Tor.com is pleased to present Mary Rickert’s “Cold Fires,” originally published in 2004 and recently included in the new collection You Have Never Been Here, available from Small Beer Press. Faced with the uncanny and the impossible, Rickert’s protagonists are as painfully, shockingly, complexly human as the readers who will encounter them. Mothers, daughters, witches, artists, strangers, winged babies, and others grapple with deception, loss, and moments of extraordinary joy.