Dead Letter

by Samantha Henderson

The dream jerks me awake and I stare at the rough plaster ceiling.  My body is filmed with sweat, and the pattern of cracks above me looks just like Nevada.

The dream leaves me hollow.  An empty place like the inside of a drum stretched tight, a hollow place echoing with short sharp cries of dread or despair.

The dream forces tears from me eyes, crawling slowly, thick like worms, drying into sticky crusts of salt.

I blink once, twice, and emerge from the shadow of the dream.  The pit of of my stomach aches, as if punched, once, twice.

I blink three times and I’m out of it.  Out.

An Invitation via Email

by Mike Allen

Some of the asides in your article made me realize (Gods, can I be dense sometimes) that when you spoke of concerns about “arcane rites” in response to the invite to my Halloween party the next evening, that you possibly weren’t kidding and perhaps had some genuine anxieties. I really should stress that my wife and I had planned for the Halloween party to be occult-free — no spirits other than the liquid sort!

Chinatown

by Greg van Eekhout

One day as I sat in the restaurant savoring my lunch, a man in an ivory suit came into the place. His head was as white and hairless as an eggshell, and when he spoke, every syllable came out twisted into an odd shape. I think he was Belgian. “Daughter of Lu Ch’eng-Huan, far removed,” he said,  “I have grown impatient with your truculence. I have dealt with you in good faith. I have offered you riches — gems and antiques, property and estates, significant shares in profitable concerns — but you have mistaken my generosity for desperation. If you will not part with the soup in a fair exchange, I shall have to take it by force.”

Michelle Sze was over at a corner table, taking care of some accounting matters. “Get lost,” she said.

When Shakko Did Not Lie

by Eugie Foster

The maiden’s amber eyes glowed in the moonlight. A single tear glistened and rained down her moon-white face.

“Don’t cry, lovely one,” Shakko barked, alarmed.

The maiden lifted the sleeve of her jasmine-yellow kimono and dabbed at her eyes. “Why should I not cry?” she asked. “My champion says he will sleep as Master Sun opens his house to the heavens, and when his windows close at dusk, I will surely die.”

Uchronia

by Tim Pratt

When she couldn’t stand it anymore, Clio, the muse of history, decided to unhitch the present from the past and make a few changes….Let the Age of Damnfool Things come, and sweep retroactively through the past, every idiot misconception made real.

In Order to Conserve

by Cat Rambo

In order to conserve color, the governments first banned newspaper inserts, the ones where dresses and dishwashers and plastic toys and figurines of gnomes with wary smiles tumbled across glossy surfaces.  Readers faced columns of type interspersed with dour black and white line drawings, no slick sheets cascading on their laps as they unfolded the newsprint to gaze at the reports of latest developments in The Color Crisis. Others turned to the Internet, monochromatic monitors scrolled by blogs denouncing the Administration, the liberals, the conservatives, the capitalists, alien spiders, and a previously obscure cult known as the Advanced Altar of the Rainbow Serpent.

The change had been almost imperceptible at first.  Only artists, fashion designers and gardeners noticed the dimming of shades, the shadows of reds, blues, purples that blossomed from less verdant stems.  They brought the shift to the attention of white-coated scientists, who measured the changes in angstroms, then announced that laboratory results proved it true.  Somewhere, somehow, color, once thought an inexhaustible natural resource, was running out, and doing so quickly.

Change

by Greg van Eekhout

My ex-wife tells me on the phone that she thinks she saw a kid in her yard last night. She’s got a lot of stuff in the shed that’s worth money, like her boyfriend’s tools and some nice bikes, and she’s always going on about how her neighbors are coming over to steal stuff.

“It couldn’t have been a kid,” I say. “Maybe that old guy from across the street? He’s pretty small.” I’m encouraging her, I know, but it’s possible it was that old guy. I once caught him peeping into the dining room window, and when I confronted him, he said he thought he smelled gas. That was when Steph and I were still together.

“I know how an old man moves,” Steph says. “I know how a kid moves. This was a kid.”