Lowry Poletti

2 months ago | lightspeedmagazine.com | Wendy Wagner |Lowry Poletti

“You have singularly bad timing, Sun,” Hati says as he leads Sun back into the lab. Glass cabinets overhang black-topped benches. At the end of the aisle, the hatchling is suspended in a tank of proteinaceous fluid. Sun gasps at the sight. It’s only been a few days since the poor thing was eating in the video. “What happened?” She steps past Hati, putting a hand on the glass. Unconscious, the hatchling’s head is tucked beneath its skinny neck.

Aug 19, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Lowry Poletti |Ali Householder |Mary Lee |Max Banshees

A woman drags a white doe out of the ice room; it hangs from the ceiling rails by two brass hooks, one caught beneath its pelvis and the other behind the scapulae. As she pulls, the metal wheels whine. When she works in her lab, she is a butcher. She lays the doe on her bench and makes an incision from sternum to pelvis. Beneath translucent skin and shimmering hair coat, she expects to find the pink, glassy meat, which should flake against her scalpel blade like white-fleshed fish.

Sep 12, 2023 | fantasy-magazine.com | Christie Yant |Lowry Poletti

In the fading shadows of dawn, a hunter meets a wolf with white eyes, a wolf whose mouth stretches open, and in its growl there are three faraway voices, distorted as if heard through water, so the hunter shoots. He does not wait to see what he has done. • • • •Risha follows the limping stag. It is so far away that Risha can hardly see it, but Risha drags itself forward anyway. Toward the starkly black beady eye. Toward the musk stench. Risha’s limbs grow heavier with the passing days.

Feb 14, 2023 | fantasy-magazine.com | Christie Yant |Lowry Poletti

The dead return in strange shapes, yoked to those who mastered them in life. Thais sees them: shadowy animals who slink between the townspeople in the market square. When he was born, so he is told, his mother held up his birth-wet body and pressed her nose to the middle of his brow. They lay together, crowned by oak branches dragged low to the ground by last night’s rain, on the stone table at the center of the woods. “He will find the dead tethered to the earth,” she said.