Lagoonfire

The past can be a difficult thing to escape...

Decommissioner Thirty-Seven is not the most conventional decommissioner at the Ministry of Divinities, but she takes her role of helping fading gods to retire seriously-and feels bad when things go wrong. Take the decommissioning of Laloran-morna, former god of warm ocean waves: she botched that, somehow, and now he spurts saltwater when upset. When seawater invades a development project in Laloran-morna's old haunts, suspicion naturally falls on him. But is the retired god the source of the problem? Or is it the work of a mortal saboteur? Searching for the answer to these questions brings Thirty-Seven face-to-face with a past she'd rather forget.

Francesca Forrest is the author of Lagoonfire's predecessor story, The Inconvenient God, as well as Pen Pal (2013), a hard-to-classify novel from the margins. Her short stories have appeared in Not One of Us, Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, and other online and print venues. She's currently working on a third story about Decommissioner Thirty-Seven that builds on the events in Lagoonfire. She blogs at asakiyume.dreamwidth.org, and you can follow her on Twitter at @morinotsuma.