T. K. Rex is a science fiction and fantasy author from the western states, whose stories can be read in roughly forty publications, including Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice, Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future, and their forthcoming collection, The Wildcraft Drones (2026, Stelliform Press). They’re an alumni of the Clarion writers workshop, a twenty-year denizen of San Francisco, and a friendly acquaintance of spiders. You can read most of their stories at the links below, and keep up with their latest publications and events on Instagram, Bluesky, and their newsletter. They read almost all of the emails sent to tk at tkrex dot wtf.
SHORT FICTION
The Rings of Ferocina
Factor Four Magazine, February 2025
Fifteen years. I count them by converting Standard to Gregorian badly while my feet move forward without me. It’s been fifteen years since I’ve seen another human and here’s one at the Stones on Ferocina underneath the glowing rings and stars, swirling a red gourd-bottle while he stares into the bonfire like a human would, like any human would, with the flames flickering across his brown and bearded face. He looks up and he sees me and that must be the same expression that I had a moment earlier: is that a human? No way…
1000 words
To Plant an Oak in Sand
Reckoning 9
Arthur Corey owns a small house in Port Charlotte, Florida. It’s bright lemon yellow, with a lawn he’s trying to kill, and a carport with no car, where a glass table gathers bong ash in the shade of seagrapes...
700 words
Everything I Hate About the Ninety-Two Foot Woman Next Door
The Fabulist, November 2024
There is a ninety-two-foot Venus de Milo trapped in the plaza above the underground parking garage of the apartment complex next to my building. I hate her.
800 words
Growing Swirling Clouds
Apex, issue 145, July 2024
Bards & Sages Quarterly, vol. XI, issue IV
TERSE., February 2019
TERSE., February 2019
“Mark died yesterday, Margery.” My tone was patient, sad but not distraught. The time for distraught was past, I thought.
“Coral, don’t joke about those things. He was right here a few minutes ago.”
I found a serious expression in my database and displayed it for her. “It’s not a joke, Margery. He left us yesterday morning. We’re saying goodbye as soon as you’re ready for the ceremony.” Margery wore her work uniform—a faded blue jumpsuit—and had her thin, white hair pulled up in a small bun. The jumpsuit no longer fit her well...
4800 words
Davu the Explorer and
the Druid Tía Yara
Roses & Wildflowers, Spring 2024
“When was the Rewilding?” Davu asked his big brother, Semtset, as they walked the oak and bay lined trail to the ruins of the Berkeley Wall, where they sometimes liked to play.
“Dad said it was seven hundred years ago.”
“Is that a really long time?”
“Yeah, it’s practically forever.”
Semtset climbed onto a concrete boulder, scraping yellow lichen with his shoe, gray felt with brown leather soles. Newer than Davu’s, which were starting to feel a little small, one heel about to get a hole...
6100 words
The Hen and the Shadow of the Monstrance Street Commune
Haven Speculative, January 2024
I wasn’t there the day that Glenda’s daughter Misty found a stray hen wandering along the gravel edge of Monstrance Street, because I only come out at night. I heard about it through the shadows of the ivy that grew in through the cracks in Glenda’s walls and all along her ceiling, hanging in gravity curves against the plastic tarp that kept the insulation dust from falling on her bed at night. I heard about it from the hen herself, in the pen that Glenda and her boyfriend Henning made from scrap they found around the commune grounds...
2000 words
Water, Which Laughs At All Things
New Edge Sword & Sorcery, Issue 2, December 2023
Any laughter there had been around the edges of Mar’s Tavern, in the Rain Shadow town of Cactus Wren, fled the moment Pargbog’s soldiers opened the door. Navikt threw back the rest of her brew and pushed the empty mug across the scarred wood bar to Mar, whose eyes were wide with fear for her between his thick gray eyebrows and his thicker, grayer beard. They both remembered the night he smuggled her out of the Rain Shadow with the last shipment of yucca stalks sixteen years ago, the night Pargbog executed the elder watertender she’d apprenticed with on the bank of the Grandfather River...
5900 words
Hi From Shelling Point
Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, October/November 2023
Dear Twila,
It’s me, Mist. From high school. Well not your high school, but… nevermind. Hi. It’s lonely out here.
