Publish or Perish

by Julia LaFond

Cynthia Blanche wasn’t credited as the first author on her own paper. She wasn’t the second, the third, or even the fourth. The Modern Journal of Phantasmology listed her as the last and least fifth author, which meant Dr. Redbud had screwed her over once again.

If Cynthia weren’t patient, she never would have made it through her candidacy exam, so she patiently barged into Dr. Redbud’s office.

“Could you please explain why I’m not the PI for my paper on the sulfur content of ectoplasm?”

Rolling his eyes, he swiveled away from his array of monitors. “The reviewers reached out to me and said they wanted us to determine the allotrope of the sulfur — when an element has multiple physical forms, each one is called an allotrope —”

Cynthia obviously knew what an allotrope was, but she also knew better than to interrupt Dr. Redbud when he was mansplaining.

(Continue Reading…)

The Third Wish

by Peter M. Floyd

I was in the middle of a pleasant little nap in the Seventh Sky of Severus when the summoning came.

Enfolded in a cloud bank, I was snuggling under the billows in a comfy-cozy fashion, all of the troubles of the sixteen quasi-pyramidal dimensions slipping away like forgotten dreams. This was my first real rest after four or five eternities spent putting out fires in the Red Chasm of Varsh, and I was looking forward to spending a nice long perpetuity indulging in some me time.

But no such luck. I had been there for only two or three eons when the all-too-familiar tingling sensation began in my phalanges and outer membranes and then spread in jagged waves along my dorsal limbs and then up through my carapace. There was no denying it; some fool on the mortal plane had successfully cast a spell to call me to them.

“Oh, by Crom’s back teeth,” I said to no one in particular. “Not now!”

But my words were in vain, and all too soon I felt the glorious softness of the cloud melt around me. For fifteen horrible seconds I slipped through the oily blackness between dimensions, fighting back the urge to vomit. (Dimensional travel always gives me motion sickness.) Then, with an audible pop, I landed in the mortal plane. (Continue Reading…)

Amma’s Kitchen

by Rati Mehrotra

I can always tell what dish my customers will order. Knowing what the dead crave is my gift. Or my curse. It’s hard to know which.

This girl, for instance. Brown, like me, but pale, as if the color’s been leeched out of her skin. Dark, staring eyes, weeds tangled in her drowned hair, and an ugly purple frog squatting on her shoulder. She doesn’t remember her name or the man who killed her, but she remembers the taste of her mother’s fish pakoras.

She drifts in, dripping water over my nice linoleum floor. I suppress a sigh. Cleaning’s the worst part of my job. At least it’s not blood and guts today.

“Sorry,” she says, glancing down.

“Don’t worry about it.” I wave her to a barstool. I have tables and chairs for groups, even a couple of red vinyl booths, but my customers are usually a solitary lot. Sometimes a family will come in, all four or five of whom have died in the same accident. I’ll usher them to a booth, doing my best to ignore their ghastly wounds, and give them what they need. (Continue Reading…)

The Mountain and the Vulture

by Nick Douglas

“High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.”

― Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Story of Mankind

At the edge of the world stands a mountain, a mile high and a mile wide, black against the white sky, like one was carved out of the other. Wind whistles against the knife point of the stone. There is nothing for the wind to blow. Nothing grows here. There is no snow or rain. The mountain is alone.

And then in the distance, in the white sky, is a dot. The dot grows into a line. The line grows into a shape. It’s the shape of a vulture in flight. Wings out ramrod, feathers like rays of the sun. Below the wings, the body, in the same dappled gold. Below the body, the head, red and fuzzy and bobbing. The vulture is sailing toward the mountain, and now it is close, and now it is circling. (Continue Reading…)

The Sound of Children Screaming

by Rachael K. Jones

THE GUN

You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or wear a visitor’s badge.

The Gun does most of its damage in the first five minutes. The Gun doesn’t care about lockdown drills, and it will not wait for the SWAT team to arrive. The Gun can chew through a door, a desk, a cinderblock wall, and kids don’t wear those bulletproof backpacks during reading time.

Everyone has a right to a gun. Nothing can take that away from you. What you lack is a right to the lives of your children.

The Gun likes a game of hide-and-seek. The Gun will rove the grounds until someone stops it. The Gun has been here many times before.

The Gun is not working alone. (Continue Reading…)

Good Fortune for a Beloved Child

By Alexia Tolas

There ain’t no body for Thomas funeral, so we bury an empty coffin.

Not empty, Daddy did tell me as we followed the undertaker to the cherry-woods and mahoganies. The coffins they pretty up with ivory velvet and pillows and other shit the dead ain’t gonna care about ‘cause they dead. We don’t even know if Thomas really —

Quintia . . .

But I hear him at night. Singing.

Please!

When the tide goes out.

Enough! (Continue Reading…)

Flight

by Charlie Sorrenson

Now

They are coming out of the woods when Mateo grabs one of Maggie’s wings and tugs, hard. This has long been his way of getting her attention and she has always let him do it, wanting to be a good mother, reminding herself that this is a phase, that he is only five years old, that little boys who do bad things are not destined to become bad men.

But now she wheels on him, the force of her movement yanking her wing from his grasp. “No!” she says, and he blinks and reels back. Two women are walking ahead of them with their children. At the sound of her voice, their heads flick back to watch. “You’re a big boy now,” Maggie says, her voice rising. “You can’t touch them anymore.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the women murmur to each other. Turning their smooth, wingless backs to her, they seize their children’s hands and hurry away. Maggie doesn’t care. Tears pool in Mateo’s eyes but she ignores them, stalking up the big, sweeping lawn toward the place where everyone parked.

Further up the slope, the man who is not Trace walks quickly, gripping his daughter’s hand. On her arm is a bruise the size and shape of Mateo’s fist. As Maggie watches, the girl tugs her hand out of her father’s and takes off, her empty Easter basket bobbing in her grip. Her father calls out but she keeps running and Maggie urges her on, her heart pounding on the girl’s behalf, as her head says: faster, and her heart says: it will never be fast enough, and all the places where the Brothers took her apart pulse with remembered pain. (Continue Reading…)