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Jan 7, 2025 | 
uncannymagazine.com | Ai Jiang |Clockpunk Studios
In science, fantasy, and horror, there is an increasing number of works that explore the idea of a home and what that might encompass, how it has changed over time, and how it has become something not always comforting and safe nor desirable but one that has been manipulated and twisted.
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
lightspeedmagazine.com | Wendy Wagner |Ai Jiang
It is 3024, and there are no longer shrines. They long since washed away by nature’s fury in the form of quakes that split across continents, countries, cities, down schools, fields, homes neatly in two.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
lightspeedmagazine.com | Wendy Wagner |Ai Jiang
Mother whispered to us about the beings on Earth she regretted creating; the ones whose only merits are their minds, but their minds rot so easily. They are not like you, children; they cannot see so clearly. We asked if the eyesight of humans is poor. Mother only chuckled. Her laughter now carries in the wind, wraps around our bodies—water in the clouds, flames in the lava—but her being is gone, plundered by the human masses, only rubble remains, and us.
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Jun 7, 2024 | 
psychopomp.com | Ai Jiang
(CW: Death of animals/pets)There is a thing, an idea, I’ve forgotten if it was my mother or someone else, had told me—that the pets we cater to, and spoil, must be someone from our past life to who we owe. But in terms of afterlives, past lives, and reincarnations, that will be another piece. They say that pets are but a part of the lives of humans, but to the pets themselves, we are their entire lives.
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May 3, 2024 | 
psychopomp.com | Ai Jiang
During my undergraduate studies, I had a thought to minor in philosophy until I realized one of the required courses was logic, which at the time seemed absolutely incomprehensible to me because of the problem sets we would get that looked like math equations with written words rather than numbers and letters—for which I would take three hours to get through five questions even though it was supposed to only take twenty minutes (spoiler: I still got all of them wrong when I compared answers...
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Apr 4, 2024 | 
psychopomp.com | Ai Jiang
I won’t say too much before diving into this month’s piece because I think the musings and thoughts on the chosen chaos trifecta speak for themselves, but we have three stories commenting on something I have been brewing given current events: the way society is driven by death and sacrifice, and how society also has a way of driving people towards death.
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Jan 2, 2024 | 
uncannymagazine.com | Ai Jiang |Clockpunk Studios
We, the rebirthed gods, drink their past,we drink their anger, and we feel the ashesscrape against our lips, the heat boilingour skin, snaking its way in and its roughtexture, cooling against our icy tongues,crystalizing the past deep, deep within us.
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Dec 4, 2023 | 
audiofilemagazine.com | Ai Jiang |Alli Nesbit |Mateus Roberts
Nancy Wu narrates these supernatural novellas. The primary story focuses on an unusual Canadian town called Home. Wenqi's family moved there in hopes of escaping the grief of her older brother's death. Years later the teenager and her family move to a town where the houses are haunted by the ghosts of deceased loved ones. With the residents so focused on the dead, Wenqi longs to return to a more lively existence. Subtle sound effects enhance the listener's experience.
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Oct 24, 2023 | 
pseudopod.org | Alyson Tait |Nick Petrou |Ai Jiang |Sam Rebelein
I will be who I will beby Nick PetrouI was a blister clinging to the throat of your shower drain. I didn’t know I was alive, let alone that, as I built myself from your beautiful waste, I would grow to love you. The first thing I remember was a taste: a sweetness tainted by bitter soap. My membrane shifted, allowing the sweet, the you, to pass, while the soapy water spat down the pipe into darkness. I disassembled a flake of your skin, reading you as you might read a book.
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Oct 3, 2023 | 
uncannymagazine.com | Ai Jiang |Clockpunk Studios
to bear life from within youto let it rip you apart from the insideout, tear through your flesh to escapeinto a world more chaotic than your mind. to hear it cry desire for not seconds,minutes, not hours, but for days, weeks,years. they make it sound so easybut if it were them, they’d be scaredwitless at the thought of having piecesof their body chewed off, bloodied,fearing contact as soon as life’s stomachrumbles.
