The Medicine Woman of Talking Rock

by Pamela Rentz

Violet Spinks checked her to-do list for the ceremony: canoe, plants, medicine cap, trails. List-making might not be traditional, but no one would blame her for needing a brain prompt. She set the list in her medicine book and picked up the TV remote. She clicked through the channels and stopped when she spotted a young man with a torso like polished bronze. He shook out a bundle of black rubber cables and attached them to a shiny disk. The camera zoomed in on his brawny arms and legs as they worked the cables with the disk spinning in the middle. He looked like he wrestled a spider. A notice on the screen said three easy payments of $14.99 plus tax and shipping.

Virtue’s Ghosts

by Amanda M. Olson

For two weeks after she moved into our house, no one could convince me that Aunt Victoria was not a ghost. With soundless steps, she drifted from room to room in a dress the same blue-gray color as the pendant around her neck.  When she cried, I heard nothing.  Once, as Mother tried to calm her, Aunt Victoria opened her mouth as if screaming and broke a plate against the wall.  There was no sound from the glass until it hit the floor.

It was ten days past her coming-of-age ceremony when she came to live with us, after a week of urgent telegrams and hushed dining room conversations between Mother and Aunt Lily.  This was a boarding house, Aunt Lily pointed out, and Victoria would take up one of the rooms without paying rent.

Aunt Victoria was bad for business.  In the early days, more than once, we would find her in a room with a knife, hacking desperately at the ribbon around her throat. It never took the slightest damage, though Aunt Victoria managed to cut her fingers more than once.  Other times, she would stand at her window and stare out, causing more than one potential boarder to start at the eerie sight and promptly take themselves over to the less-respectable Mrs. Harper’s.  I hid behind Mother’s skirts when Aunt Victoria came into the room.  I remember wishing that I, too, could move in with Mrs. Harper.

The Colors of the World

by Paul Willems

Many years ago there was a small fisherman’s house on the dunes of La Panne. Rik-the-Fisherman’s wife Marie sat at the window all day long, spinning thread as she watched the sea. She was tall and thin with a tanned face and blond hair, and her eyes, from watching the sea, took on the color of the waters: blue when it was fair, green when it was cloudy, and black when there was a storm. Now, one day when Marie’s eyes were black, one stormy day, the fishing boat sank and Rik was never seen again. Marie was so sad that her eyes stayed black. As the sea reminded her of her husband, she changed places and sat at the other window, which looked out on the Abbey of the Dunes.

Two months after Rik’s death, a little girl was born in the little house. Marie called her Rika, in memory of her father. Rika grew. She always played alone in the dune and on the beach, for her mother spun from dawn till dusk to provide for them. One evening (Rika had just turned six), Mari began to weep. She wasn’t earning enough money spinning and there wasn’t anything left in the house to ea. She told Rika to go out the next day and keep watch over the sheep for the monks of the Abbey of the Dunes. The monks would surely give her a big jug of milk each day for her trouble.

But Rika replied that she would rather go to the beach. Sometimes the sea tossed up precious objects she would gather and sell.

And so it was decided.

Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot

by Claire Humphrey

Making friends with Ginevra was like taming a stray cat. First I started hanging around in areas where she might be found. If she showed, I didn’t approach her. I just stood there, smoking, or I read something, glancing at her secretly from behind my hair. Then I started catching her eye once in a while. Then I started smiling.

Then I started dating Christopher Potter; I dumped him after a few weeks, but that got me introduced to Pete Janaczek, which got me the invite to Pete’s party, which got me in the same room as Ginevra while she was tipsy and expansive, and then-finally-it happened.

All that was a lie, you know. As if I could plan anything like that. It’s only in hindsight that I realize why I started spending time in the smoke-hole in the first place. So many of the things we do, we keep from ourselves.

Where Virtue Lives

by Saladin Ahmed

Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, the best ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat, was weary. Two and a half bars of thousand-sheet pastry sat on his plate, their honey and pistachio glazed layers glistening in the sunlight that streamed into Yehyeh’s teahouse. Adoulla let out a belch. Only two hours awake. Only partway through my pastry and cardamom tea, and already a panicked man stands chattering to me about a monster! God help me.