Sorry, I couldn’t just keep writing dry ass ship logs while everyone I’ve ever known grows old and dies without me. So I’m writing to Twila. To you. To 2000 you, the teenager who worked at Happy Donuts who I had a crush on when I used to go to shitty punk shows at The Gilman back in high school. If by some exceeeeedingly unlikely scenario my mission here succeeds, and I find aliens, and they know how to get home from the end of the galaxy, then… well then if anybody ever reads this, I guess I’m a little space-mad already, so I hope at least you’re entertained...
4500 words
A Layer Thin As Breath
Escape Pod 907, 2023
Best Vegan Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2019
Metaphorosis, July 2019
“Valley. Can you still hear me?”
Julian’s voice filtered through her dying radio. The Prince of Cats was a speck of light, dimming through the gold-grey film that, atom by atom, was devouring her helmet.
Valley tried to say something, anything. Failed.
Julian was sobbing on the other end. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so kzzzzzzchchchcffft-” and that was it. Her radio was gone...
6100 words
A Lot Full of Weeds
Little Blue Marble, September 2023
Sometimes, especially days the air was easy to breathe, I liked to walk all the way down to Golden Gate Park, wander through the trees, maybe get a taco, watch the waves at Ocean Beach, or the roller skaters down by Fulton. Maybe just sit on the playground swings and listen to the birds and kids. Get reminded there was more to life than my Slack-infested laptop and my fourth-floor view of a vacant Tenderloin lot.
The day I got the seeds, Golden Gate Park was bright and sunny, warm the way it is sometimes in late September, and the air was golden-brown but the quality a decent 65 that day, I guess the smoke was too high up to get to us...
2000 words
Margot, the Clouds Will Part Again For Us
Dreams & Nightmares, September 2023
Margot, the clouds will part again for us
The rain can’t last forever.
I’m here shining where I always was.
Here for a few more billion years.
Even if my light falls only on the fossils of your bones, on the rain-smeared ink of your name...
200 words
(Available in the print issue only.)
Ravens Made of Lichen, with Beaks of Black Basalt
Typehouse, Volume 10, No. 1, Issue 27
An empty dining table stretches wide between Alana and her father, untraversable. His face has fallen into an expression that she’s never seen before, forehead wrinkled up like laundry, one eye twitching at the edge.
He says, “I’ve never really loved a human woman.”
Is he crying? Fuck, what’s happening.
“There was a mermaid, back on Earth, I met in college.”
She tries to be respectful, nod politely...
5600 words
Saltwater Rinse
Club Chicxulub Journal, 2023
“Try a saltwater rinse,” my friend Amanda said as we stared into the gaping wet hole in my knee. It was red inside and lumpy with a row of slightly bloody, wide spaced teeth...
1600 words
The Six Years I Spent With You On Chenhablimesh
Uncharted Magazine, 2023
It’s been thirteen years since I threw that old red flip phone across the beige-carpeted living room of my first apartment in Albuquerque, startling the white rabbit I lived with, who hopped away into the bathroom and hid behind the toilet.
The memory erasure worked, for thirteen years. But after watching that viral video on repeat a hundred times, standing in my bedroom, late to a Zoom meeting with coworkers I’d never met in person, watching that little white space ship above a dark gray, grainy sea, it started coming back to me...
1100 words
Squawker and Dolphin Swimming Together
Reckoning 7
The Submersible aQuatic Cetacean Communication Robot—professionally known as SQCCR, affectionately known as “Squawker”—splashes into the harbor from the starboard side of the Charlotte’s Web at dawn. A few brilliant, cool drops hit Julia’s skin.
The heat index is already 96 and aiming for the red by ten. What must the dolphins think of the extra three degrees the world’s gained since the oldest members of their pods were born?
Maybe this is the upgrade that will finally help her find out...
5000 words
The Roots in the Box and the Roots in the Bones
Asimov's Science Fiction, January/February 2023
At the top of the hill, in the center of the ruined buildings, a sprawling coast live oak exhales pollen from ten thousand yellow catkins, nearly glowing, backlit by a beam of rainy season sun. The meadow smells like fresh baked acorn bread, with hints of rose and citrus, stronger with each step toward the tree.
Oliver, beside me, says, “She’s here, Macara. I can feel it.”
Millions of tiny bones crunch under my boots, colorful mushrooms sprouting thick between them.
