Home at ten-thirty. Emily pays the cab while I get the keys. Inside, the house quiet - Jenna on the sofa with her phone, the monitor on the coffee table showing Theo's breathing steady and slow.

"He went down at nine," Jenna says. "Took the bottle fine."

Emily thanks her and counts out cash and I wait by the door. When Jenna's gone Emily sets the monitor to low and looks at the stairs.

"He'll wake in a few hours," she says. Not a complaint. Just the math of it, working out what the night holds. She takes her shoes off at the bottom of the stairs.

---

On Monday, August 14, I tried to summon Aries and bring myself to the world of the Sea Men again, but as Jody this time. It didn’t quite work, though. I arrived in the world, but I was sleeping alone on the beach and the doll was just a doll, in my house. I decided that this answered one of my questions about the power in one of the ways I thought might be true. I could not summon Aries today because I was trying to summon her into a world where she already exists, even though that was some distance from here.

Bob and Tessa’s Place, Ocean Front Condo, Virginia Beach, Va.
Bob looks over towards Tessa, who was sound asleep on their bed. They just got back from California last night. Dr. Jessica Blake was successful in transplanting the reproductive organs from Tessa to his body, without any problems.

The Dead Pixel Society

© 2026 Zoe Taylor

“Trouser role,” Kris said without missing a beat.

January means performance reviews. The forms have been in everyone's inboxes since the second week of the month - self-evaluations, peer feedback requests, the annual accounting of what you did and what it was worth. I've been filling mine out in the gaps between client work, in the gaps between other things.

Dave stares too long over the cubicle partition at nine-fifteen.

I wake before the alarm. The room is dark, January dark, the kind that hasn't lifted by the time I'm up and moving. Theo went down at two and woke at four-thirty and Emily took that one. I could hear her through the wall, the low murmur of her voice, the silence after he settled. She'll be under for another hour at least.

Authors Note: This chapter contains harsh language, and insensitive young people. It also has drug use, D&D, and a form of sexual abuse I suppose, though imaginary. Just be warned. I'll put more thoughts at the end.

Chapter 4 D&D
Garrett

For Saturday, August 5, I brought Aries back with a specific idea in mind. After breakfast, and after asking Aries to put on one of her bikinis, I called my parents and set up another video call.

As soon as Aries came into the frame, before I even had a chance to introduce her to my parents, Mom exclaimed, “What the hell is that!”

“I can explain, Mom,” I said.

But Dad interrupted with, “Told you so.”

“Told me what?” I asked.

Acidalia XXVIII

By Amanda D

Sunday Oct 11 2:55 pm

Pacific Coast Highway:

They turned into the coffee shop parking lot, circled behind the building, and backed the Honda Civic into a space beside the tree line. As it had been just two days prior, the lot was mostly empty save a moving van parked taking up three spots near the lot’s exit and a couple of cars parked by the kitchen entrance that looked like they might belong to the shop’s employees.

In the dream, within her dreamworld, I tried to see how far into Victoria’s past I see. And it was what wasn’t there that stood out. There were memories, and more memories of Victoria’s than I could ever remember exploring before. I could actually follow my Victoria back a bit further now in her mind, before I could remember ever having dreamed of being Victoria, though not all the way back to when I first invented Nancy before we had even started school. But this Victoria, the one who I grew up being in dreams, was not, no way, no how, the same as alt-Victoria that I brought into the world the other day. Even if she had some of the same personality traits, it was clear that she followed a different path.

Split Victory

© 2026 Zoe Taylor

“I think I’m going to throw up,” Morgan said just above a whisper, her voice cracking as she leapt to her feet and sprinted for the door.

I awoke, in bed, on Thursday, July 27, as Victoria, beside and intimate with what I expected would be Jody’s body. But when I tried to get Jody up, I couldn’t feel him at all in my mind. There was only Victoria. When I looked at the body in the bed beside me, I saw he was blond. Who was he? I roused my bedmate and got a better look at him.

Ladies and... gentlewomen? Anyway.... HERE WE GO AGAIN. It's a new story. I've been developing this for about 2 months. It's set in the same town as my last novel, Mud Creek. But in in 1994. The characters in this story are 20 something geeks, gamers, outcasts, wannabe satanic warlocks, and witches. It will be somewhat darker and grittier then Mud Creek. As usual consider this a preview, warts and all. I'm using a rotating 3rd person POV.

The annual planning folders are on my desk when I arrive - Dave's doing, the account list already pulled, the prior year actuals flagged for comparison. October means the revenue forecast, account by account, the coming year projected against the current year's performance. I open the first folder and start working.

The loose shirt manages the morning. Not perfectly - when I lean forward to pull a folder from the stack the fabric shifts slightly - but nothing that evident. The jacket stays on the chair.

In the dream, I was there with Mona, and I went straight to the point.

“What I’d like, if you can do it, is a portal between my home in Alaska and my dream-home in the world Nancy lives in. My home is two doors down from hers. Um, no, I shouldn’t call it a portal because of the Portal People. Let’s say a doorway.”

October. The light through the bedroom window is different from the summer light - lower, more amber, the trees along the street turning. I've been watching this from this window for six years. First autumn in this body.

I sit in the Target parking lot for four minutes before I go in.

The calculation happens here, in the car, engine off. I'm going to walk into the store and go to the women's section and stand in front of a wall of sports bras and buy one. More than one, ideally. I know what I'm looking for in general terms. I don't know my chest measurement. I know I take a large men's shirt. I don't know if that translates to anything in the women's activewear section of a Target.

---

Nancy revealed the surprising fact that she remembered her time at home alone the days she wasn’t here the last week, though she didn’t remember any such time before that. Specifically, she remembered starting her period on Monday. Until now, she hadn’t remembered any specific event from any time I wasn’t dreaming about her, though it seemed like she implicitly knew some things that she should have known if she grew up at the same time as and down the street from me, even if her house was at an imaginary address on my street.