LINKDING

<blockquote>As you enter the doors of this school for the last time, the girl who your brother slept with last night brightens for just a moment before she realizes you’re not Jesse. She deflates. You and your brother should be identical—technically you are—but no one has ever mistaken you for each other.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Is your tape still running? Oh, they don’t use tape anymore? That’s clever. Very good. But really, you came all this way to interview me about the family and what happened to the land and now we’re talking about ghosts! Now, in the twenty-first century, the magic future century we were all promised? No. I don’t believe in ghosts because the crying bride never haunted us. God knows, if anyone had reason to, it was her. You might think that would worry me now that I’m pushing eighty-nine but it doesn’t. It might surprise you, young lady, to learn that I’m pretty satisfied with everything I’ve done.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The day I found out my Uncle Will was still alive, I had been out spraying the crops in a full crinkly hazmat suit. The Earthers I was working for were nice people, but they always whined about the suits. To me they seemed light and airy, hardly even an annoyance compared to a vacuum suit, so I was the one who would get sent out first with the sprayer when the blight warnings came in from the provincial capital in Edmonton. I didn’t mind. It was the tenth month of my indenture on Earth, and I had almost gotten used to the smell, but even so a little overlay of antifungal didn’t change it much.</blockquote> ➤ (I cried)

<blockquote>Fisherwoman Mika Sandrigal was lost at sea. She knew where she was in relation to the Candorrean coastline and how to navigate back to her home city, Maelstrom. She knew the time of day. She knew the season. She knew the phase of the moon and the pattern of the tide. She did not know the year.</blockquote>

➤ a woman tries to search for alternate universes where her daughter is happy

<blockquote>It's the first Thanksgiving since Grandpa died. This morning Gretchen put the extra leaf in the table, pushed and wiggled chairs so that it would seat a crowded-on-one-side seven. The new tablecloth--Gretchen bought it last week without consulting anyone or anything beyond her own pleasure--is spread, and on it sit silver and the best china. Trivets wait for mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and corn. The turkey is dismembered, keeping warm in the oven. Gretchen is ready.</blockquote> ➤ weird and amazing and I love it

<blockquote>In a futuristic, fascistic Rome, a brilliant, unstable scientist proves that she can transcend the human body’s limitations. The test subject? Her own daughter. A mother-daughter mad scientist story, “The Destroyer” asks how far we’ll go to secure our own legacies — and how far we’ll run to escape them.</blockquote> ➤ It started kinda slow and I skimmed but then I found myself getting engaged and by the end of the story I was all the way here for it. A strange and bittersweet kind of story

<blockquote>This is a food blog, not a disease blog, but of course the rumors all over about bird flu are making me nervous. I don’t know about you, but I deal with anxiety by cooking. </blockquote> ➤ the chronicles of a family dealing with an epidemic as told through a food blog. This worked REALLY WELL and by the end I was SO ATTACHED to everyone in the story and ughghgh I hope everything does work out for them in the end