The Cold Calculations
ShortStory 5,540 words Recommended by 5 award/anthology sources
"Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad. We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We’re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide—poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless."
Content warnings 1
death
Quasar links out; the story lives on Clarkesworld, where the author gets the click.