A Jar of Malice

By Gregory Marlow

1982

The morning light woke me as Mamaw slid in through the front door carrying a small flour sack. Mamaw’s couch was made of Brillo pads that left crinkle imprints on my cheeks as I peeled away from the cushion. I had kicked my quilt and pillow onto the floor. Mom used to say I ran marathons in my sleep. But that was before she left us.

Mamaw was trying to be quiet in the unpracticed way of a person who had lived alone for over a decade. She pushed the front door closed with a light click and then walked slowly to the kitchen with the flour sack in her hand. I watched her from the couch. She looked old and tired to my ten-year-old eyes, even though she was only fifty-six. The gray hairs outnumbered the brown, and her upper back was permanently arched forward, having spent more hours of her life leaning over a countertop and stove than standing upright.

Then I saw the sack move as if something inside had given it a little kick. I sat up quickly and wiped the sleep from my eyes.

She’d caught one.

(Continue Reading…)

Indi walked into the bar, seeds crunching under tarsus. The bar was her usual hangout, but tonight a trio of mountain pine beetles occupied the worn corner of the long pine counter. She hadn’t seen their kind here before and her antennae twitched. She cast a glance to the tree’s thick trunk, but there was no sign the beetles had started their terrible work: no pitch tubes, no bark dust sprinkling the orange conk floor. As she watched them, a trio of aspen bark beetles waddled in and joined the mountain pines. There were high legs all around and excited chitters.

It was clear to her they were up to no good — borers didn’t meet without cause. The beetles were small and she could have eaten all six in two bites, but she stayed clear. Technically, they hadn’t done anything wrong; she supposed beetles liked a night out as much as any bug. But they were a threat, and she would be damned before this grand old pine fell to their machinations. The Crimson Waste stretched to the west as far as the eye could see, trees consumed from the inside out by the insidious beetles. Aspens remained plentiful, but the boys were looking to move ever east, through richer stands of pine and fir.

“Indi?”

Her eyes flicked to the black carpenter ant who spoke her name, and she joined him on the opposite side of the bar. She hadn’t come for beetles, after all. She sank onto a leaf going dry around the edges and looked at Joe. He was handsome, dark and gleaming under the twilight that filtered through the branches, despite the scar that rippled over his left eye; he’d taken a bad hit from a wood wasp’s ovipositor some weeks before. He flicked one leg out, brushing her chin.

(emet)

by Lauren Ring

i. detection

When protesters take out the power at her Silicon Valley office, Chaya is at home, watching a golem pull dandelions.

The morning air is clear and cold. Chaya can hear her computer pinging alerts at her from inside her farmhouse. As soon as the dandelion patch is gone, she wraps her knee-high figurine in satin, pressing the cloth against its soft clay midsection. She lays her golem gently down by the riverside. A single tap on her phone activates the preprogrammed subroutine that wipes the alef from its forehead, leaving only the letters mem and tav — every instance in its code of emet, truth, becomes met, death.

She slips the bundle into the water, watching the satin flutter away in the current as the golem returns to the wet sediment. All that is left of Chaya’s creation are smears of ochre on her fingers and lines of code on her hard drive.

Chaya wipes her hands on her jeans and heads back to her daily bug tickets, ready to find out the day’s fresh disaster. Working from home has its perks, but maintaining her plot of land would be impossible without the help of her golems.