They make my heart out of stone. A slate-colored hunk of granite run through with thin veins of fool’s gold like silver cracks that the father found in the mountains outside of town. He had been gathering lackweed to chew, so that he could make himself numb, and could fall asleep in the meadows, in nests of dry grass like a bird. The afternoon sun burned his skin, and he felt almost as if the light were passing through him. He felt like a window. Like a single pane of a glass.

He couldn’t sleep at home anymore. The old feather bed was too soft. The mother slept turned away from him, and the curve of her neck, in the blue moonlight, looked to him like a hooked knife. The silence there had a body and a mouth, and he could feel, always, its teeth against his neck. Silence was a vampire.

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The Ravens’ Sister

by Natalia Theodoridou

There are many ways to tell this story.

All of them are true.

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Sarnai

I sit at my kitchen table and watch as my soon-to-be ex-husband, David, assembles cardboard boxes and labels each one in neat block letters. This is David’s third packing weekend and once again our daughter has made herself scarce; Sophie has no problem with late-at-night drunk mom or lonely stoned dad, but watching us sort through the flotsam of our former marriage — it’s too much.

“What’s up with those burn marks on the driveway?” David says. “I can set up the fire pit if you want.”

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La Gorda and the City of Silver

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

I.

I was born on a Wednesday, in the middle of a chapuzón.

The sudden squall of sky water bears little resemblance to a thunderstorm — it’s more like a vertical flood, though very brief.

I considered Chapuzón for my luchador name — I had poured out of my mother with the same fulminating relentlessness and washed her into the hereafter — but fate took a hand, and the name is still available to anyone who wants to design its mask and come up with some signature moves.

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There Are No Wrong Answers

by LaShawn M. Wanak

Please select the answer below that feels most comfortable to you. There are no right or wrong answers. Your results will be tallied at the end.

Question one: If you were to arrive at your apartment to find your front door ajar and your chocolate Labrador missing, would you:

1. Wander about the apartment complex, tapping a can of Alpo with an opener and calling (softly) “Here, Marti! Here Marti!” Grin sheepishly when the Filipina neighbor across the hall peeks from her apartment, then swear when she slams the door.
2. Call the police and argue with the dispatcher. “Of course it’s an emergency, she’s a chocolate lab, dammit. You know how much money I paid for her? Hello? Hello?”
3. Screw it. Go fix yourself a margarita because Marti is bound to get bored at some point and come back. Stupid dog.

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Words Never Lost

by DaVaun Sanders

Imala spat on the schoolhouse’s brittle timbers as she passed, slipping behind the Tyre Orphan School’s woeful outbuildings and through the fence. A lashing awaited anyone caught here, but she had broken her promise to meet Vachaspah one too many times.

The soft crack of fledgling bone pulled her eyes up. An owl had perched atop a nearby saguaro, its dead barrel bleached white. Pitiful screeches and wet, tearing sounds floated from a wicked nest made entirely of long thorns. The owl’s wet beak dipped down again and again, skewering its floundering owlets. Bloodstained tufts of soft down littered the ground.

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Three Cats at the End of the World

By Aimee Ogden

On the heath at the beginning and the end of the world, a witch once built a cottage where she could live with the past, the present, and the future. They are hers, and she is theirs, for as long as life and as deep as death. (Continue Reading…)

Chasing Flowers

by L. Chan

Lian’s world is flat. Not just the landscape, which extends as far as the eye can see, horizon to horizon under the rolling twilight flux. Not just the houses, dotting the slate grey earth and the thunder cloud sky. Not just her folded servants, who used to pad around silently with their painted smiles and their unblinking eyes, unfurling from their hiding places to bring her the same dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a hundred years.

Lian ate regularly for fifty years before she realised that the food tasted of nothing but fire and ashes. Before she realised that she wasn’t hungry and had never been since her death. Not down here, where the sun peeks over the hills at the edge of the land and she still doesn’t know if it’s rising or setting because it’s been stuck there for the hundred years since she died.

(Continue Reading…)