C.L. Moore and Other Great Free Fiction

It's a rather good day for free fiction already with seven free fiction stories, five flash fiction stories, four audio fiction stories (including part one of a classic by C.L Moore), and a partridge in a pear tree. Oops, I mean an "other genre" story from The New Yorker, guess the season is getting to me. Very likely more later with a link or two swiped from my now elderly arch-enemy Regan Wolfrom.


[Disturbing art from Lightspeed, linked below]



Fiction
• At Author's Site: "Ghosts of Christmas Present" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Horror.
      "Fog, thick and old, smelling of saltwater and decayed dreams, rolled in off the ocean. The streetlights shone yellow in the dampness. A cat hiding in the enclosed stairway leading into the bakery hissed as Michela passed."

• At The Colored Lens: "The Wreck of the Emerald Sky – Part 1" by Sean Monaghan. Speculative Fiction.
      " The painted readout on the armature above her head was all blue. She was sleeping normally. He went in and pulled the sheets up over her, staring at her face for a moment. So sweet and angelic. How had five years turned this bubbly academic elementary school achiever into a semi-suicidal wreck?"

• At Lightspeed: "Family Teeth (Part 5): American Jackal" by J.T. Petty. Fantasy.
     “My dad just won the lottery, nine thousand dollars. Probably be half that after taxes, but he wants me to come home and help him spend it. Shit. Take a lot more money than that to get me back East.”

• At Lightspeed: "Swanwatch" by Yoon Ha Lee. Science Fiction.
      "Officially, the five exiles on the station were the Initiates of the Fermata. Unofficially, the Concert of Worlds called them the swanwatch."

• At Night Shade Books: "Invisible Men" by Christopher Barzak.
      "She said he was an “ex-peer-i-ment-al in-vest-i-gat-or, don’t you know?”  And lucky for me, I don’t catch her looking at me much, so I rolled my eyes at myself in the glass I was cleaning, then set it up on its shelf with my eyes rolling in its surface for a long time after."

• At Strange Horizons: "America Thief (Part 2 of 2)" by Alter S. Reiss.Speculative Fiction.
      "I couldn't get into that house when it was empty, because it was never empty. If I had a month to work, something might have come up that got everyone out. Or I could have come up with a trick that'd get them out of the house. But I didn't have a month. I had two more days, maximum."

• At Weird Fiction Review: "Headstone In Your Pocket" by Paul Tremblay.
     "Two agents pin the driver against the truck’s chrome grille. He yells, claiming the hot chrome burns his skin. The agents don’t care, don’t say anything, and handcuff him. The smuggler is priority one. The cargo can wait."

Flash Fiction

• At Daily Science Fiction: "The Merger"by Michael Adam Robson.
• At Every Day Fiction: "Synonym of Discovery" by Jabez Crisp. Science Fiction.
• At Innsmouth Free Press: "Dead End in December" by Bryan Thao Worra. Horror Poem.
• At Strange Horizons: "The Beetle Horde" by James Valvis. Speculative Poem.
• At 365 Tomorrows: "Caveat Ereptor" by Patricia Stewart. Science Fiction.

Audio Fiction
• At LibriVox: "Tom Swift and His Sky Racer" by Victor Appleton. Early Speculative Fiction.
     "A $10,000 prize lures Tom into competing at a local aviation meet at Eagle Park. Tom is determined to build the fastest plane around, but his plans mysteriously disappear, which means Tom must redesign his new airplane from the beginning."

• At Lightspeed: "Family Teeth (Part 5): American Jackal" by J.T. Petty. Fantasy.
      Described above

• At PodCastle: "Miniature 74: The Book" by Lavie Tidhar. Fantasy.
      "There is a bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London and it’s never open. Its windows are covered in a thick film of dust and spiders grow webbed cities in its darkness. There are books inside that no-one’s ever read; books that human eyes had never seen, books where black ink spells secrets on black paper, books written in darkness that cannot be read in the light."

• At Protecting Planet Pulp: "The Tree of Life" Part One by C. L. Moore.Science Fiction.
      "There was neither food nor water in these ancient Martian ruins, and Northwest Smith knew that it could be only a matter of time before the urgencies of his own body would drive him out to signal those wheeling Patrol ships and trade his hard-won liberty for food and drink. He crouched lower under the shadow of the temple arch and cursed the accuracy of the Patrol gunner whose flame-blast had caught his dodging ship just at the edge of Illar’s ruins."
 
Other Genres
Fiction at The New Yorker: "A Voice in the Night" by Steven Millhause.