An e-zine about spaceships, aliens, science, memory, motherhood, magic, and cats.
My dad is an emotionally abusive jerk. My mom spent twenty years sublimating her own needs to protect me and my sister from him.
From this, my sister seems to have learned that mothers should be self-sacrificing saints with no needs or feelings of their own.
I have kids now… you do the math. Continue reading “Unfortunate Family Dynamics”
by Mary E. Lowd
1.
As I wandered on a sunny day,
I came upon an otter along my way,
Living in a lilac bush. Continue reading “The Otter in the Lilac Bush”
I’ve started rereading Jane Austen’s novels, and I just want to point out: she uses exclamation points & all caps ALL over the place!
Exclamation points & all caps may be horribly out of fashion in fiction these days, but Austen is a master. Editors can get over themselves. Continue reading “Italics and Exclamation Points”
God it feels good to no longer have a vested interest in a market that’s been treating me badly for a month and a half.
This is my fourth original sale (out of 172) to fall through; the other three were due to markets themselves going under. Continue reading “Fighting for Good Contracts”
What it is like when my spouse and I run routine emails past each other to check they’re okay:
—debate regarding relative merits of long sentences & short ones
—Finnegan’s Wake compared to a banana taped to a wall
—double slit experiment involving bananas
—what were we doing?
A couple weeks ago, I heard the memory of a line echo in my head, but I couldn’t place it. I thought maybe it was from Grey’s Anatomy… or a Jane Austen movie…
Now I think it’s from Remember WENN. But I can’t check. I can’t share it with my kids. I can’t relive it. Continue reading “Remember WENN and Grief”
Story time.
When I met my husband, he was a Christian. He believed Christians shouldn’t date non-Christians, meaning me. That was a rude and surprising slap in my face, after I had got up my eighteen-year-old courage to tell him I liked him. Continue reading “Christianity”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Empyreome, September 2017
Lee-a-lei’s wide wings fluttered, casting pools of colored light that chased each other across the walls of the robotics laboratory. The harsh fluorescents from the ceiling softened to warm reds, golds, and chips of blue or green as they passed through her translucent wings. Continue reading “One Alien’s Wings”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Theme of Absence, July 2017
The blue sun of Lottie IV glinted off the watery world’s ice rings. Rocky chunks of diamond gleamed with sapphire light, stretched in a crescent across the world’s pale sky. Its inhabitants — a long-spined, thick-furred, water-breathing, lutrinae species — had stared at that crescent of glittering ice from Lottie’s oceans for generations. Out of reach. Unconquerable. Continue reading “Sky River”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Fantasia Divinity Magazine, December 2017
Alarm bells rang out and lights flashed red from the corners of the buildings on either side of the street. A mechanical turret rising out of the middle of the mountaintop base swung around and cast invisible laser beams, searching for the intruder, but Rikkita threw herself to the ground and spread her wide, bushy tail over her back. The fur on her tail was ultra-dark black; it would confuse the algorithms processing the data from the lasers. As long as she held still, she was safe. Continue reading “Treasure Moon”