His Giant Heartbeat

by Natalia Theodoridou

I smoke with my back to the caravan while I wait for B and his client to finish. It’s a drippy afternoon, deep in the fenlands. We’ve parked the caravan next to a mere, marshy and rotten green. The air smells damp, the ground is soft and uncertain, the kind that might swallow you up whole if you put your foot down wrong. There are birds, and frogs, and foxes, far away. I guess it’s peaceful. Two years since humanity flatlined — well, most of us, at least — and the rest of the world doesn’t give a toss.

I inhale. The smoke burns my lungs. I close my eyes and savour the pain — there are so few things one can enjoy these days. B doesn’t like it when I smoke. He clings to old ideas. I get it.

Eventually, the client steps out of the caravan. A balding, pale man in his fifties. He smiles a tiny smile. The poor guy looks like an embarrassed ferret. I beam at him as he hands me a hundred quid. He went for the ultrasound, after all.

“Come again,” I say. I catch a glimpse of scar tissue poking up from the collar of his shirt. Heart surgery, probably. Imagine the irony behind that story.

“Will you be here a while, then?” he asks.

As if. As if there is a here, outside a nothing town in the middle of nowhere marshes. “A couple of days. We’re on our way to a concert down near the coast.” I point at the posters plastered on the side of the caravan. THE AMAZING BEATING HEART. This gig is the biggest one we’ve been able to land in a while. B is a cult sensation in these parts, apparently. “You should come,” I say, trying not to cringe at my half-hearted sales-pitch voice.

The man mumbles a thank you something something and backs away towards his car. (Continue Reading…)

Labyrinth, Sanctuary

By A.E. Prevost

Constance carves her timeworn tracks into the thirsty rock. With silent steps her footfalls smooth the stone, century into century, grooves and gullies growing green as time and seed take hold. Stone after stone, her hands build battlements and balconies, repair time-ragged trusses, stack spires towards the sun. Deep in the dark wood, with every aching year, her sanctuary spreads its restless roots.

Constance dreams of colonnades and courtyards, crafts finials from fingernails, weaves tapestries from hair. She climbs her spiral stairs into the storm-bruised sky, flings open feverish arms against the thrum of thunder, batters the balustrades with fists like driving rain. Constance lets rage run through her like the roiling storm, then huddles in the hollows and scratches broken nails across the thirsty roots that thrive between the cracks. So long as she keeps building, she is safe. Her moss-laced maze mirrors the spirals in her soul, and she repeats her one and only truth: in this, her sanctuary, no ill thing can befall her. (Continue Reading…)

The Horrible Deaths of Helga Hrafnsdóttir

By Christine Tyler

The day Helga Hrafnsdóttir went up the Ævilok tree, the entire village held its breath. From the time of her birth, the Ævilok that grew beside Helga’s home had sprouted the most horrible flowers. In the first week alone, anyone who touched the blossoms of her Ævilok saw visions of her blankets smothering her, her brother dropping her, and a fox dragging her out of her cradle and mauling her. During those days, Helga’s mother kept the doors locked, stuffed up the cracks, didn’t let anyone else hold the child, and barely slept. She watched over every yellowing bud, touched every bloom to see what new horrors she had to fend off. Once Helga survived the premonitions, the blossoms shriveled up and fell to the frosted turf. Thanks to her mother’s vigilance, Helga Hrafnsdóttir outlived all the ill fortunes of her infancy. But from that time on, everyone knew the girl was destined for a gruesome fate. (Continue Reading…)

Bought bred, the new cow had cost three thousand dollars, and so as night fell with no sign of the calf, it was Arnold himself who trudged back and forth between the house and the barn, waving away the hired hands.

“My money,” he grunted. “My problem.”

A storm struck up, not snow but a roaring haze of fine slush that crusted his beard with ice. Far to the west, visible only by their bluish, luminous heat, the old gods of grass and grain bayed to the cloud-buried stars. Arnold ignored them. It was too early in the year for a sacrifice.

On the fifth trip, his youngest child joined him, silent as ever, silvery hair greased down from the rain, in her oldest brother’s canvas coat. She liked their ancient hand-me-downs, though she was so small that everything trailed in the muck like the train of a wedding dress. Over the splattering sleet Arnold heard her rubber boots squelching in the wallow that had been the path. He waited for her to catch up before continuing to the barn. (Continue Reading…)

The Masochist’s Assistant

By Auston Habershaw

Each morning at precisely seven, Georges, famulus to Magus Hugarth Madswom, stabbed his master in the heart. It was a fairly complicated affair as the linens needed to be spared staining and Georges had to make the thrust quickly, lest his master wake up and become angry with him for failing in his duties. He had suggested abjuring the sheets against such stains, but his master claimed that doing so also meant his sweat would pool about his body during the night rather than being absorbed by the sheets, and Georges’ master refused to wake up stinking and slimy. So, no abjurations.

As a result, Georges would leave his master’s home at half-past six and go to a nearby weaver where he would purchase the previous day’s linen scraps from her bleary-eyed son. Then, linen draped over one arm, he would return to the house, make his master’s tea (bitter black, no sugar), place cup and saucer on a silver bed-tray along with the teapot (still hot) and a long, slender chef’s knife, as he was not permitted to wear a sword. He would then mount the narrow spiral stairs that led up to his master’s bedchamber, carefully open the door without making a sound, and set the tray on the bedside table. (Continue Reading…)

Getaway

By Jennifer Hudak

Ten days after her family installed themselves in their summer cottage on Greenpenny Lake, Leena separated from her body for the first time. She peeled from herself like a sticker from its backing, and hovered inches from the ceiling. Meanwhile, her body stretched out beneath her, lumpy under the threadbare blanket: the rise of her belly, the slack softness of her cheeks falling back toward the pillow, the thickness of her neck. Then she plummeted back inside her breathing, sweating flesh.

