This past week’s issue of Strange Horizons features a story by Andrea Kneeland. “Beneath Impossible Circumstances”:

Analise wants to have a baby. A real baby. I tell her that if we had a baby together, it would be a real baby. It would be a real baby and it would have parts from both of us, and it would be a real person made from both of our genes, and that I want parts of myself in a child just as much as she wants parts of herself in a child. When I tell her these things, she turns on the faucet or runs the vacuum or opens the refrigerator door wide and sticks her head in like she’s looking for something so she can pretend not to hear me and I can pretend not to see how damp and salted her reddening cheeks are, and on days like these, when I tell her things like these, the bed sheets between us stay cool and dry and I remind myself of the virtue of silence and I bite my lip to draw blood so that in the morning, when I move my mouth, the pain will remind me not to say a thing.

Other features include poetry by Virginia M, Mohlere, commentary by Adam Roberts on the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke shortlist and a review of Lev Grossman’s The Magician King by Bill Mingin.

---