The deeper I breathe, the less I’m afraid. This would be a beautiful place to die...
8900 words
(Available in the print issue only.)
A Holdout in the Northern California Designated Wildcraft Zone
Grist, Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, 2022 collection
Holdout. Female, late sixties to eighties, ethnically ambiguous, average build, unarmed, traversing north-northeast dirt footpath through oak/pine/madrone woodlands near northern edge of my newly assigned territory. Permanent human presence poses significant risk to my rewilding efforts here. Network: Approach?
4000 words
The Beast of the Shadow Gum Trees
New Edge Sword & Sorcery, issue 0
And so Moth buried Amas with his lute beneath their favorite lilac tree, and willed himself to die beside him. His cells refused, for he had given up all but the magic he had started with irrationally long ago, in exchange for one last chance at love.
He stumbled to the edge of the Neonate Sea, and gave himself to the green waves, where the serpent-tailed women of the water greeted him with sympathy and sea grass braids.
“Let me drown,” he begged them.
“But you cannot die,” they sang...
5000 words
The Hall of Being
Luna Station Quarterly, issue 051
Currant has a good feeling about the gathering today. Young Jaheem is back from his away mission, and the mood is bound to be high. She has a topic prepared, an old favorite, and a few new floor pillows for the circle, woven tule filled with cattail fluff, made with love by hand just down the hill.
The empty Hall of Being greets her with the scent of slightly dusty wood, warm green and yellow light from the stained glass panel of bay laurel flowers high above, and the silent ancestors carved into all six redwood walls. Lepidodenron, Tiktaalik, Deinonychus...
4300 words
(Available in the print issue only.)
And in Her Sleep, She Cooed
The Molotov Cocktail, vol. 13, issue 1
In a dark, oil-stained corner of a parking garage in downtown San Francisco, where a dusty white and warm-brown pigeon had pecked at a dried glob of someone’s caramel latte only moments earlier, there now stood a naked, middle-aged woman.
Her life as a human had commenced...
980 words
Gentle Dragon Fires
Strange Horizons, 17 January 2022
ah-eh-ah- ay ay
The land burns so hot and high tonight that Let can see its orange glow even from the heart of The City of Birds. It burns so thick she can taste the whole year’s growth of leaves and branches on her lips. It burns so fast she can almost hear the deer and cottontails scream as flames outrun them and devour them whole.
But Let can’t dwell on this, not tonight. She has a song on her tongue and the streets of The City of Birds are thick with smoke and strangers in her way...
4900 words
My Favorite Shape Of All
Queer Blades: An Anthology of LGBTQIA2+ Adventure Fanatsy
The first time I met Zashil, I was a jaguar.
I woke at dawn with claws and teeth, and knew I might not get a better form for this for years. That night I made my way into the town, through cobbled alleys in the moonlight, past the gaslit square where townsfolk dulled themselves with drink, and through the mud and reeds up to the moat. I quickly swam across, and climbed a palm tree to a window that I hoped would lead me to the bedroom of the king, where I would tear his throat out with my teeth, and finally end my curse...
8500 words
Ten Years In
Daily Science Fiction, July 20, 2021
My Dearest Lahar,
I’m afraid I must confess, I’ve done something irreversible. Before you make assumptions, let me just explain.
There was a time, which barely seems like yesterday, when I could hardly take my eyes off you. You barely knew that I was there, but from behind the counter of the bakery on Bay Street, I always knew the moment you walked in, and the moment that you left. I started making morning buns, the ones with hazelnuts you always get, with only you in mind. And when, from time to time you smiled at me, I would swoon so hard the other bakers teased me...
990 words
(No longer available.)
The Steak
The Offbeat, vol. 19, Spring 2019
Chrissy and Mark subscribed to a meal delivery service from a local startup. The meals were mediocre, but they arrived on time every day.
Chrissy assumed there was a building somewhere where workers assembled meals. She had never voiced this to Mark.
Mark assumed there was an office someplace, where men like him worked on the app. He had never voiced this to Chrissy.
Mark microwaved the meals while Chrissy set forks and napkins on the coffee table in front of their TV. They did this every night. Neither could remember the last time they’d left the house for dinner.
“Mark,” Chrissy said one night, in a sullen voice, “I ordered a steak today even though I felt like I should eat a salad. Am I a bad person?”
