Excerpt from Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chloe looked up from her phone with a disgusted expression. "Mags!"

"Sure," Liddy said. "You and Grace can come over after school. My mom won't be home until late. She has a date."

"I'm coming too!" Chloe insisted.


While Liddy hosed off her legs in the shower, Chloe lit a candle in Liddy's bedroom—a scented leftover from Christmas, filling the room with the waxy, candy-sweet smell of artificial pine needles. She ran a sewing needle through the flame. Once it was cool, she dipped it in rubbing alcohol and left it to dry on a paper towel. Liddy sat on her bed, her feet up on a clean white towel taken from the hall closet. We were going for a surgical atmosphere, or a ceremonial one—an appendectomy, a baptism—but instead it felt more like a game of pretend, the kind of game we'd only recently outgrown.

Chloe and I sat on Liddy's bed with her. Mags sat on the floor, resting her elbows on the mattress with her chin in her hands, her face level with the bulbous horrors.

Liddy pressed the needle to her skin lengthwise, parallel to her leg, and slid it down to pierce the first of the two bubbles. We instinctively all leaned away, as though it would explode, but Liddy had to draw the needle up to tear through the out-side layer of skin. Clear fluid ran down her leg. She mopped it up with a hand towel.

When she lifted the towel away, we could see the matted clump that had been underneath, resembling a downy, slimy, just-birthed animal, newly ejected from its mother. Liddy got up and went back to the bathroom, and we followed. She left the shower curtain open as she stood in the tub and splashed the lump with tap water. The coil unfurled. She turned off the water and fluffed it out with another towel, helping it along. "They're ... feathers," I said.

A bird's wing stuck straight out from the side of her leg, the feathers black, the span approximately the length of her hand. The wing flexed away from Liddy, stretching to its full outward distance, before trembling and folding back, the tip pointing down once more.

Excerpted from Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu. Published with permission from Tin House. Copyright (c) 2022 by Kim Fu.