My sci-fi horror story One Last Step has been accepted into the Lockdown Horror #5 anthology by Black Hare Press. It’s a story about a little girl stalked by an unseen shadow-thing across a post-apocalyptic landscape.

“Will it hurt?” I watched my father roll the sewing needle between his fingers, its tip glowing orange-red in the heat of the flame. My eyes welled with tears.

“Just a little,” he replied.

The flickering candlelight sent eerie shapes dancing around the cluttered attic where we were hiding for the night. Outside, the screeching calls of the shadow-things rose and fell like whale songs made from rusted metal. They sounded close.

My twisted fairytale Matches has been accepted by The Stygian Lepus. It’s a dark(er) retelling of Hans Christian Anderson’s story, The Little Match Girl.

As a frigid wind gusted down the narrow lane, the girl side-stepped into an alley to avoid the chill. She sat down cross-legged on the cobblestone, drawing her feet into her folded knees to try and restore some feeling to her toes. She was freezing, but she dared not go home. Her father would be there, waiting, expectant. How many matches had she sold? How many pennies had she earned? None? The girl winced involuntarily at the crack of her father’s belt. She knew what was in store for her if she returned empty-handed.

My cyberpunk story A Free Man has been accepted by Metastellar. In a world where you can purchase a synthetic replica of a person from a vending machine, the best person to frame for a crime you committed may be yourself.

The days of identity theft being just a stolen credit card or Social Security number were long gone—criminals could steal a person’s actual identity with something as simple as a 3D holoscan of their likeness. Except for a small microdot array at the base of its neck, a synthetic was indistinguishable from an actual human.