A.R. Geiger

Everyone else is asleep. The captain confined us to our quarters the moment we stepped on his ship, as if our ragged, bloodstained clothes and battle-scarred weapons threatened him. The others complied easily enough, they don’t mind being confined for a few days or a week. Most of them have done nothing but sleep and…

At midnight, the clock in the hall chimes twelve times. I listen to it, waiting until the last echo has faded, and then I get up and fold my blanket. And wait for the children. They come in twos and threes, padding up to my rooms in the attic like little ghosts, dressed in their…

The mountains rise above us, black against the blue skies, against the white clouds driven on by the keening wind. I can see the eagles above them, floating in the breeze, black specks among all that blue, all that white. We’re following them. Following the eagles. We have nothing else to do. The paths we’ve…

We take them out at dawn, when the sky in the east is red and the birds are starting to sing. I climb onto our bull and pull my sister up beside me. It’s her first time herding, her first time coming into the fields and pastures with me, and her little arms wind around…

The air smells like antiseptic in the hospital tents. Men lie in rows along the canvas walls and listen to the war waging outside, barely a mile away. So close. So very close that sometimes the gunfire and thunder of the bombs shake the walls. I don’t have enough bandages for them all. Their shirts…

I leave a handful of seeds outside my garden gate when I plant in the spring. The faeries don’t like it if I forget them. They like to plant their own little gardens, sometimes beneath my flowerpots, sometimes under the porch in the front yard where the light is dim and the mice leave their…