nadine aurora tabing

speculative fiction writer, designer, & artist

Short Fiction

The Bright in the Gyre

Reckoning (2023)

~4000 words

Near the end of the last year of her projected life expectancy, Cora knows she shouldn’t be spending any moment on frivolities. Her store of oxygen tanks is depleting. Her body begins wheezing halfway up the stairs to her apartment. Every last breath in her body needs to be spent on work, on microscopes and slideshows and documentation and the full spectrum of mycelium she’s endeavored so hard to engineer.

But instead of thinking about any of this, she, like everyone else, is riveted to her newsfeed. She clings to every eddy of information.

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Microplastics, trash-eating mycelia, and mysterious lights where there should be none. 🌊🍄🔍

Obsolesce

Strange Horizons (2022)

~7000 words

> I have more important things to keep. And this body has never had enough space. Then, with the words rendering in halting, bitter emphasis: Shall I make a comparison you’d understand? Sensors were never necessary to me, or any of my kind. They’re wisdom teeth, appendices, tailbones. I have no need of any of it, nor of any conversation, or anything except for you to tend to me until my transference.
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A Filipino "nurse" provides caregiving services to robots going obsolete. Her newest client is a war veteran, originally modeled after a singer-actress diva. My first short story publication! 💾💛

Balikbayan

Solarpunk Magazine (2022)

250 words

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. Read more
Solarpunk, Filipino ghost stories, and diaspora mango feelings.