Yee! My fantasy-Brooklyn short story “Non-Zero Probabilities” is now live at Clarkesworld. For those who attended the reading at Bluestockings Books last month, this is the story I read there. Also, there’s an interview up with me and several other “emerging writers” — many of whom I know, hi guys! — in which I get a bit silly about the hypothetical dinosaur apocalypse. Rise up, my mammalian brothers and sisters!
An excerpt from the story, for those who need a tease:
It’s only New York, that’s the really crazy thing. Yonkers? Fine. Jersey? Ditto. Long Island? Well, that’s still Long Island. But past East New York everything is fine.
The news channels had been the first to figure out that particular wrinkle, but the religions really went to town with it. Some of them have been waiting for the End Times for the last thousand years; Adele can’t really blame them for getting all excited. She does blame them for their spin on it, though. There have to be bigger “dens of iniquity” in the world. Delhi has poor people coming out of its ears, Moscow’s mobbed up, Bangkok is pedophile heaven. She’s heard there are still some sundown towns in the Pacific Northwest. Everybody hates on New York.
And it’s not like the signs are all bad. The state had to suspend its lottery program; too many winners in one week bankrupted it. The Knicks made it to the Finals and the Mets won the Series. A lot of people with cancer went into spontaneous remission, and some folks with full-blown AIDS stopped showing any viral load at all. (There are new tours now. Double-decker buses full of the sick and disabled. Adele tries to tell herself they’re just more tourists.)