The South Side of New Orleans in the 90s was a shithole, so Olivia Jacques accepted her scholarship out of the city at the age of eighteen and suddenly found herself in with a briefcase and two sacks of Louisiana squash in Berkeley, California. Her Creole mother cried at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport: “don’t lose who you are,” she said with a mixture of pride and disbelief.  Her daughter, from the French Quarter, was going to the Bay.             Before she even set...

For all of accounted history the Ojatai people of Villenevue Planet in the Great Barrier Galaxy depended on the prophecy of a single herald for their self-preservation.  Their god Imami wrote in the Sacred Texts that he would appoint a single Ojatai, called the Herald, every one hundred forty years to deliver a prophecy of great doom to the People, and that failure to listen would result in their race’s destruction.  The Herald was chosen by casting lots over a hollow disc of dead meat (not...

Zhang woke up to a scorching headache on her left side.  The man who had directed a scholarship for her was snoring, his big fat body with jelly rolls of mass leaking out in all directions sprawled out over the cushion of the bed in the Westin 70th floor in Palm Beach