“The cadaver drone makes an incision along the inside of each finger. My stomach curls, waiting for the blood, but of course there’s none left. The body has been dead for days, all the blood drained and replaced with a sweet-smelling formaldehyde formula.”
Pinocchio Photography
(Clarkesworld, Issue 198, March 2023)
– A sci-fi story about grief and family that poses the question: “If you could take a photo with any loved one, dead or alive, who would it be?”
“‘You really like making lists,’ my friend said, red-faced from her second mojito.
‘I don’t like making lists,’ I replied. ‘I just like collecting all the evidence for why someone or some thing may be parsing through my decade old emails.’‘
‘Some thing? Like an outdated ghost who doesn’t know how to use anything but Hotmail to communicate?’”
The Day We Returned to Sunnytown
(Fusion Fragment Issue #15, January 2023)
– A sci-fi mystery steeped in 90s/00s nostalgia, conspiracy theories, and the bittersweetness of childhood love
“Mina did not believe the recent rumors. That people were disappearing. That someone had snuck into the Temple the night of the Moon Festival and the Cleaners had found him the following morning on the altar in the main hall, adorned in white lilies.”
Olympus is a Body (The Dark, Nov 2022)
– A sci-fi body horror story about post-apocalyptic cults, getting revenge, and how home sometimes is the scariest place of all
“The Police are dancing under the red lights / without their heads”
The Subway Is Another Place To Die
(Strange Horizons, 20 March 2023)
– a poem written while trapped on the subway
“In my second year of graduate school, there was a couple that would sometimes have sex in the printing workshop after midnight…”
Human Trash (Maudlin House, Dec 2022)
– a flash story about the dangers of assuming you know someone
“They told you falling was the first symptom
so you stayed in your house,
wrapped a warm blanket around your shoulders
and pretended to be a bird.”
Three Symptoms of a Disaster (Nightmare Magazine, Dec 2022)
– a poem inspired by the fear of family history
Check out more of my stories and poems here!
Angela Liu 