Ray

by Mario Milosevic

You know that episode of M*A*S*H, the one where they have to pick up stakes, pack everything up and move to another location? Me neither. I never watched that show, but Liz, who works the booth where people throw darts at balloons on a cork wall, and who is thirty years older than me, has seen every episode of that show at least three times. She said every time we break down the rides and get ready to move on, she thinks about that episode.

“It’s like Colonel Potter said they had to bug out because they were about to be in a shooting zone, and we bug out for the exact same reason.“

“The same reason?“ I said to Liz. No one was going to be shooting at us, I was pretty sure.

“Yeah” she said, “because now that the carney’s over, they don’t want us in town, you know? They make it a hostile environment so we’ll leave them alone. They’re scared is what it is. They’re scared of us and they’d just as soon kill us as look at us.”

I wasn’t quite seeing it, but I thought it best not to challenge her on the issue. When she told me this, I had been on the job only a couple of weeks, and we’d been to two fairs. We were packing up to move on to the next one, somewhere in the Columbia River Gorge. “You got Ray all packed away yet?” I asked.

She patted the side of the trailer, folded up like a wrapped birthday present. “Ray’s always right here with me,” she said.

Poet-Scholars of the Necropolis

by M.K. Hutchins

Hedrana, the Lord-Governor’s aunt, arrived the next morning. She banged on the necropolis door as if she’d been locked out of her own house. “Hello! I won’t be kept w-aiting!”

If Hedrana’s shrill, sing-song voice couldn’t wake the dead, nothing would.

Royzca was already awake, but she took her time shuffling down the hall, her hip aching as it did every morning. Onyo joined her from his room. “Do we have to let her in?”

“If we’re nice, maybe she’ll go away more quickly,” Royzca said. “She’s only here to flatter herself.”

Sweet Potato Woman

by Chris Barnes

The voice hummed the tune again, softer. George blinked, rubbed his eyes and focused on the bedside clock’s green glowing hands. Twelve-something.

Kitchen. The song was coming from the kitchen. He sat up and listened. The tempo slowed, the voice faded, vanished. The house fell silent, expectant.

George climbed out of bed, switched on the lamp, put on his glasses and stumbled into the hallway. He stood and listened. Nothing. Through the living room, the dining room, into the kitchen. The linoleum chilled the soles of his feet. He tried the back door. Locked, as it should be. Then where …?

The sweet potato woman?

The Character of the Hound

by Tony Pi

Unlike the other wheel-ships in the fleet, which had been rigged with trebuchets, this squat vessel held on deck only a windowless cabin with a door slightly ajar. I gathered my courage and entered.

Two men stood in heated argument in the lantern-lit chamber. I recognized the wispy-bearded man in his early fifties as Admiral Zhang, bedecked in his imposing lamellar armor. A veteran of the war against the Jin, Zhang had been given the command of our river fleet by the Spirit General himself.

The other, a balding man in his thirties, bore a deep diagonal scar crossing both lips. His uniform marked him as a Yongdui, a platoon commander.

The Fairy Ring

by Joe Pitkin

I noticed another person in the room, the only other person, peering at me through a monocle. That was when lots of people in the city were wearing monocles—this wasn’t the first monocle I had seen today. The barista with the neck tattoos and the barbershop quartet moustache had a monocle when he served my tea. But this new person looked a little old for a hipster: short, slender, angular, wearing a three-piece cream colored suit, a fedora just taken off to reveal close-cropped thick black hair, barely gray—my first impression (which is everybody’s) was that the antiquarian was a person of great power. In fact, for a moment I thought Leonard Cohen was standing in front of me.

The antiquarian gestured at the chair opposite me to inquire whether it was free. With a sinking feeling I offered it: I foresaw small talk with a lonely old person. Not that I was especially interested in reading, but I was sitting there with a book—shouldn’t that have signaled something?

The antiquarian, I learned, was not much for small talk. “You are looking for a job, I see.” The voice was high and cracked, but still quite beautiful. “I am in need of a factotum.”

Congratulations On Your Apotheosis

by Michelle Ann King

As a life coach, Abby Fowler strongly discouraged magical thinking. It was better for people to take responsibility for improving their lives, rather than wait and hope for supernatural assistance. Better, and a lot more reliable.

So Abby would never advise anyone to use a spell, even one that came with impeccable provenance and the crackle of real power in every square inch of the ancient parchment it was inscribed on. Even one that was purely for divination, nothing more than a harmless bit of information-gathering that might, say, help someone with preparing a five-year business plan for their coaching practice in order to apply for a bank loan. She would never advise it because she knew that kind of thing never ended well.