California King

by Michael J. Jasper and Greg van Eekhout

Our hero, a scrawny, bristle-haired man, softly sings a song he wrote when he was fifteen as he gives himself a new tattoo. He no longer remembers the verses, but the chorus goes something like: “Nyah-nyah, fuck-fuck, I’m the king, nyah-nyah, fuck-fuck.” Even after all these years, he finds the hook sort of catchy. His raspy tenor smoothes and deepens as he embeds dozens of carefully-spaced puncture wounds into his skinny right arm with his long, sharp knife, stealing the voice of the unconscious man upon whom he sits.

This will not be a big tattoo, we realize, for the real estate on our hero’s right arm has become quite crowded. Someday soon he’ll have to move on to his unmarked left. As he rubs a hanky soaked with berry dye and coal dust into the bloody dots, we watch a thin line of red trickle from the mouth of the motionless, waxy-skinned man beneath him. We see the scuffs and the ruined soles of our hero’s black boots, so recently applied against the skull of the man under him. But what we cannot see is what his tattoo will be. At least not yet.

We call this man, our hero, the California King.

Corinthians

by Sam Schreiber

God chuckled at that, a basso rumbling that tickled the hairs on the back of your neck. He said He remembered buying the Sergeant Pepper LP like it was yesterday, which made a sense when you stopped to think about it. Then He told you how He met Paul McCartney at a bar in Manchester in the seventies. How they had both agreed over rounds that the rumors of their respective deaths had been greatly exaggerated.

It’s not hard to see why so many people love Him. Of course, long before you were born God was considered something of a bad boy, at least within the theological community. You’ve seen William Blake’s painting with His shaggy hair whipping through the air like a rock star’s and His byzantine muscles gleaming with cosmic power. Somewhere down the line, you think around the Italian Renaissance, God started to mellow out a little. These days His hair is white and puffy like Christopher Lloyd’s, but the look works for Him. He’s also put on a little weight over the last few centuries but that just makes Him feel safer somehow. Like a big, tame animal.

And the Blood of Dead Gods Shall Mark the Score

by Gary Kloster

Huck smiled, and his smile stretched the pink rift of scar tissue that ran up from the corner of his jaw, across the twisted pit of his ruined right eye and onto his broad forehead. Before Nikolai’s betrayal, Huck’s face had been sternly handsome and the blood tatted into his dark skin had shone like lightning. That tat’s magic had made him beautiful and terrifying, like a storm rolling, and with a look he could make all the world his bitch. Now, left with just the scar and the spark of rage that still burned in the depths of his remaining eye, he had to be content with just scaring people shitless.

“Tribals are crap, redneck poser ink. Do yourself a favor and piss off.”

Two minutes after Huck banged in and my only customer that whole damn day was sulking out, a black dot of ink no bigger than a pimple hidden beneath his shirt. “Follow him out, Huck,” I said as the door rattled shut and I trashed the ink that I’d laid out for the job. “We’re done, remember?”

Skatouioannis

by Nick Mamatas

The first time Skatouioannis made an appearance was the morning of the SATs. I had just started the ignition and was pulling out of the driveway when the ground gave way. It felt like I had hit a speed bump, or a kid, then it all went black. The edge of a shovel and a drizzle of broken glass woke me up – he was there, a silhouette with the sun behind his head, branches and telephone wires criss-crossing the sky, poking away at the windshield of my car, which was standing nearly straight up, the trunk and back seat in the sinkhole left by the collapsed septic tank. A mostly empty septic tank. The shovel came down hard.

I woke up in the hospital three days later, my first year’s tuition already spent on a new septic tank and driveway. Plus the medical bills. If there were big muddy footprints all around the front yard, they had been swept away before the doctors let me go home. Old, empty septic tanks collapse all the time, you know. It was another two seasons of mowing lawns for the little old ladies my mother knew from church before I actually got to go to school.

Chemical Magic

by Katherine Sparrow

Two months earlier the magician stood on the dance floor wondering how to magic his feet into graceful motion rather than the choppy glitched movement of a thirteen-year-old boy. He hated his dancing, but hated more those men who stood in the club’s shadows and watched without ever moving their bodies. So he bounced and swayed while his elbows jerked backwards in a hopeless gesture.

He hit something soft that squished and said “Ow.” He turned around to see a woman holding her breast and glaring at him. She had the kind of breasts he loved: round and droopy.

“Sorry,” he mouthed over the bass boom. She rolled her eyes.

He tried to elbow himself in the chest; it only seemed fair. But the laws of physics only allowed him a blow to the belly. At least it made her smile a little. It turned her hard-edged face lovely for a moment.

Songdogs

by Ian McHugh

She led Carrick along the eroded bank, examining the creek bed in the moonlight. It was furrowed with flood channels and littered with rocks and small debris, but no patches of smooth sand that might indicate a jack-o-box lurking underneath.

He slipped going down the bank, despite Agnieska’s efforts to keep him upright. He knocked her off balance, too, and caught her a painful blow on the breast with his elbow as they slithered to the bottom. Carrick landed on top. He pressed the mittens onto her chest as he scrambled up, squashing the breath from her lungs. Agnieska got her arm in the way of his clumsy swing at her head, yelped as she caught the blow on the point of her elbow. Carrick staggered away, trying to run. His escape lasted only a handful of paces before the compulsion spell stopped him and he sprawled once again in the dust.

Agnieska surged to her feet, her patience shot. With a snarl, she kicked him over onto his back. From her coat pocket she took a pair of steel-bladed calf hooks.