I also enjoyed Gareth Stack's "Creepdoll," in which a single man decides to buy a very life-like doll as a means of attracting women, who will think him a single parent. Of course, maintaining the fiction invites complications. Gustavo Bondoni's "Offline" is involving, if perhaps not quite convincing, about a woman in a future Namibia who has fallen in love with a white man, strictly verboten. So she has gone "offline" and is trying to escape. I enjoyed it, but I couldn't quite buy the draconian society depicted.

Also enjoyable is "A Most Notorious Woman," by T.D. Edge. It concerns Grace O'Malley, the Irish "Pirate Queen." A mysterious visitor fetches her after her famous meeting with Queen Elizabeth I, and soon we gather that some sort of time travel is involved, and she is in the future, captaining a pirate ship for, essentially, rich tourists. But she has her own ideas about what being a pirate really means... And Richard Alan Scott's "Stoker's Benefactor" is nice enough, an epistolary tale about Bram Stoker's career as a theater manager, and the scary individual he encounters, a mysterious Eastern European who has designs on one of the actresses.

The other two stories weren't quite as successful. "Sing a Seller's Song," by Sara Joan Berniker, tries to shock with its depiction of a young boy forced to act as his mother's pimp. In the end, again, I just didn't believe any of it. And "Aegis," by D.T. Neal, goes on rather too long in telling of a young artist's fascination with a much -- much! -- older sculptor named, significantly, Renee Euryale. It's obvious where this is going from the first, and the young artist -- nor a model he encounters -- just doesn't come to life.

Albedo One is consistently interesting, if occasionally rather uneven. It aggressively supports fiction from all around the world -- here the only example is Bondoni, an Argentine who writes in English, but previous issues have featured prize-winning German stories, for example. Certainly it is worth seeking out.