A gift to end 2025 — Worlds of Possibility Volume 2!

Hello, and happy New Year's Eve!

Where I live it's been gloom and gray this week — the perfect weather to curl up with a cozy story or few. If you're short of cozy stories, fear not, for I have just the thing for you!

With great thanks to all the amazing authors and artists and paid subscribers who have contributed to and supported Worlds of Possibility, I am delighted to offer everyone the gift of the Worlds of Possibility Volume 2 ebook!

This second volume collects short stories, flash fiction, and drabbles from the August 2023 to June 2025 issue run of Worlds of Possibility. The magazine officially ended with the June 2025 issue, so this anthology catches us up to the present with a massive 85 stories! Several of these also have original art!

There will be a print version of this volume in the future, but for now, there is only the ebook, and I have decided to make it free for everyone, because I think we can all use some hope and coziness!

Table of Contents (titles in bold were first published in 2025):

• “Child and the Bocwyrm” by Joshua Gage, featuring “Bochord” illustration by Ana Niki
• “Please Mind the Poltergeist” by Tehnuka
• “The Flightless Finch” by Megan Baffoe
• “When You Don’t Have Money, Have People, Even if They’re Dead” by Wen Wen Yang
• “Ivy and Eucalyptus” by E. M. Linden
• “Miss Elsie’s Sunken Piano” by Marc A. Criley
• “The Giant’s Unquiet Bones” by Kate Ravenna
• “Morning Dew” by Megan Baffoe
• “House Call” by Christine Hanolsy
• “Heartbeats” by Annika Barranti Klein
• “In Her Tower of Scales” by Marisca Pichette, featuring “Fairy Tale Forest” illustration by Ana Niki
• “A Simulacrum of Self” by Aimee Ogden, featuring an origial illustration by Amad Razi
• “Shooting Stars” by Rebecca Zahabi
• “My First Name Was Droplet” by Akis Linardos
• “What the Crows Know” by Valerie Kemp, featuring an original illustration by wunder
• “Gargoyle Girl” by Sylvia Heike
• “Mazal Tov, Mazal Tov” by Y. M. Resnik
• “The Face of a God” by H. V. Crow
• “The Witch’s Cat” by Julia LaFond
• “Let the Mothman In” by Rachael K. Jones
• “Princess Reimagined” by Beth Goder
• “A Hint of Cinnamon, a Whiff of Mint” by Amanda Saville
• “Five Reasons Why I Am Absolutely Not in Love with My Nemesis: A Magically Sealed Journal Entry” by Stephanie Burgis
• “Delivered” by Rem Wigmore
• “Hearts and Flowers” by Marisca Pichette
• “The Slayer’s Descent” by Ayida Shonibar
• “Fairy, Robin, Sunflower” by Avra Margariti, featuring “Robin and Sunflower Illustration” by Graziella Miligi
• “We Carry What’s Ours” by V. Astor Solomon
• “Shopping at the Soul Patch Consignment Store” by Amanda Helms
• “Inherited Shadows” by Wen Wen Yang, featuring “Shadow Monster” illustration copyright 2023 by Julia Kim
• “Feathers” by P.A. Cornell
• “Fairy Charm” by Rita Briar
• “How to Cook with the Negative Space in Your Grandmother’s Recipes” by Jennifer Hudak
• “Neither Kith Nor Kindergarten” by H.E. Bergeron
• “Night Mare” by Susan Taitel
• “Inheritance in Six Parts” by Nadine Aurora Tabing
• “Silver Tracings in Starlit Skies” by Reed Mingault, featuring “Spiderbot” illustration by Cassie Daley
• “So, Your Child Turned Out to Be a Phoenix” by Stephanie Burgis
• “Answering the Call” by Julie Brydon
• “A Refugee from Fairyland” by Keyan Bowes, featuring an original illustration by Tetiana Hut
• “The Last Items of the Forgotten Hero, Or, the Grandchild’s First Dragon” by Guan Un
• “Princess Mildred and the Dragon” by R. J. Howell, featuring “Dragon Reading” illustration by Jenn Reese
• “Fix It, Remember It, Undo It” by AnaMaria Curtis
• “The Case Against Raven Mail” by Wen Wen Yang
• “Diary of a High School Necromancer” by Spencer Orey
• “Stories Never Die But Live Forever On the Winds” by Jo Miles
• “Recipes for the Course of Living” by Jeané D. Ridges
• “The Regrettable Loneliness of the Great Wizard Graveblossom’s Door” by Michael M. Jones
• “Brighter Than Anything on Earth” by Annika Barranti Klein
• “Bone and Marrow, Root and Stem” by A.Z. Louise
• “The Shape of Them” by Y.M. Resnik
• “Firecrackers on 28 Mott Street” by Angela Liu, featuring “Firecrackers” illustration by Robby Firmansyah
• “Garage Ghost” by Julia LaFond
• “The Last Adult Superstore” by John Wiswell
• “The Forge” by DJ Tyrer
• “So You Want to Run a Temporal Coffee Shop” by R. P. Sand
• “W.F.A. #31” by Adria Bailton
• “Coalescence” by Simo Srinivas, featuring “Eyepatch and the Cat” illustration by Milcanna
• “Wheat Bread and Honeycomb” by Marc A. Criley
• “No S’mores For Me, Thank You” by Marc A. Criley
• “Do You LIKE Like Me?” by Marc A. Criley
• “Perks of the Job” by Kimberly Ann Smiley, featuring “Perks of the Job Cat” illustration by Miyusa Ashibara
• “Three Conversations with Myself in an Arby’s at the Edge of the Solar System” by Craig Church
• “Stone Soup Colony” by Jennifer R. Povey
• “Have You Eaten Yet?” by Ian Li
• “Nova’s Epic Re-Entry Bucket List” by Y. M. Resnik, featuring “Tacopalooza” illustration by Amad Razi
• “This Goodly Frame, the Earth” by Cecilia Tan
• “Night Shift Coffee” by Marc A. Criley
• “Happiness Is ______________” by Rodrigo Culagovski, featuring “Ayx and JamJam” illustration by Julia Kim
• “Soldier On” by Peter Duchak II
• “Little Known Facts About Dragons” by Adria Bailton, featuring “Dragon Puppy” illustration by Jenn Reese
• “A Day at the Beach” by Lena Ng, featuring illustrations by Julia Kim
• “Two Views of an Unexpected Flight” by Marc A. Criley
• “An Unexpected Wombat” by Nico Martinez Nocito, featuring “Trans Pride Wombat” illustration by Gonzalo Alvarez
• “Man’s Best Fiend” by Caias Ward
• “A Sunday at the Park” by Lena Ng, featuring “Philip Skipping a Stone” illustration by Julia Kim
• “The Door Opens” by Ali Trotta, featuring “Thin Man and Cat” illustration by Rocco Casulli
• “Catch of the Day” by Brian Hugenbruch
• “Lessons From My Road Trip With a Sea-wife” by Devin Miller
• “The Last Time I Went on a Prowl with Farrell Jenkins” by David Anaxagoras
• “Until the Great Experiment Ends” by Keyan Bowes
• “Invasibility” by Ellis Nye
• “Warning: Cats Eyes Removed” by Die Booth
• “When You Think No One Can See You” by Lettie Prell, featuring “Fairy Ladder” illustration by Andrea Bures
• “The Clearing Where it Began” by Sarah Grace Tuttle.

