The Contraction
I logged it on day 47, just to be sure, but I had been seeing it for five days. Centauri B was closer.
The Word for Enough
On a dead world where the libraries are still lit and nothing ever burned, a philologist hunts for the catastrophe — and finds one untranslatable word.
The Refusal
The signal arrived on the morning of 14 March 2071, was confirmed independently by seventeen radio observatories within four hours, and was, by the conclusion of the following week, the most-studied phenomenon in human history. It came from a region of the sky in the constellation of Cygnus, at a distance of approximately thirty-eight light-years.
The Widening
For forty years the pulsars kept perfect time, and gravity was the one thing you could lean on. Then, on an ordinary Tuesday, the weight of the universe began — very quietly — to let go.
The Last Postcard
Mavis Tinker was the last human on Earth, and she ran a diner that had no customers, in a town called Otterford, in what had once been Wisconsin. This was in 2089.
The Mending
They gave us the menders for free, and that should have been the first warning. Nobody hands the poor anything for free unless they have already found a way to take back something larger.
What the Octopus Remembered
You are not a metaphor. You are an octopus. You are eleven kilograms, in your forty-third lunar cycle, with three healed punctures across your mantle from when the men came in 2031 with the spear gun and got two out of three of your sisters before you flooded the cleft with ink and pulsed away.
Advance Notice
The message from the future arrived at 3:14 on a Thursday, which was inconvenient, because most of the people qualified to read it were at lunch. It had traveled eighty-one years to reach us.
Marrowfield
I came to Marrowfield because of a letter my mother had hidden in a copy of The House of the Seven Gables she kept in her closet, fourth shelf up, behind a hatbox. I was forty-six years old when I found it.