– 4 –

“There’s been a fire over at the Bosque Verde.” Leandro entered the house, removed his coat, and hung it on a hook on the wall. “Dry leaves, it seems.”

Eduardo shuddered, his nails rasping against his cane. He was sitting on an armchair he’d put where the old pendulum clock had struck its last sigh five years before.

“Will it reach us?”

Bosque Verde was a grove at the other side of the Amorims’ property. It couldn’t be seen from there, but the scent of ashes stuck to the air like the remains of a fireplace. Eduardo had woken up that morning with the smell and yelled for Leandro, asking him to find out its source as soon as possible. Leandro obeyed. He was always there for his grandpa, though sometimes the old man seemed not to notice. In the core of old Eduardo’s soul, he probably missed Joana a lot more than she deserved. (Continue Reading…)

A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair

by Renan Bernardo

– 1 –

I was conceived by a carpenter with quivering hands in the back of a lumberyard. She was called Anatólia. Some days she had to fix flaws, sawing one or two parts of me again. On other days she hurled chunks of me against the wall, screaming at the bashful furniture she’d built, lined against the far wall. If she knew she’d bestowed consciousness on me with her art, perhaps she’d have other thoughts. I didn’t care. She was sturdy and careful and didn’t mind her son babbling about her being too old for this kind of work. Oak trees lasted for millennia. She had but a dozen wrinkles around her cheeks. Her particular way of wheezing meant nothing. She would last.

Ignoring all the humility chipped into my wood by her hands, I was a true work of oak art. Seahorses adorned the palmettes atop my backrest, which was ornately twirled with bubbles and the contours of fishes. I had cockleshells on my apron and water lilies on my four feet, so exquisitely wrought that I feared the day someone would push me against fellow furniture. My upholstered cushion was velvety and crimson, not unlike the eyes of Anatólia’s son the day he entered the lumberyard and brought me to my first sunlight bath. The day I found out things I didn’t want to. (Continue Reading…)

Pirates

by E.F. Benson

For many years this project of sometime buying back the house had simmered in Peter Graham’s mind, but whenever he actually went into the idea with practical intention, stubborn reasons had presented themselves to deter him. In the first place it was very far off from his work, down in the heart of Cornwall, and it would be impossible to think of going there just for weekends, and if he established himself there for longer periods what on Earth would he do with himself in that soft remote Lotus-land? He was a busy man who, when at work, liked the diversion of his club and of the theatres in the evening, but he allowed himself few holidays away from the City, and those were spent on salmon river or golf links with some small party of solid and like-minded friends. Looked at in these lights, the project bristled with objections. (Continue Reading…)

~ Five ~

Dinner was not silent. While we sat in the kitchen, sipping soup and munching on bread and mutton, Miss Couper maintained an animated lecture on the tumuli and barrows of the British Isles and the Continent.

“Wayland’s Smithy being a prime Neolithic example. And then there’s Maeshowe up on Orkney. Chambered cairn. Unique to the Orkneys. Don’t see that anywhere else. Well, that we know of. Could change at any moment. Always making new discoveries. Even the Americans are doing good work, digging up Indian mounds —”

“Miss Couper, could you pass the salt, please?” I held out my hand, smile stiff.

“Eh? Oh, aye.”

Miss Baxter hid a smirk behind a bite of mutton. (Continue Reading…)

The Adventure of the Faerie Coffin: Being the First Morstan and Holmes Occult Detection

by Rebecca Buchanan

Dramatis Personae

Miss Mary Morstan — a governess with a secret, fiancée of Dr. John Watson

Mr. Sherlock Holmes — a consulting detective of ruthless logic

Mrs. Edith Fearghasdan — a concerned headmistress

Miss Evelyn Baxter — not a friend of Miss Morstan

Miss Susanna Couper — an opinionated teacher

Ailis, Judith, and Beatrice — students with a shared secret

Miss Maighread MacPherson — a teacher skilled at uncovering secrets

Mrs. MacPherson — her mother

Mrs. Webster — Miss Morstan’s former governess and mentor

Mrs. Forrester — Miss Morstan’s current employer, a supposedly respectable society matron

Dr. John Watson — Mr. Holmes’s flatmate and partner in criminal investigations, Miss Morstan’s fiancé
(Continue Reading…)

This Blue World

By Samantha Murray

You leave while it is still dark. Your lover sleeps on his stomach, the sheet draped only to his waist.

You don’t want to go. You want to slide back into bed and listen to him breathing. And for him to make you coffee later, dark and sweet.

But you’ve never let anyone haunt you. And you’re not about to start now.

Your car takes a few tries to get going, as if it is reluctant to move out of his driveway, as if it wants to stay, not to glide down his street in this blue world that exists just before dawn.

There is light in the sky when you pull off the highway and wind through the suburban streets to your house. A woman is walking down the road, and she is surrounded by her ghosts. You try to count them unobtrusively . . . eleven? Crowding and cluttering behind her. She doesn’t look that much older than you, and how easy is her heart, did it just throw itself at anyone who came along? You wonder if any real people are waiting for her at home or if their ghosts were the only part she kept. (Continue Reading…)

The Portal Keeper

By Lavie Tidhar

October 1st

The rabbit was back this morning. It stopped outside the portal like it always does and it checked its pocket watch like it always does. It doesn’t matter — the rabbit’s always late.

So far I’ve never found out what the rabbit is late for. It wore a jazzy waistcoat. It looked nervously from side to side and mumbled to itself. Then it hopped through the portal and was gone.

I trimmed the grass hedges and washed the flagstones and placed fresh seeds in the bird feeder. I’m a portal keeper. The portal just sits there, a circle of heavy etched metal the height of three men or one small giant. It shimmers like a mirror inside. I cleaned and wiped the metal, applying polish. The metal is etched with what could be ancient runes or could be manual instructions. I don’t know what it means. I’m just the keeper.

(Continue Reading…)

Beverly’s Sonata

by Jennifer Hudak

When the record player first spoke to Beverly, it used the voice of her old piano. At first, just the whisper of air among strings, like a clearing of the throat. A single tap of the middle C. Then came the scales, forwards and backwards, and the muted thud of felted hammers against metal strings. Beverly took in a sharp breath. She’d learned to play her first notes on that piano, decades ago. She knew its vocabulary intimately: the delicate chuckle of the upper registers, the lisp of its sticky high A, the squeaky press-and-release of the sustain pedal. There was no mistaking it.

The scales turned into a melody, bass and treble weaving into a voice that gained strength with each pop and hiss of the needle, each revolution of the vinyl. Every glissando asked the same question: Where are you?

Beverly wavered on her feet. The carpet — too new, too plush — felt like shifting sand beneath her house slippers, and she sat heavily on the green chair. The chair was one of the few pieces of furniture to have made the journey with her from her lovely house by the sea. The piano had not. It wouldn’t have fit in her son’s van, much less this tiny apartment.

Yet here it was. Her piano. The ghost of it, anyway, hovering over the record player like French perfume on an old, forgotten coat.

The glissando again, more insistent: Where are you?

“Where are you?” Beverly echoed.

The piano answered with a thundering chord that spoke of waves crashing into cliffs, and a plink of seventh-octave keys that felt like salt spray. A solid sequence of chords drew square rooms, echoing wood floors, chilly windows that let in as much of the sun-painted ocean as possible.

Home. (Continue Reading…)