Search Worlds Without End

Searching for her daughter, a woman confronts the man she believes stole the child... and the strange truth behind local legends.

Originally published at Tor Reactor Mag on 7 February 2024, read it for free at Tor.com

This short story originally appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, December 2008. It can also be found in the anthologies Clarkesworld: Year Three (2013), edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace.

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This short story originally appeared in Weird Tales, July-August 2008. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edited by Rich Horton. The story is included in the collection The Inner City (2013).

Heuler's stories dart out at what the world is doing and center on how the individual copes with it. Anything is possible: people breed dogs with humans to create a servant class; beneath one great city lies another city, running it surreptitiously; an employee finds that her hair has been stolen by someone intent on getting her job; strange fish fall from trees and birds talk too much; a boy tries to figure out what he can get when the Rapture leaves good stuff behind. Everything is familiar; everything is different. Behind it all, is there some strange kind of design or merely just the chance to adapt? In Heuler's stories, characters cope with the strange without thinking it's strange, sometimes invested in what's going on, sometimes trapped by it, but always finding their own way in.

Table of Contents:

• FishWish - (2011)
• The Inner City - (2008)
• Down on the Farm - (2007)
• The Great Spin - (2013)
• The Escape Artist - (2013)
• The Large People - (2011)
• After Images - (2009)
• Creating Cow - (2013)
• Beds - (2013)
• How Lightly He Stepped in the Air - (2013)
• The Difficulties of Evolution - (2008)
• Thick Water - (2011)
• The Hair - (2013)
• Ordinary - (2013)
• Landscape, with Fish - (2008)

Shirley Jackson nominated short story. It originally appeared in Cemetery Dance, #58, 2008. It can also be found in the chapbook The Inner City (2013), the eponymous collection The Inner City (2013), and the anthology Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature (2016), edited by Jacob Weisman.

Looking for a job, a woman discovers a hidden underground city manipulating the city she lives in. Will she be hired?

In the state of Liberty, water is rationed at alarming prices, free speech is hardly without a cost, and Texas has just declared itself its own country. In this society, paranoia is well-suited because eyes and ears are all around, and they are judging. Always judging. This terrifying (and yet somehow vaguely familiar) terrain is explored via Eleanor, a young woman eagerly learning about the gifts of her magic through the support of her coven.

But being a white witch is not as easy as they portray it in the books, and she's already been placed under "house arrest" with a letch named Stan, a coworker who wronged her in the past and now exists in the form of a cat. A talking cat who loves craft beers, picket lines, and duping and "shooting" people.

Eleanor has no time for Stan and his shenanigans, because she finds herself helping another coven locate a missing witch which she thinks is mysteriously linked to the shortage of water in Liberty.

This short story originally appeared in Albedo One, #40. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 17 (2012), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection The Inner City (2013).

After beginning chemo for a rare cancer, Hildy discovers an extraordinary talent--the ability to see and take other people's time. She also discovers there's an underground market for quality time. After all, who has enough time? The dying, especially, want to get more of it, but giving it to them means taking it from someone else. How moral is she? How will she juggle the black marketers' strong-arm tactics and her own quandaries about stealing something so precious and vital that it can never be replaced?

Life unfolds in strange ways. You may encounter people from your past living in your former apartments, or realize you have a penis as you engage in war-dreams, or find a planet filled with ghosts that look exactly like the ghosts back home. Is it possible they are the same as the ghosts back home? Wherever you travel, you'll have tough decisions to make about the aliens you may have harmed and the aliens who may harm you. Other Places, Karen Heuler's latest story collection, follows travelers as the familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes life.

Table of Contents:

• The Rising Up - (2016) - short story
• The Apartments - (2016) - short story
• Twelve Sisters, Twelve Sisters, Ten - (2014) - short story
• How to Be a Foreigner - (2013) - short story
• What They See on Nox - (2016) - short story
• The Moons of Martle Hart - (2016) - short story
• Respite - (2016) - short story
• Which Side Is the Other Side? - (2016) - short story
• The Alien Came Over the Hill - (2015) - short story
• The Brief Return of Marianna Napoli - (2016) - short story