Short Stories/Novellas

Originally published in Mike Resnick’s By Any Other Fame. 3k words. An alternate history, near the dawn of Israel, just after word of an assassination has arrived. Golda Meier must write one necessary, difficult letter.

Originally published in Deals with the Devil, ed. Mike Resnick, Martin H. Greenberg and Loren D. Estheman. Short story of 6k words. Wealth, fame, power—these are the things with devils tempt mortals to trade away their souls. It’s a strictly favor-for-favor bargain. But even devils grow bored, and Aazian is among the oldest. What he wants is the unusual, what he creates are traps for the unwary. Those who want wealth, fame or power are easy to entrap—let others do that mundane work. He has taken the souls of those who would never otherwise reach his realm, twisting them slowly until they are his, and his alone. And he has been following one mortal—a mortal who asks of him something he has never before been asked.

A short story of 6.5k words, originally published in Alternate Outlaws, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. When the heart of her writing and her work is denigrated, a tired, exhausted writer is drawn into a game that feels like freedom by a man who says civilization is based not on civility, but fear. The fearless can do anything. Anything at all.

A short story of 5k words, originally published in Witch Fantastic, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. A young office worker overlooks a standing grove of weeping willows. There, her co-workers eat lunch in the shade. She’s tried this; all she can hear while she’s there is the weeping of children she can’t see, can’t touch, can’t reach. No one else can hear them. There’s nothing she can do, because there are no children. But she has to do something, has to find out some information that might allow her to hear what everyone else hears. Who owns the willow grove? Who cries at its heart? What does it want from a woman who has never really been wanted?

Originally published in Enchanted Forests, ed. Katharine Kerr and Martin H. Greenberg. A short story of 9k words A young man is visiting his sister at her cottage—in the middle of a bitterly cold winter. Who does that? He doesn’t particularly like cottages, he’s not fond of nature when it’s not contained in planters, and he’s not a fan of the cold. But he’s here, in a winter forest, with his sister … and shambling corpses that seem to follow him wherever he goes. What happened here? Why are they after him?

A short story of 6k words. Originally published in Phantoms of the Night, edited by Richard Gilliam & Martin H. Greenberg. A lone man enters a church to confess: he has murdered his wife. Why?

A short story of 9.5k words. Set in the expansive universe of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar, this is about a young woman who works in an inn. She’s yearned and waited much of her life for a companion to walk past the gates, choose her, and carry her into a heroic, useful life. This doesn’t happen. It never has. But she does meet a companion and her herald, Carris—the latter injured, with a mission that cost the life of his partner. The mission isn’t completed, and it’s critical. Kelsey decides to help—and discovers why a herald and their companion were killed in commission of that mission. Can she survive? Can Carris?

A short story of 10k words, originally published in Tarot Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Lawrence Schimel. Shelagh was a mother, living in a small home, on the edge of the rest of her life with a husband she adored. Now, she lives alone. Her husband remains convalescent in a care facility, wordless and unable to walk. All of the promise of life, of future, is gone, and she wants no reminders of the past—but she finds one: a pack of carefully hand-crafted Tarot Cards that she made for him on a long-ago day when the future seemed to matter. Those cards are one of the few remaining things that bind them together—but to what end?

A short story of 9.5k words, originally published in Elf Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Larry Segriff An elderly woman walking the old ways comes to the Faerie circles to die—so that the child she carries, the last of her kin, might live. With her life as the payment, the Fey take the newborn infant into the court of their Queen, to watch her grow, age, and die—for mortality fascinates those whom age does not change. But the child is mortal and human, and what a child wants or needs is not what immortals do. The lands are changing; the old ways are dying. The time is coming when the Fey must reckon with the Law of Man.

A short story of a 7k words, original published in Return of the Dinosaurs, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg. A fossil—a bone—arrives in Peter’s mail. He understands what this means: The father from whom he’s been estranged since childhood has died. He’s never understood why his father deserted his family, and attending to his inheritance is one way of attempting to understand it. His wife is worried. His mother is very, very worried. Peter himself is not. He knows what his father did to his family, and he has no intention of ever doing the same thing to his own wife and child. But what he finds is not what he expected, and he is caught—as his father was caught—by the compelling voice of a past he has never experienced until now…