The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter

by Brent Hayward

  “I’ve been looking for so long.” The cherub’s breath, hot in her ear. “The things I have seen, mother. The things I have seen.”

  The chatelaine stroked the cherub’s head, her sobs diminishing.

  Over the shattered silhouette of Nowy Solum, clouds were turning to amber, but these clouds seemed very thin today—the thinnest, in fact, the chatelaine had ever seen. She wondered if she would ever recover from the shock and heartbreak, should she make the foolish choice to continue living.

  The cherub was already asleep against her shoulder.

  Turning, to make her way back to shore, the chatelaine sighed, and the horizon past Jesthe ruptured with an astonishing patch of blue.

  about the author

  Brent Hayward’s fiction has appeared in several publications and anthologies, including Horizons SF, On Spec, ChiZine, the Tesseracts series, and Chilling Tales. In 2006, his story “Phallex Comes Out” was nominated for the StorySouth Million Writers Award as best online story of that year; it received an honourable mention. Filaria, his first novel, was published by ChiZine Publications in 2008 and has since garnered solid acclaim.

  Born in London, England, raised in Montreal, he currently he lives in Toronto with his family. He can be reached through his LiveJournal at: http://brenth.livejournal.com