Size / / /

Cleave logic in two with your tongue.
Sharpen lies into fancy letter openers with scrolled brass handles.
Your head can think of a way to make a thing not what it seems.
It’s so good at fooling you, why not use it to carve reality into your
own liking.

Start small.
Tell him he is beautiful.
Tell her she is brave.
Repeat these things until they are not observations
but truth.
Turn her into a warring, fierce thing.
Make him blush.
Shape them with the sound of your breath between your teeth.

When you have remade them into what you want them to be,
push your powers further.
Explain to friends of friends you won the lottery once but it was all stolen.
Tell the police officer you have never sped before in your life,
this is your first time being pulled over for anything
except when you were small and shoplifted a can of Crisco without your
mother's notice.
Make sure to describe your mother's chill anger in detail.

Learn how to cut.
Tell the woman at the airport your flight hasn’t been canceled, what's
wrong with her?
Say, "The next round of drinks is on me," and leave right after.

Tell him he's ugly.
Tell her you always knew she was a coward.

Warning:
Spells, once cast, break easily
no matter the silver sheen in your mouth.
Carve the illusion with care because the lie that breaks
slices the liar with her own tongue,
opens her up like a false love letter with a real heart inside it.




Gillian Daniels attended the 2011 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop and afterward moved to Boston, MA. Her work appears in Apex Magazine, PodCastle, Flash Fiction Online, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet among others. She writes reviews for Fantastic Stories of the Imagination.
Current Issue
16 Mar 2026

The garden is the resting place of your vulnerabilities; there’s a reason you’ve left them here instead of carrying them with you. Typically you enter hardened and hurried, beelining straight for the correct plot and quickly releasing whatever is clutched in your hand without a second thought—today, an attempted weaving of leather and lace, strength and suppleness that your body cannot figure out how to wear, nor your words to narrate.
If you say there are rats, I will believe you, though I don’t hear or see them.
A ruffling of branches as they resettle for the night. We dare not ask why they are here.
Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity 
As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 
Friday: When Among Crows and To Clutch a Razor by Veronica Roth 
Issue 9 Mar 2026
By: Lio Abendan
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Strange Horizons
2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
Issue 2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons
Issue 23 Feb 2026
Issue 16 Feb 2026
Issue 9 Feb 2026
Issue 2 Feb 2026
By: Natasha King
Podcast read by: Jenna Hanchey
Issue 26 Jan 2026
Issue 19 Jan 2026
Issue 12 Jan 2026
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