Debbie Urbanski
Debbie Urbanski has hiked through the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and Iceland, though her favorite spots are the quiet hemlock forests on the Finger Lakes Trail in Central New York. She is the author of the novel After World and the story collection Portalmania. (debbieurbanski.com)
When They Came To Us
We went to sleep, and in the morning they were here. We saw them on our screens as they emerged from a grove of trees a hundred miles west of us. Their ship had crashed. It was made of a rose-gold metal and looked like a claw with a broken tip. Within hours the government had moved these beings — the “blues,” we eventually came to call them — to a holding station outside the nearest city. There we could watch them whenever we wanted, because of the cameras in each room.
August 2016The Portal
The second portal to Mere had been two feet high and three feet across. Amber knew this because later she returned to that exact spot beside the woods and measured where the portal had been using her wooden school ruler. She did not know the size of the first portal because she had been much younger then — just six; she was seventeen now — and so she had overlooked many important details.
March 2016The Life Of Alice Peters, As Told By Herself, The Blessed Alice Peters
Please don’t interpret this record as an indication that I lack modesty. Rather I wish to provide documentation that my life was holy, that I deserve to be canonized, and that my grave must become a shrine where the devout will gather with wheelchairs and crutches to hold candlelight vigils, chant in fourteen different languages, and pray for a disembodied me, in full glory and shining robes, to come and heal their hearts. Because after abandoning my body, this earthly inconvenience, I will grow in reputation as the patron saint of heartache.
December 2003
Has something we published moved you? Fired you up? Did we miss the mark? We’d love to hear about it.
SEND US A LETTER