The Stiffening

by Nicole D. Sconiers

I was eight years old when I realized that I never saw my mother sitting. Ever. Or lying in bed or immersed beneath a blanket of suds in our old clawfoot bathtub. She was always upright. Afternoons would find her in the kitchen, tending something on the stove or wiping down counters with a dish rag. This is how I remember her: thick black hair spilling over broad shoulders and sturdy legs clad in a print skirt and drugstore stockings. She loved to cook, to bring a steaming and pungent plate of collard greens to the table, to serve my sister Trina and me a slice of her famous orange pound cake. Even though she was on her feet all day mixing batter at Xavier’s Donuts, the sound of a metal spoon clanking against a pot usually met me and Trina when we came home from school.

(Continue Reading…)

Tadpole Prophecy

Avi Burton

It is cold, twilight on the cusp of true night, and they have sent you down to kill a monster. The uncut gems of frost crunch underneath your feet.

The dark lord’s castle is onyx and steel, and it is beautiful. It is a fortress that lurches out over the cliff face like a three-fingered hand jutting into the sky. It resonates and sings to you, drawing you forward. The windows are frosted glass and obscure what lurks behind.

There are guards by the jagged portcullis, but they step aside as we pass. They know the duty we have been sent here to do. They cannot change the prophecy. You grip my handle tighter and wonder what the guards fear more — you, or your destiny. I, linked to your thoughts by the bond we share, suggest that they are one and the same.

If I wasn’t me, you ask silently, do you think the guards would try and fight for their monster? Do you think that they would die for him?

People always die for dark lords, willingly or not, I say. That is their purpose. We have ours.

Purpose. Destiny. You shake your head and stride in to meet yours.

(Continue Reading…)

Solace of the Keeper

by Woody Dismukes

If you watch the wind for long enough, you may find yourself a wisp. And though we call ourselves the Keepers, not even we can keep what is not there.

We tell the living that we keep the dead, but only because that is what they want to tell themselves. Some of us believe it too, perhaps even many. Yet the most disciplined of us know this is not the case. It is the living that are kept from the dead.

I first arrived at the monastery under these same delusions, and in no hurry to upturn my faiths. I came to find solace, though not from what you think, for there are far worse punishments than exile among the dead. I took solace from my peers — I never liked them much — and solace from my future. I was destined to be damned, either as an urchin of the streets or an urchin of the graves. And so, by my life of petty crime, it was chosen for me that I should perish as the latter.

(Continue Reading…)

Down to Niflhel Deep

by Maria Haskins

The dog’s name is Roan.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been running. Maybe it’s been hours, or days, or maybe it’s only been fifteen minutes since he slipped out of the backyard through the open gate, but however long it’s been, he hasn’t stopped running since. The streets are going dark, but Roan is running steady, nose to the ground, skimming asphalt and concrete. Ragged currents of scent tug at him from the ditch and the grass and the road and the yards—urine, feces, raccoon, squirrel, cat—but underneath it all is the straight and narrow path he’s following: the girl. (Continue Reading…)

Tend to Me

by Kristina Ten

Nora is a serial becomer. She has become many things in her life, though rarely on purpose. The first time, it just sort of happened. The second time, it was a coincidence. Now, it is a habit she cannot seem to break.

In the past, she has become a rock climber and a scuba diver, a beekeeper and a gardener and a mechanic specializing in European cars. For two months last summer, she was a stand-up comedian. Her senior year of college, she amassed New England’s largest collection of antique coins.

Nora has no interest in any of these things. She has, in fact, an acute fear of heights and depths and stages. Exhaust fumes make her sick, and she is allergic to bees.

But Nora cannot help herself: she is prone to absorbing the interests of whoever she is dating. She is caught in a pattern. She cannot get out.

(Continue Reading…)

Black Wings, White Kheer

by Rati Mehrotra

The wings knock against the closet door on full moon nights, trying to escape. The sound terrifies Sarita, because if it wakes Amit, he might think there’s an intruder in the apartment. He might arm himself with something (what? Sarita settles on the kids’ baseball bat), throw open the closet door with a warrior’s scream, and pound the old bones of her once-beautiful wings, reducing them to a pile of dust.

Blood and feathers, why does she torment herself like this? Amit is a sound sleeper. He snores with his mouth open, spread-eagled on his back, taking up three-fourths of their bed. Besides, the wings can take care of themselves. Does she not know this better than anyone else? Far likelier that Amit will be the one in need of rescue.

(Continue Reading…)

Excavate

by Melody Gordon

The airplane hatch opened and the Pearsons, with guns on their hips and jetpacks on their backs, gathered as a family to look out at the plantation.

They were flying low to the ground. Too low. The hot air whipped at their jumpsuits and the ground rushed underneath them at a frightening speed. Danielle, the youngest and smallest Pearson, stood between her father and her big brothers who were glued to the floor like big brown pillars, watching the scene blur past. Danielle was shaking and sweating everywhere, from the bandana holding her braids back all the way down to the soles of her feet.

“Before we go, I have one more thing.” Their therapist, Dr. Greenwood, said, projecting her voice over the wind. She stood behind them in a jumpsuit with a jetpack but no weapon. A shovel protruded from the top of her backpack and over her shoulder. “We’re only a few seconds away from the fields.”

(Continue Reading…)

The Healer of Branford

by C. A. Barrett

After twenty years, Maud decided that it was safe to return to her hometown. She had never personally known a cat to live to the age of twenty, and even if someone had taken one inside and cosseted it into old age it would be too feeble to recognize her now. So Maud tied a scarf over her aching face and found a straight walking-stick. She went up to Branford by the old cobbled road. Her path rose alongside ample hills of heath spangled with flowers, bright purple and yellow reminders of the magic flowing underneath the soil. She saw a distant flock of birds wheeling in the air, and felt just as light. Branford, City of Magic-on-the-Moor, would be home again. Branford would take away her pain.

She was almost at the city gate when a small orange tabby-cat sprang up from his napping. He leaped to the top of a hitching-post and stared at her, blinked twice, then cried out “Maud Coffand! Maud Coffand, the cats know what you did!” (Continue Reading…)

Gitl Schneiderman Learns to Live With Her In-Laws

by Rebecca Fraimow

Shprintze, you nudnik,

Before you ask again, I’ve gotten all your letters scolding me for not writing—and Esther and Sarah’s too. Well, I’m sorry about it, but with one thing and another, my cousin’s kid crying all the time on the one side of me and Gitl crying all the time on the other, I haven’t had two wits to rub together, let alone two words to put onto a page for you. Anyway, what’s the point of going on a visit only to spend all your time talking to the same people you’d talk to at home? But everything’s calm to the point of boredom now, so I can spare a little time to catch you up, and then you can share this letter around and catch up everybody else. (Continue Reading…)

Aeaea on the Seas

by Hester J. Rook

“Oh, go to the crows,” I snarled under my breath as the knocker slammed home. The door was supposed to be a discouragement to visitors, large and heavy and dark, the handle made up of a curl of iron shaped like a beautiful maiden with fanged dogs at her thighs, eye tormented. Scylla, in the form I’d turned her into so many years ago: Remember my power. Do not come to me lightly.

But no, there it was again, a rapping that echoed through the old house.

“What’s wrong, flower?” Her voice was strangled down the phone.

“Don’t worry, darling. I just have a visitor.”

She chuckled, low and dry. “I really need to teach you my old trick for dealing with them.”

“You forget, my love. I have my own tricks.” (Continue Reading…)