A. A. Attanasio

“Mauka on Mars means toward the mountain.” The tour guide directed the group’s attention to the colossal shield volcano astride the wide, cratered land. “Olympus Mons. The largest mountain in our solar system.” Alpenglow lit the sprawling volcano, illuminating in pink pastels jagged rimlands along the caldera. “The first people on Mars remembered the greatest […]

Death’s head moon—spook talk I first heard from an Irish Gunnery Sergeant in Nietzsche’s War at a place called Belleau Wood during the battle of the Marne. Looking more porcine than human with his hog jowls, tiny and hard hog eyes, bristle-cut gray hair, and large mouth curled at the corners to a hog sneer, […]

What is a warrior angel? A defender of the human spirit. Over the years, I have encountered demons and angels. The demons always say the same thing: “You are a factory for the manufacture of excrement. You are a pylorus of endless hunger. I know you, you world of multiplying bacteria. Awe of maggots.” The […]

You are deep in a northern forest covenanting with spirits that lift into mist from an ancient tarn. They show you a treasure. Buried in the rock-flour milled by a Pleistocene glacier, a duck egg fossilized black fits your sling perfectly. (It’s a dream; you have a sling!) You spin and release, and the egg […]

[My fan fic about Pearl Prynne, a fey character from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter.] 1650 – 1662 Rain furled in gray auroras through the afternoon sky when Pearl, in her eighth year, first arrived at Derring-on-the-Wolds. Mist ran like young colts across toiled fields, and sheep huddled against the wet wind on the […]

Through our tears, we see rainbows. — Mescalero Apache saying See the scrawny kid with gimpy leg and cross-eyes shoveling bull manure into that rusty wheelbarrow? His name is Billy Roto. Other kids have mercilessly ridiculed his deformity since kindergarten. And early on, some classroom clown called him Billy the Kidded and it stuck. Billy’s […]