Here's my note from the editor:

Dear Reader,

Thank you for picking up this volume of hopeful, soothing, and uplifting science fiction and fantasy stories. I started Worlds of Possibility at a time when I really needed to read hopeful things. Over the past few years, it’s been a joy to read and edit so many lovely pieces, and to commission original artwork for some of them. 

The cover art for this volume is by one of the most frequent artistic contributors to this project, Julia Kim. I first commissioned her in 2022 to make an illustration of a cat riding a rocket bike. This was an illustration for Lena Ng’s story “A Saturday Out” in the August 2022 issue of the magazine — the very first full issue. That illustration became the cover art for the issue, and it was also the most popular sticker in the first Worlds of Possibility Kickstarter reward selection. I love it, and to this day, I have a little rocket bike cat on my water bottle!

I originally found Julia Kim by searching for Ukrainian creators because I wanted to support them as much as I could in the early days of the war. Over the past few years, my pool has broadened to include artists from all over the world, but I also continue to commission Ukrainian artists, and I keep coming back to commission more work from Julia Kim because she has such a fun and cute style. In this volume, you’ll find two more stories by Lena Ng, both featuring the same characters, including Philip, the orange cat. Of course I had to have Julia Kim illustrate them, too! She’s also done illustrations of full scenes for “Inherited Shadows” by Wen Wen Yang (this was also the cover for the October 2023 issue of the magazine), and “Happiness Is ______________” by Rodrigo Culagovski. It seemed just right to ask her to create cover art for this volume as well. 

The other two books in this series, Worlds of Possibility and Worlds of Possibility —Poetry, have cover art by two wonderful artists, Grace P. Fong and Grace Chadwick. Both of them chose to represent the idea of Worlds of Possibility by having a human(ish) figure reaching out toward different possible worlds or ideas. For this volume, I asked Julia Kim to take that same theme and change the possibilities a little. Instead of bubbles or planets, I asked for three things that come up multiple times in this volume: a dragon, a rocket, and a cat. I love how this one came out, and I hope you will find it, and the volume it illustrates, as delightful as I do.

In this book, you will find short stories at a variety of lengths from very short flash and 100 word drabbles to longer shorts that you might settle into for a little bit. They represent twelve issues of the magazine, from August 2023 to June of 2025. I have sorted the stories into loosely themed groups, as I’ve done for the other volumes in this series. You can read them in order, or dip in and out according to your whims! All the art that was commissioned for these stories is credited at the end of each individual story. If you see uncredited art, it is stock art that I personally curated and/or used to create a design. I am a big fan of human creativity, and to the best of my knowledge I do not use AI. 

There are content notes at the end of this volume for anyone who is worried about what they may find in the stories. Although my goal for Worlds of Possibility is to publish works that soothe, inspire, and delight, I recognize that many subjects are difficult for different readers at different times, and I encourage you to make informed decisions about what you choose to read and when. 

All Best,
Julia Rios