Stephen Hastings-King

Path is a room from remembering with windows around its perimeter, a table, red wine, cutlery, couscous, partially chewed red meat, salad dressed with indifference, a silent film grand piano...

Once the expression finishes repeating it writes itself again. I write it again, and it travels through every node in every network and repeats itself.

I walked in my spacesuit down the long white corridor toward the strobe-lights and launch pad, and already felt weightless. Strapped into the seat of the capsule, I focused on the backward series...

Zeno is keening for shore, under full sail, cutting through the water, leaning in: the boat makes no headway. He photographs the sun, and if he ever puts in, he will storyboard its...

Part of an arrangement of trapezoids and triangles, lines and loops, I move across the water, watching as pieces of the sky come loose and fall. Asleep on a schooner dreaming I am on a schooner,...

Where I work, you cannot see the sun, people use words like leverage, and everyone sits in a cube looking at a surveillance image of themselves. When it rains, you can hear water flowing through a...

A man who wrote in code was killed and left in a bathtub. He was found by mistake. Soon a story surfaced about a man who thought in code. His body was found in a bathtub some weeks later. A man who...

She drinks a chocolate martini and I slide into her pocket where we talk about space, travel and the topologies of her breasts. She pays us no mind and opens her hand and I open myself to her length.

In a faintly orange air of a late afternoon I sit at a tiny metal sidewalk café table across from another. I ran into Julian again and we talked about lines of flight, the desire to become someone...

When the head of the king popped off the royal body, the lackey thought about historical necessity. That was the first sentence. Because of it, the story ground to a halt. The famous writer...

The Black Mariah pulls into the driveway, and I imagine myself a spent reactor core in an anonymous railway car shuttled siding to siding. I imagine myself less than nothing blindfolded and...

Her engagement announcement arrived this morning, and he retells the story so that it came like a calling card placed on an elephant foot umbrella stand in his hallway. He decides not to go to the...