“Chrissy,” Mark said, “We’re all bad people.”
850 words
(Available in print only.)
Surface Tension
JMWW, July 2018
Miranda, 22, has dyed her short hair blue. Today she wears an off-white tee with a picture of a cat, which she would say was ironic if anyone asked. Her boot-cut jeans are too long for her, and the frayed cuffs drag on the floor, collecting coffee grounds. Over it all hangs a black apron, just ill-fitting enough to let the cat peek out.
It’s not her first job and she thinks she’s as experienced as she lied she was on her resume. It pays minimum wage with afternoon tips. She is a beginner at other things—cooking, Photoshop, love—but she is an expert at foaming milk.
He walks in...
1300 words
Open letter to the tech bro who spat at me, from that pigeon eating a noodle on Market Street
Art + Marketing, March 2016
It was a regular Thursday afternoon, and the south sidewalk of Mid-Market near Chai Cafe was busy as usual. I, like many San Franciscans on any given day of the week, was quietly enjoying some delicious noodles. However, unlike most San Franciscans, I was interrupted when a complete stranger decided to spit at me. You.
650 words
PRAISE FOR GENTLE DRAGON FIRES
"Taking on climate change and climate action in interesting speculative ways, it imagines a voice worn down to a whisper, but still audible to those willing to listen." — Charles Payseur, Locus
FOR THE BEAST OF THE SHADOW GUM TREES
"‘Beast’ has the haunting qualities of Ursula K. LeGuin’s works, by way of Richard Powers’ The Overstory.” — Anthony Perconti, Schlock! Webzine
FOR THE ROOTS IN THE BOX AND THE ROOTS IN THE BONES
"There was a really interesting premise, a cool vision, and some nice writing there, especially at the end. Glad I had the chance to read it." — C. C. Finlay
INTERVIEWS AND PRESS
The Authors of Issue 145: T.K. Rex
Apex Magazine Patreon, July 23, 2024
A photographic essay about place, writing, and generation ships. Created by T. K. Rex for Apex Magazine as part of their series on The Authors of Issue 145.
Chatting with Dolphins (and Author T. K. Rex)
Bright Green Futures, Episode 2, March 28, 2024
T.K. Rex in conversation with Susan Kaye Quinn about communicating with the non-human; the interface between ourselves, nature, and technology; and T. K.'s solarpunk stories, namely "Squawker and Dolphin Swimming Together" and "A Lot Full of Weeds."
Seven SFF Stories Featuring Rebellions Big and Small
Tor.com, Dec 6, 2023, by Ratika Deshpande
Featuring a short review of “A Holdout in the Northern California Designated Wildcraft Zone” by T.K. Rex.
Hopepunk Panel
Watertown Free Public Library, January 24, 2023
T. K. Rex discusses the emerging hopepunk genre with fellow authors Renan Bernardo, Brianna Castagnozzi, and Susan Kaye Quinn.
Finding and Breaking Utopia
From Earth to the Stars: The Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine Author & Editor Blog, January 12, 2023
To build the world of The Roots in the Box and the Roots in the Bones, T.K. Rex devoured books about California’s natural history. In this post, she discusses the horror and revelations of an epic deep dive.
New Edge Authors Say Hello
So I’m Writing a Novel, Episode 53, Oct. 9, 2022
T. K. Rex chats with Oliver Brackenbury, editor of New Edge Sword and Sorcery, about writing The Beast of the Shadow Gum Trees for issue 0 while attending the Clarion Writers Workshop.
Wyrd Question Daze: T. K. Rex
Wyrd Daze, Nov. 27, 2022, by Leigh Wright
T. K. Rex muses on the tiny UFO that flew through her kitchen when she was five, and other stuff.
The Hopefulness of Destruction
Woke AF Daily, Nov 15, 2022
T. K. Rex and Danielle Moodie discuss the nature of hopeful fiction in the climate crisis.
Interview with Thea Boodhoo
Writing Off The Deep End, Episode 25, July 5, 2020
T. K. Rex (whose nonfictional name is Thea Kinyon Boodhoo in case you were wondering about that) (also it's pronounced "tay-ah") has a chat with Mary Thaler and Geoffrey Edwards about writing and the research process for a novel that later became The Roots in the Box and the Roots in the Bones.
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