fiction
After September
BETTY STANTON
I walk toward the place where we first stepped when we had no homes, no reason to stop for relics. The air was swollen with laughter then, loud with its own wealth before cameras swallowed me whole and you kept the moon on a leash.
Today it is different. She runs into you now, frantic with her need to be everything to you. She holds herself out like an offering, and you take her in. I move slowly. I will not rearrange my body for you. I will not fracture into your shape. Time chisels us into acceptance. There is no winning. Only waiting. She believes you two can be one. I believe it too. Belief is nothing but surrender.
The wind is humid. It brushes past like the breath of something already buried in these backyard echoes of childhood. Play collapses into schedule. Love collapses into habit and I walk toward the place where we first stepped when we had no homes, no reason to stop. I carry the silence that comes after.
—Betty Stanton
Room for One
MONICA LYREHART
Radiation Imminent, T minus eight minutes.
Liz shoved another water jug into the shelter, hands shaking. There was room left for one adult, but it would be weeks before rescue.
She scraped everything from the pantry into a box.
Six minutes.
Sirens blared, briefly stunning her.
Deep breaths.
She secured oxygen canisters to masks and ran back.
Four minutes.
She wedged the box into the shelter, rapidly checking:
Water. Food. Waste container. Oxygen. Favorite Blanket.
Two minutes.
“Mommy?”
She grabbed Toby. Kissed his sweet hair. Shoved him in.
“Drink. Eat. Potty there. Breathers here. Like we practiced… I love you.”
Monica is a speculative fiction author, poet, writing contest goblin, and “the best mommy ever.”
The Selling of a House
NATALIA PLOS
“So, did you sell my house?” Craig asked.
“It’s not that easy to sell a haunted house,” Allen grumbled.
“Why can’t you grow some pretty flowers in the windowsill or sweep the floor? There’d be lines for a house with an automatic cleaning function.”
“Evil haunts don’t do that,” Craig shrugged. “I’m a very respectable and dangerous evil haunt.”
“Can’t you move into another house?”
“I can’t.”
“Well...” Allen said wistfully. “There’s still a chance you’ll find someone who likes you. And who will understand that talking to an evil haunt can be more pleasant than talking to most people.”
Natalia Plos is a horror writer. Her stories appeared in Stygian Lepus and Dark Myth Publications.
The Old Gods
MIKE A. RHODES
And something shifted in my perceptions then, like a clearing of mist, and I saw the lake glittering in the valley below us not as a lake but rather the awakening eye of a long sleeping giant, blinking, looking back at us.
“You people are insane!” I yelled over the keening wind.
“Please,” the man said calmly. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We’re trying something quite new."
There was a flash of silver in the orange-dusk and I felt something hot and then very cold. I felt weak. I looked down and saw blood pouring into pre-dug troughs in the dirt. The pattern was an intricate design that made little sense to me.
The group encircling us began a rhythmic hum. The ground rumbled as if the whole Earth joined in. As I fell to the ground, too weak to stand, vision beginning to swim, a giant tentacle seemed to reach up from beyond a hill across the valley.
“Civilisation has failed,” the man said. “We must look to the Old Gods.”
Mike A. Rhodes enjoys reading, writing, ice hockey and food.
Apotropaic PPE
GABRIELLE BLEU
“Kid,” Camelia barked at the intern. “Helmet on!"
“But it smells,” the intern grumbled, donning the metal hounskull helmet and closing the pointed visor.
“No rookie mistakes today,” Camelia chided. They entered the cave to begin the bat inoculations.
The rookie gawked at the thousands of sleeping bats above. One dropped from a stalactite, small furry body shifting into the pale, bloated corpse of a man swooping towards the intern.
Thankfully, the garlic stuffed in his visor deterred the vampire.
"What’d I tell you, kid?” Camelia called. "It’s the vampire vaccinator’s motto: ‘In a bascinet, then the bats can’t get.’”
Gabrielle Bleu writes luminous science fiction and fantasy. Find more of Bleu's work at gabriellebleu.com.
A simple concept
BRETT ABRAHAMSEN
Everyone knows that humans are not intelligent. However, my colleagues and I believe that there is more to these little furry creatures than meets the eye. It should, of course, be noted that even the most intelligent human is undoubtedly less intelligent than even the least educated Proxima Centauri, but there is certainly evidence that suggests humans may exhibit intelligence on levels similar to the inhabitants of Castor and Polaris. To test our (admittedly fringe) theory, we took one of the apes and tried to “Centaurize” it – in other words, to teach it to become one of us.
Of course, the experiment was doomed to fail. We began by explaining to the human how quantum mechanics and relativity are reconciled, how we effortlessly created the universe and everything in it (including homo sapiens), and how something came from nothing in the process – incredibly simple concepts, really. Of course, the human parroted everything we told it, but there was some debate concerning whether the human actually understood what we were saying or whether it was a mere case of rote operant conditioning.
My colleagues and I ultimately decided on the latter. We had been naively optimistic. Our brains are light-years long, theirs are only the size of a football, and we should have known better.
We sent the human back to its home planet. We watched as the creature made a successful landing, and then we fixed our sights elsewhere.
The author has sold dozens of works to numerous publications. He resides in Saratoga Springs, NY.
The Magician
GRAEME DIXON
On the third week of the search,
a magician came forward to help find the body.
Not one of your psychic mediums --
an actual magician with a top hat and wand.
He asked the lead detective to ‘pick any card,’
and strode with the team into the woods.
They found the body after only half an hour,
lying with a playing card on its chest.
‘Is that your card?’ asked the magician,
when they had cordoned off the area.
The detective turned it over.
The three of clubs. Uncanny.
‘I wonder how that was done,’ he said
to his other detective friends.
Probably a trick of the trade, he thought.
The magician winked at him as he went past.
Graeme Dixon writes when there’s no alternative to staring out of the window.
Impressions
ALETHEA PAUL
I hold my breath and brush away some sediment. Years of searching and dwindling expedition funds, I finally found one. With a slow, steady exhale, I blow the last dust of eons long passed into the wind.
But a marvel remains.
Before man and mammals, other creatures lumbered under the first towering conifers; animals whose bones fell into stagnant swamps and mineralized over millennia.
I can envision, as I hold the Maiasaura’s footprint, its duck-like bill reaching to graze. Perhaps this was the final muddy step before its last breath.
But now, an eternity after, I know it lived.
Alethea pretends to be profound with purple prose, puns, and alliteration.