Illustration by Guinevere von Sneeden
• You can lace your own corset without assistance.
• You wear corsets.
• When your friends order cocktails, you prefer a neat whiskey—or champagne if you’re feeling feisty.
• You believe music sounds best when played on...
Photography by Natalia Le Fay Follow Natalia Le Fay on Instagram @natalia_lefay.
The Lost Queen by Simon & Schuster was published in September, 2018. Read more about Signe at signepike.com.
Read Carolyn Turgeon's, EIC of Faerie Magazine, interview with Signe Pike.
A chill...
Father loved me better than my sisters. That sounds desirable, yes? To be best loved, to be the one desired?
The dresses he gave me were golden as the sun, luminescent as the moon, bright as the stars. They weighed more...
I. An expedition
More scientists than sirens, the mermaids
gather specimens with the stalking skill
of anglerfish. They catalogue all evidence
in an abyssopelagic lab, sterile in the steam
from deep sea vents. Tube-worms witness
their collections grow and inquiries unfold:
how cloth and air might...
Garden Ice
I was alone when the cold began. Ice fell onto the gar-den like rain, only it was a pale green, so pale you had to look carefully or it would be invisible. Everywhere it fell the world turned...
In the land of the Sand Riders, where women go veiled from top to toe, there lived a young man who dreamed of love. But he was too young to think of marriage, and according to the customs of...
Children! To perform this nifty trick, ask your mother for a shelled-out lemon, balled-up handkerchiefs, a vial of perfume, fire, and a pistol. “I have written this work,” writes Professor Henri Garenne, in his introduction to the 1886 edition...
In her first memory of this life, she clutched two pecans in her small hands. Warm brown with tabby cat black stripes, dry and cool to the touch. She might have gathered an empty husk, too, its edges curled as...
Every time my writing gets stuck, I ask myself, “How would Scheherazade get out of this?” Of course, she would know what to do. That’s how she survived for 1,001 nights and beyond: by knowing when to add to a...
This is the way she knew he was gone: The door was open. His boots were missing. The cage where he kept a hawk was empty. He’d never said a word. The night before he went missing he’d gathered the...