The Man Who Spoke to the Dryads, Michael Forester
He would have his clients lie supine on the floor, place them into trance with a combination of murmured incantations ...
The Thaw
For all the talk of warmth and rebirth, spring is a really ugly season. Trails turn to mud pits and roads to rivers as the thaw begins to take hold, and the brown carcasses of what was left at the end of fall begin to reappear. The ground cover is a layer of partially decayed leaves, and all the damage the winter did is slowly revealed.
The Siren
Sometimes someone will drown in another part of the river and I can’t help, because the river is large and I am only one person.
Lingering Wires
"But she doesn’t lie still, she continues to thrash and moan, spraying blood across the ground and staining the foam at her mouth red."
The Expedition
"The astronomer had calculated where the planet we were looking for would lay: the “Goldilocks” zone, where the star’s heat would neither be so close that the planet’s water would boil nor so far that it would freeze—the temperature at which life was likely to form."