Short Fiction & Poetry
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Pieces marked with an asterisk (*) are available online to read for free.
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Short Fiction
Imperfect Monsters (2000 words). Upcoming in Into the Dark (All Worlds Wayfarer)
Upcoming!
Blood Stains True (3300 words). Published in Vampire Hunters: An Incomplete Record of Personal Accounts (Speculation Publications), July 22 2025.
I write now, however, not with concerns that a vampire walks beside me, but with a pressing mythological question—an academic curiosity, you might say. This entire affair has been most unusual, and so I shall start with its beginning, as is usually best for any matter where one pursues the truth.
A Knot for the Hawk (3000 words). Published in Loki (Flame Tree Press), June 8 2025 (UK)/July 22 2025 (US)
The problem with godly jokes, the ironic reason that perhaps made me such a trickster to begin with, is that they are very difficult to undo.
To Catch A Name (3900 words). Published in Morgana le Fay anthology (Flame Tree Press), March 31 2025 (UK)/April 15, 2025 (US).
I cobble him together, that imagined nighttime boy, out of hawthorn boughs and apple blossoms and the gentle, thumping rhythm of my own heartbeat.
Then I hide him in my garden.
The Science of Transient Cartography (2100 words). Published in The Daily Tomorrow, February 2025.
Note: Available to subscribers only.
My pa likes to say, his curmudgeonly jaw working at the spoon he often inserts between his lips when he’s trying to suck the last vestiges of honey from the well-worn metal ornamentation, that when he was a boy, maps were static things, only changing when wars were fought and lost and won.
I usually like to remind him that we don’t have wars anymore.
Poetry
Whittled and Burned (16 lines). Upcoming in Trollbreath magazine.
Upcoming!
What the Birds Taught Me (16 lines). Upcoming in Heartlines Spec, July 31 2025.
Upcoming!
* Eagle-Eyed (46 lines). Published in Eye to the Telescope Issue 57: Birds.
The doctors had no explanation
for the bird’s eyes set into
my flawed and human head.
Beauty's Captor (34 lines). Published in Star*Line Issue 48.3 (Summer 2025)
Note: Available to subscribers only.
Sleeping Beauty reimagined from the point of view of the vines
Bait (24 lines). Published in Black Cat Tales (Black Cat Publishing), June 13 2025.
They don't realize
they're the bait.
*
To Be the Change (43 lines). Published in Strange Horizons, March 10 2025.
Reviewed by Charles Payseur in
Locus Magazine #773 as "a piece that challenges those who believe their power and corruption to be eternal,
recognizing that no amount of power or control can prevent people from knowing and following their hearts
and being themselves. Nocito does a beautiful job bringing the prophecy, and its fulfillment, to vivid life."
My father’s least favorite prophecy
has been reviewed by five generations of scholars
and soundly dismissed by them all.
When the heir becomes a daughter …
them // us (46 lines). Published in Utopia Science Fiction, March 2025.
Note: Available to subscribers only.
They
drop from the sky at moonrise
when silver beams twist around their silver capsule.
Gretel (111 lines). Published in Grimm Retold (Speculation Publications), September 24 2025.
2025 Rhysling Award nominee!
The next day, when she opens her oven to bake
another loaf of bread, Hansel pushes her in.
Flash Fiction
Through Time and Calamity (750 words). Upcoming in Starship Librarians (Tyche Publishing).
Upcoming!
Speak (1000 words). Upcoming in Utopia Science Fiction.
Upcoming!
* A Single Song (750 words). Published in Factor Four Magazine Issue 48 (July 2025).
A harp made of bones, they say, will only ever play a single song.
An Unexpected Wombat (500 words). Published in Worlds of Possibility, June 2025.
Described by editor Julia Rios as a story that "shows us another kind of coming of age vision
as a trans person finds hope and comfort amidst inner chaos."
Note: Currently free to read for subscribers only.
I hold absolutely still, motionlessness morphing into illusion. When I finally stir, I become my mind’s self, standing knee-deep in snowflakes containing my memories.
Microfiction
* A Collector of Lives (100 words). Published in A Coup of Owls: Summer 2025 issue.
A phoenix seeks to collect additional lives to avoid reincarnation.
* Window to the Lost (100 words). Published in Trembling with Fear (Horror Tree), February 9 2025.
Grey mist wreaths my eyes. I swat it away and angle my flashlight to illuminate the sharp glimmer that snagged my attention.
* after the apple (100 words). Published in Holly & Broom (Iron Faerie Publishing), October 2024.
Apple blossoms flutter to the earth around her, and she spins, letting them settle on her dark hair like flakes of sugar, or cocoanut, or snow.
* You Must Not Dare to Free the Breeze (100 words). Published in Holly & Broom (Iron Faerie Publishing), January 2025.
Wind billows from the organ’s pipes, a billowing maelstrom loosed from within the polished valves, and in seconds it rips through the cobweb-spun church.
* Physics and Fairy Dust (100 words). Published in Holly & Broom (Iron Faerie Publishing), December 2024.
The train can’t make me human—no wicked sorcery could alter me so fundamentally—but it reminds me that humanity is something to be striven for.