Haven’t been keeping with my short fiction reading lately (lots of novels), but here’s a bunch of stuff I enjoyed recently:

• Offerings by Stephanie Burgis (Fantasy Magazine)
  • That Wednesday, the witch found five silver paperclips laid across her doorstep, next to an apple and a sharpened No. 2 pencil. She regarded them gravely as the breeze from the lake swept up through the pine trees and ruffled her upswept black hair. Then she turned to see if she could spot any signs of who had left them.
• “Charms” by Shweta Narayan (Strange Horizons)
  • Edith nods, but what it’s not is fair. It’s too easy, the tide of war washing these feckless, smiling girls up, drowning Edith in the bile and brine of the past. And she’s hardly old, not yet. Not yet. She shakes her head tiredly. Women’s magic, she says, is like everything else. Not good enough for girls these days.
• “Thieves of Silence” by Holly Phillips (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
  • The women that moved within the ring of flames wore nothing but their shifts, silk and lace that freed long white limbs Zel could not help but admire. Three women among the flames, a fourth who held the knife: the old man’s ice maiden daughters.