nadine aurora tabing
Obsolesce
Strange Horizons (2022)
The city was so large now there was no longer night and day, only glowing blue hours as endless as the low hum emanating from the chalky skyline.
A nurse provides caregiving services to robots going obsolete. Her newest client is a war veteran, originally modeled after a singer-actress diva.
Nominated by the editors of Strange Horizons for a Pushcart Prize. Also my first short story publication! đź’ľđź’›
~7000 words. Read
A short story about a woman taught to survive by eating others’ sorrows, and how she raises her daughter to eat sorrows too. 🍽️️ 🍽
Published in Cursed Morsels's No Trouble At All, as part of an anthology of horrors that exist under the guise of politeness.
2500 words. Paperback / eBook
An Inherited Taste
No Trouble At All (2023)
When Felisia was born, Bea wept with relief. The weight of her family's sorrows had been growing for some time, without anyone to carry it but herself. So, with care, Bea started on her daughter early. She salted Felisia's milk and formula with murmured complaints. She pureed bananas and seasoned them with sparkling shreds of spite. She stewed potatoes and peas with stubborn little grudges, acidic...
The Bright in the Gyre
Reckoning (2023)
The satellites spot them first at night: lights where there should be none, sparse enough to be mistaken for dead pixels in the ocean’s inky gut. Before long, the lights splatter into a constellation orbiting 32°N and 145°W, and those who know the significance of that migratory path are summoned to interviews that flood every social media feed. WHAT IS IN THE NORTH PACIFIC GYRE?
A story about microplastics, trash-eating mycelia, and a woman's decision of how to spend the last days of her life. In Reckoning's “Oceans” issue 🌊🍄🔍
4000 words. Read
In USF’s “Weird Progeny” issue—a story about a world plagued by poisonous sunlight, and clone descendants doing their best to live up to the wishes of their originating ancestor.
~5000 words. Read
The Conditions
for Blooming
Utopia Science Fiction(2023)
Luni remembered the moment she was born: the seal cracking like an egg, the hiss of air, the gelatinous tide of amniotic fluid, her limbs unspooling and cooling underneath headlamps round and bright as moons. She kept this story tucked inside and told it only once: to another self of hers, the first she’d ever met, who reacted not with a swell of rapport, but horror.
Balikbayan
Solarpunk Magazine (2023)
Every childhood summer he returned to a country that felt loose, unfitting: the smothering heat, the sour stews with bone-in meat eaten under a rusted roof, his aunties that gasped, in English, when a butterfly landed on him at the cemetery: Look, your mother is visiting.
The winner of Solarpunk Magazine’s May 2022 microfiction contest, a solarpunk flash crossed with Filipino ghost stories. 🦋🌱
250 words. Read
DIY 5-Step Homemade
Polycephalic Hound Chow—EASY!
99 Fleeting Fantasies (2023)
Coming soon!
A fantasy flash about making food for your beloved companion.
500 words, coming late 2023 from Pulse Publishing.
A cyberpunk flash about the things passed down in a family, like eyes that can (??) see ghosts đź‘€
Coming 2023.
Inheritance in Six Parts
Worlds of Possibility (2023)
Coming soon!