Some stories I’ve read recently. Tales of Strangeness, Beauty, and Horror “Cicadas, and Their Skins” by Avra Margariti in Strange Horizons I spent my first summer as an orphan watching cicadas fuck, scream, and molt. Wasn’t long before I plucked one of the cicada skins from the dry village soil. I brushed it clean against my secondhand clothes I was already beginning to outgrow. Dappled by sunlight, the carapace looked hard though I knew it to be brittle. A coat, people called it. To me it looked like a veil I yearned to slip into. A fierce, angry, bloody tale. An orphaned girl has lost her mother and moved from the city to a small, stultifying village. Watching the cicadas, she learns that she can slip into a cicada’s skin. She can find herself in the skins of mice, birds, and more. And she can teach the other children of the village to do the same. An angry tale of wildness, of desperation and freedom, of seeking escape from the judgmental eyes of the village prie