story
Welcome to Restless Reality!
We’re so glad you’re staying with us (even if the razor-winged magpies say otherwise; don’t listen to them). As a world-class Alternative Hotel of the Unexpected, we’re brimming with caffeinated carpeting, shapeshifting smorgasbords, boundless beds, savory showers, hand-eating heat pipes, and so much more. Hungry after your travels? Grab a sub from the common area (by grab, we mean you need to actually grab it because it might skitter away on its hundred legs, and by sub we could mean a sandwich or a literal submarine, and by common area, we mean either the space where you might find sofas and chairs or the giant warm-blooded womb of a ginglegormer). Tired from running the grapefruit gauntlet while just trying to enter the hotel? Take a snooze on your comfortable bed (it might be a rectangular structure with a mattress, blankets, and pillows or it might be the maw of a recently-resurrected and fiendishly-hungry dilophosaurus named “Bed.” Good luck!). You’ve come here to be surprised, yes? Wonder at how quickly our lamps morph into Lamborghinis, marvel at how our waiters shift into ‘gators, and delight in how quickly our tables transform into tribbles. You never know what’s going to happen 45from moment to moment, but that’s why you’re paying us the big credits, right?!
And remember, getting eaten, liquified, dessicated, dematerialized, or chopped up into a million tiny pieces does not qualify you for a refund. Enjoy your stay!
Rachel Cordasco is a Wisconsin -based independent scholar and writer.
They say conspiracy theory radio talk shows only play at night. They’re wrong.
Sometimes midday you can hear them. If you drive out of the city into the middle of nowhere. Just listen.
Park and play the radio just right, and you might hear the tales of lizard zombies that crawl out of the Earth’s core following a meteor storm. I almost saw one once; a lizard zombie, I mean.
I know the greys are real. Sometimes, I hear them through the fillings in my teeth, always at high noon. At night, they taunt me with their dreaded Hum.
I use the radio in my old truck and a prepaid burner phone, never a smartphone. You never know who might be listening. But I suspect it’s an organization with jumbled letters. The kind of letters that correspond to numbers that add up to evil.
The people must be warned. Don’t they know the End Times are coming?
I give them a call
“Hello, Friend! You’re on the air!”
And I tell the truth
E.J. LeRoy is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer with a forthcoming mpreg novella. Curious? Visit http://ejleroy.weebly.com.
Sap crawled out of mother's blackest water—the ichor gluing leaves to his palms as he clawed at summer's sheddings like a babe seeking breast.
Screeching saws had beckoned him. With each step he swelled, 'til mountainous.
Collapsing, he smothered the sparking blades.
He sucked bones, steel, screams—sucked all into soil.
Monica is a speculative fiction author, poet, writing contest goblin, and “the best mommy ever.”
“Let me show you this recently renovated Victorian.” Ms. North started scrolling through photos. “It’s in great condition and priced to sell. You could move in by—”
“I told you, I need a new build.” I shuddered. “My last apartment was haunted by a murdered tenant. The rent was cheap because her ghost still walks through the place, moaning.”
My realtor gasped. “How terrible! I assure you that nobody has been murdered in any house that I list.”
I shook my head. “You can’t know what’s happened behind someone’s closed doors. Now that I can afford it, I’m going to make sure I’ll never be haunted again.”
I wound up buying a lot and ordering a custom home. My builder had the best safety record in the state. His workers muttered and glanced over their shoulders whenever I showed up to watch the construction, which was often. If only they knew that I didn’t want any accidental deaths on my property, either.
Once the paint was dry, I moved in. I went to bed early, feeling secure at last.
Wailing voices woke me from a deep sleep. Frantic, I switched on my lamp. The yellow walls were throbbing. It turns out you can’t know what’s happened behind closed doors in a paint factory, either…
Pamela Love worked as a teacher and in marketing before turning to writing.
Tardy surfed the solar wind encircling Earth on a sail of melded satellite debris. Fragments swirled and eddied around him. More flotsam than a stream on the planet's surface. He shifted his weight to avoid a flying shard. A larger scrap exploded behind him. A hibernation curl saved his head.
Gail's paired stories mirror daily life as it could be. Perhaps should be.
It’s all about cross-
winds at the crossroads, milkweed
pods and matchstick men,
bluebirds, meteors and the
unreason of midnight rain.
—Jason Ryberg
She thinks everything through.
Five year plan type of girl, holding white-knuckled to the wheel to hold the course. No nonsense. Stone-cold bitch. She’s heard it all, dismissed it all as not worth her time.
The boyfriend is part of the plan, too. Taller than her, not the same major, has to be okay with putting his career first, because she certainly is.
And then—
The problem with including others in the plan is they don’t always stick to it. They sometimes have other plans, blindly following a man who promises the impossible, not thinking for themselves.
She refuses to be a prop in someone else’s plan.
Human sacrifices are so outdated, anyway. If he had just asked, she could have given him a demon’s direct line. Does he think she leaves anything up to chance? It’s like he doesn’t even know her.
Her wrists sting from where they tied her to the alter, but a demon’s favour beats badly-done bondage any day.
He begs, as she adjusts the seat in his Lexus. He always hated seeing her drive his car, and she rolls down the window so she can hear his complaints, as she puts the car in reverse.
“Please, babe, think this through!”
For once, she doesn’t, just slams on the gas and waits for the crunch.
He’ll be a better ‘ex’ than he ever was a boyfriend, anyway.
Ziggy (she/him/he/her) is a queer, disabled teller of fairy tales and happy endings.
I'm getting to be pretty good with a knife.
I wasn't before. Took me five minutes to dispatch poor Mom. She was staying over because her and Dad and were fighting again.
I was in the kitchen, chopping cucumbers. She came out of my guest room, and right away I saw it.
"No," she said, backing away. "It's not what you think, honey. I'm just tired."
But I worked in a hospital—cleaning up spills, sure, but I worked in a hospital and I knew. Slash, slash, slash and I thought that would be it. I followed her to the ground—stab and stab and stab, but still no. She tried to say something—slash and that did it.
Emergency response took her body away and, of course, checked me over, but I knew they would and I'd prepared.
Next time it was quicker—still messy, but quicker. I never liked door-to-door salespeople anyway. Then with Sally I learned that if you jab your knife into the exact right place, you won't jab twice. Sally had seen the signs of infection before I could put in the eyedrops, so it was her or me, and it wasn't going to be me.
Lots of people blame God for this. What's the point of thinking like that? Things are the way they are, so you find a way to deal.
And like I said, I'm getting to be pretty good with a knife.
Karl El-Koura lives with his family in Ottawa, Canada's capital city, and works a regular job by day while writing fiction at night. To find out more about Karl, visit his website at ootersplace.com.