raindrop.io https://raindrop.io Murmurs ripple through the assembled cadets. Not because they're shocked-everyone knew what they were signing up for-but because it all happened without fanfare, a jump across light-years of space unaccompanied by any grand orchestral swell or roari… Escape Pod 679 An Ever-Expanding Flash of Light - Escape Pod via Instapaper http://bit.ly/30aVVx6