StarShipSofa 760 Libby Cudmore

Main fiction: “First Family of Mars” by Libby Cudmore

Libby Cudmore is the author of The Big Rewind (William Morrow 2016) and Negative Girl (Datura 2024) as well as the Wade & Jacks series in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchock Mystery Magazine, and Tough. Her work has been published in Orca, Dark Waters, Stone’s Throw and the Anthony Award-nominated Lawyers Guns & Money: Crime Fiction Inspired By the Songs of Warren Zevon, which she co-edited with Art Taylor.

She is the recipient of the Eleventh Hour Innaugural Literary Prize, the Shamus Award and the Black Orchid Novella Prize, as well as a finalist for the 2025 International Thriller Writers Award for Best Standalone Mystery.

This story originally appeared in Orca, A Literary Journal, #13, Spring/Summer 2023.

Narrated by: Theo Kipnis

Theo Kipnis sits slowly in a red and pink room, not choosing, not doing. Horseshoes and dominoes line the casements and built-in shelves, on which framed pictures cherish quiet images of ancestors and cartoon cats. Again and again, he slows in the small room, feeling the steady shadow around him drip through his vision. He has wings on his tongue and a tiny, pumping heart in each eye socket. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Fact: Looking Back At Genre History by Amy H Sturgis

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