Fantasy Short Stories Collection

A practical farmer discovers a crossroads connecting four different realities. An elderly woman is granted forty-eight hours of youth, beauty and wishes. A circus performer learns how to switch bodies. A gold miner confronts a seventy-five-foot island god. New York landmarks mysteriously vanish. And a powerless drifter discovers he can heal—or kill—with a glance. Across these fantasy short stories, wishes, powers, supernatural encounters, alternate realities and impossible changes create adventure, humor, danger, wonder and unexpected consequences.

Circus performer Little Tom Little has spent his life looking up at bigger men—especially Hermann Schmidt, the commanding ring master who seems to possess everything Tom wants. Then a dying mystic leaves Tom the secret of switching bodies. Suddenly Tom can trade his small frame for Schmidt’s powerful one. But becoming another man means inheriting his dangers and his enemies—and Tom is about to learn that getting what you want can be far more dangerous than wanting it. One soul. Multiple bodies. One impossible secret. And one wish that may leave Tom wishing he had stayed exactly who he was.

Gold miner Billy Newman thinks he has made the deal of a lifetime when he buys a remote island in the Philippines. Then crops fail, disease spreads and the islanders insist there is only one explanation: Billy has angered Tadamona, the giant god who claims the island as his own. Billy trusts medicine, dynamite and his own nerve—not superstition. But when Tadamona proves terrifyingly real, disbelief is no protection. With a young girl marked for sacrifice and an island in panic, Billy has to find a way to fight something everyone else believes cannot be defeated. A plague is spreading.

Veteran newspaperman Pop is being pushed toward retirement when he is handed one last dead-end assignment: investigate an eccentric professor with impossible ideas about matter and transportation. Then New York landmarks begin disappearing. Grant’s Tomb. Pennsylvania Station. The impossible is suddenly front-page news, and Pop has the story that could save his career—if he can prove how a professor with a model railroad is making a city vanish piece by piece. A reporter with nothing left to lose. A scientist no one believes. And a mystery too impossible for anyone but Pop to chase.

Farmer Eben Smith is tired of being told to destroy good crops while people go hungry. He loads his wagon, heads for the city and reaches a crossroads unlike any on Earth—four roads, four kinds of travelers and four realities with very different ideas about trade. Eben has produce to sell and a Yankee instinct for a bargain. But every deal he makes sends another world spinning in an unexpected direction, and the farther he travels from the road he knows, the stranger the consequences become. Four roads. Impossible customers. A wagon full of ordinary goods.

Jack is a drifter, a tramp, with nothing—until a gunshot, a desperate operation and an impossible recovery leave him with a power no one understands. At first, Jack’s strange ability seems miraculous. With a glance, the sick recover. The injured are restored. Even age itself can be reversed. But Jack soon discovers that the same force that heals can kill when fear takes hold—and once other people realize what he can do, his life is no longer his own. A miracle becomes a weapon. A powerless man becomes someone the world fears.