Children of Imagined Worlds

The hand first appeared when you returned home to practice the fourth song again, wrapping over your own hand clutching onto the neck of your viola, holding on iron tight until the strings slice through your built-up calluses, until blood coats the strings with your fingerprints.…

Mama tells a different version, when she’s had a cup or two of swamp-rice wine. We’re cursed, all right, she insists, but we’re cursed from the inside out. It was the first Dread Lord that put a hex on his own people, when he figured out he was going to lose.…

That was the first time he was certain he could taste knowledge. Of course they didn’t believe him at first, but then he started eating their knowledge. When he found a strand of his mother’s kinky afro he plopped it into his mouth without thinking. He found her fear and told her about it.…

To this day, my life has been a series of comedically bad timing, near-death experiences, and wet socks. I can’t hold an egg without dropping it, and at least once a day, a bird defecates on my head.…

Two cages I have escaped so far, though my parents strove to keep me safe within. Now I must go, in defiance of their wishes, to confront the one who holds the final key.…

Everything felt wrong with Alonna’s death. Omambara went to Afa in panic, and it led them to a new keeper, Juochi, Alonna’s nine-year old son.…

I’m supposed to write about an experience that made me who I am. Something that ties back to why I want to go to college and be an engineer. And I had an experience exactly like that. Problem is, the whole thing was impossible.…

She shifted back to hide behind Nnadi. Peeping over his shoulder, she could not understand why they weren’t alerting security or at least stabbing this oddly dressed stranger with the random spear she never knew her father had.…

He selects Netropolis and pierces the world's membrane. His avatar pixels into existence in a gloomy back alley. It fits here, his shark self. Riptide is a sharp, fast shadow that swims through narrow streets lined by skyscrapers lighting the night with bright neon outlines.…

Alive or dead, people were too much trouble. Look at where being a good girl landed Megan. Dead at sixteen, a random pedestrian struck in a freak car accident, the driver a woman speeding past a red light on her way to pick up her kids from school.…

All the other village boys Berit’s age have long since found their voices swimming in streams or grazing in fields or nesting high in trees. They have hunted them, and they have feasted. Now they speak as men. Only Berit is an unvoiced child, a boy who must sign.…