It was the lake water, the doctor said. Not the separation — she hadn’t told them about that — but the vomiting and diarrhea that had preceded it. Something about blooming algae, E. coli, something else that started either with a G or a K.

Swimming in Greenpenny Lake was unpleasant in all kinds of ways, even before Leena swallowed a stew of dangerous microorganisms. Seaweed clogged the water near the shore, and shells from the invasive zebra mussel lurked in the silt, waiting to slice open an unwary bather’s foot. Leena had read, too, about the bodies in Greenpenny Lake — rumor had it that every year someone drowned and the water was so deep that no one ever found them. Leena had protested this vacation for the first two stifling days by wilting inside the un-air-conditioned cottage, perspiring on the stained furniture and fighting to find a reliable Wi-Fi connection, before grudgingly following her father’s advice to get outside and go for a damn swim.

She wouldn’t separate until a week afterwards, but Leena knew: this was where it happened. That first swim in Greenpenny Lake. (Continue Reading…)

The Resurrectionist

by J.P. Sullivan

“Yes, I can bring your wife back from the dead,” I told the farmer, who had reasonable doubts about my abilities. “Just realize that it might not be what she wants.”

“She wants to see her children again,” he said. He’d told me his name, but I’d forgotten it.  Honestly, it’s better that way. He had a smith’s build, muscle on muscle, more beard than chin. I could tell at a glance he’d never had a crooked thought in his life. People like that are awfully hard to negotiate with. Thankfully, I have flat rates.

“She signed the consent form?” The local chapel smelled like soot and incense. They hadn’t cremated her. That triples the fee and gives me a dreadful headache besides.

“I know I’m asking for a miracle,” the farmer said. “You can really do it for ten crowns sovereign?”

It’s not a miracle, I might have said. It’s a clever utilization of certain natural laws, an inversion of a subtle current and a trick played on God. Miracles assume His blessing, this process having none of it. But you start throwing around a word like ‘resurrection,’ and people get all kinds of ideas. “Did you bring the form, or not?”

He produced it. And there it was, in hill-country chicken scratch, her name on the appropriate lines. There’s a correct way of doing everything. Why should reanimation be any different?

I said the words, laid the hooks and lines and rock salt circles. Not all of that’s important, but the ceremony is part of the service. Like a funeral, it’s for the living.

The church was empty of clergy. They couldn’t have run off too long ago; one of the fires was still lit. Every rider on the hill looked like a foreign raid, with the war on. For all I knew, they hid from me.

“I don’t like this,” said the farmer.

“Don’t worry,” I said, hands at the dead woman’s brow. “I don’t like it either.”

Then I was in the elsewhere. (Continue Reading…)

Life in Stone, Glass, and Plastic

by José Pablo Iriarte

Cleaning up graffiti was an everyday job for Sergio, pero esto . . . Could you even call this graffiti? Graffiti normally was spray-painted. Wait — that wasn’t true. Indoor graffiti typically was done in permanent marker. Or gouged into wooden surfaces with pocket knives or keys, so the only way to remove some gang symbol or racist slur or throbbing penis was by sanding it down.

Come to think of it, if anybody was an expert, he was.

And he’d never heard of mosaic graffiti.

But there it was, on the side of the Westchester Building. Marbles, reading glasses, fichas de Monopolio, a key, all cemented onto the crumbling old plaster, maybe eight feet across. Only when he took a step back could he see it formed the shape of a woman and her two kids, carrying suitcases away from a house while a grim police officer stood by with his arms crossed. Probably not the image the tenant behind that wall — AAAfordable Lending, Inc. — would want to be associated with. (Continue Reading…)

Temptation

By Karuna Riazi

“We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry thirsty roots?” 

— Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”

When was the last time food glided over her tongue?

It was funny how Kayla couldn’t even remember what it was she ate.

Was it a quick jaunt to a local fast food joint — a juicy burger or a chicken gyro that was left half-eaten and balled up in sauce-stained foil in the back of the refrigerator?

Had her mother tried to coax her into eating a meal one last time before she walked out the door, shouldering her bag, impatient, sure she was late?

(Late to what? To meet who?

Even that, she couldn’t be sure of, but that didn’t matter as much.) (Continue Reading…)

When Leopard’s-Bane Came to the Door of Third Heaven

By Vajra Chandrasekera

We stand at attention all day at the top of the green tower. L and I stand on either side of the door to the third nonsensual heaven. The rifle is heavy and I develop a lean as the day wears on, until L hisses at me from the far side of the door and I straighten up, my back creaking and popping. I’m a sloppy guard because I’m new, ink still fresh on the lottery ticket. When you’re always new at everything, you never get a chance to get good.

L hasn’t been a guard much longer than me, but she always says she doesn’t want to get good. She says you can’t pry the world open if you don’t have a kink in you. She says how come the lottery is supposed to be so fair but princes always win a king’s ticket when it’s time? She says a lot of things like that and if I say we haven’t been a monarchy in two hundred years or whatever, she’ll say I’m being obtuse. Then we arm-wrestle for it. She usually wins those, but only just. (Continue Reading…)