He brushed green and gold pastry bits from his fingers onto his spotless kaftan. Magically, the crumbs and honey-spots slid from his garment to the floor, leaving no stain. The kaftan was as white as the moon. Its folds seemed to go on forever, much like the man sitting before him.

“That hissing! I’m telling you, I didn’t mean to leave her. But by God, I was so scared!” Hafi, the younger cousin of Adoulla’s dear friend Yehyeh, had said “I’m telling you” twelve times already. Repetition helped folk talk away their fear, so Adoulla had let the man go on for a while. He had heard the story thrice now, listening for the inconsistencies fear introduces to memories– even honest men’s memories.

Adoulla knew some of what he faced. A water ghul had abducted Hafi’s wife, dragging her toward a red riverboat with eyes painted on its prow. Adoulla didn’t need to hear any more from Hafi. What he needed was more tea. But there was no time.

On the Acquisition of Phoenix Eggs (Variant)

by Marissa Lingen

The usual bidders were there, of course: Dame Eleanor in her sensible pantsuit, Miss Hawes and Miss Singh in their black leather jackets, the full brocade skirts of Mrs. Perriwhite. For whatever reason, we women have always made up the majority of phoenix egg collectors, and nowadays we did not have to send male proxies to do our bidding for us; now we could cordially hate each other directly.

There were other women, less serious than we five, and three men in the auction room: the auction house manager, Mr. Samoilenko himself, and John Weadsleigh. John was one of us, and we accorded him the respect of cordially hating him without regard to his gender. Even Miss Hawes, whom I suspect of hating men in general, did John the courtesy of hating him individually, as a competitor for phoenix eggs rather than as a man, which may be the most generous thing I have ever known her to do.

This was not a situation that encouraged generosity.

The Very Strange Weird of Endart Sscowth

by Scott H. Andrews

“Please lend me your second copy of the Chronicles, O magnanimous lord of bound volumes,” cried the scholar standing in the street.

Endart Sscowth, the most prosperous bookseller in all Samech Tern, and by that token in the whole of Hyposudia, was startled from his reverie by the reedy voice.  His ruminations, as he walked homeward that evening, had been lavish with the parchment scent of antique books, the supple smoothness of age-worn buckram, and the vivid hues of many-lettered spines in piles, stacks, and teetering columns, all atop the bookshelves of Endart Sscowth.  Now this scholar had chased that vision from his mind.

“Your pardon, but I ceased lending my treasures long ago, after too many were returned with dents and creases.”

“Then I offer to buy it, O generous one.”

Everything You Were Looking For

by Samantha Henderson

Never explore a cave alone like I just did. Here at the entrance, the roof domes high in the weak light, but at the back you’ll see it starts to narrow. I just went half a mile in.

I found a crack in the back, wide enough to squeeze through if I turn sideways and hold my breath. I stood at the maw and waited for a while, listening, waiting for my breathing to quiet. At last I turned the flashlight off.

And in the dark I heard it, faintly, far back there. The chanting. It fades in and out though the passages inside the mountain. Because they are on the move; they are always on the move.

I’ve found them. I’ve found her.

The Book

by Lavie Tidhar

There is a bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London and it’s never open. Its windows are covered in a thick film of dust and spiders grow webbed cities in its darkness. There are books inside that no-one’s ever read; books that human eyes had never seen, books where black ink spells secrets on black paper, books written in darkness that cannot be read in the light.

Crossroads

by Laura Anne Gilman

John came to the crossroads at just shy of noon, where a man dressed all in black stared up at another man hanging from a gallows-tree. No, not hanging; he was being hung, the loop still slack around his neck, his body dangling in mid-air. That, John thought, his pack heavy on his shoulder and his hat pulled low, was not something a wise man would get involved in. And yet, he could not resist asking, “What did he do?”

The man in black turned around and glared at John. “He asked too many impertinent questions.”

The man with the rope around his neck laughed at that, a rueful, amused sound, and John decided he liked the dead man.

“You might want to move on,” the man in black continued in a voice that wasn’t a suggestion. “This is a bad place to be for a lone traveler.”