When the champion Typhon died, I wasn’t very sad. I didn’t even feel like crying, even though I was secretly wishing he would win. When the gladiators smile and have nice jewels in their teeth and long ropey dreadlocks and lift me up with just one arm, I never want those ones to die. I […]

The red palace was home to a thousand cats. Or so people said. Princess Cosima, twenty, beautiful, and bored, walked through the courtyards until she saw a lithe, sandy female sunning itself on the flagstones. She slipped into the cat’s mind and sent it prowling across the square, scrambling up the red stone wall onto […]

The last of the river is slipping from her veins, and all she can think is this is why men weep. “There now,” the doctor says. “Just a few more drops.” She cannot see him, only an ocean of white fire, like staring into the sun too long. But she can feel his fingers trace […]

The caballero came into Flores along the lakeshore from the north, riding a magnificent horse and leading two others laden behind him. The sun, glinting from a silver helmet slung on the pommel of a spare saddle, projected images in air: spectral men in frayed white robes strolled ahead of him along the path and […]

By the time the river fruits, it is far, far too late. * * * Before the river fruits, the clean, white sand of Štrand swarms with bathers: young women in skimpy bikinis, old men in Speedos, families, the laughter of children playing in the gentle, blue waters of the Danube River. Lovers holding hands […]