John Gladwin Says . . .

by Oliver Onions

If we are to believe John Gladwin, the oncoming car made no attempt to avoid him, but held straight on. It held on at top speed, he says, for the first he saw of it was the sudden blinding gold of the afternoon sun on its screen, almost on top of him. He was not woolgathering or thinking of anything else at the time, and he had been for years a teetotaller. As for there not being any other car there at all, he naturally scouts the idea, for if there had been no other car why should he have made that violent and instinctive swerve? He did swerve; something hurtled past him; into the hedge and through it he and his car plunged; and where a moment before the white secondary road had run straight as a ruler for miles, he found himself on soft green, still at the wheel, his screen unbroken, his engine still running.

He says that his first thought was this — people ought not to drive like that. All was quiet on the road behind him, but the fellow could hardly be out of sight yet. John Gladwin came to life. He climbed as quickly as he was able out of the car and pushed through the hole he had made in the hedge.

Properly speaking he had not come through the hedge at all. He had broken through a thin part of it, a gap, thinly tangled over, and his car had come to rest on an old grass-grown track beyond. He looked first down the long white road. There was no sign of any other car, and no other roads ran into it. Then he looked at his own wheel marks in the dust, and they rather scared him. Heavens! What a mercy he had been crawling along! It would be just as well to report a lunatic who drove like that.

(Continue Reading…)

Shim Hyeon and the Ocean God

by Seoung Min Kim

“They usually send maidens.”

The Ocean God’s voice is a deep and resonant drawl. The whole palace smells of brine and sealife, like the fish market back in Inju. There are lights, but not from candles or lanterns — it’s a faint luminescence radiating from the walls. Shim Hyeon has his forehead pressed to the cool stone of the palace floor, but even if it was raised, he could not see the throne clearly from this distance.

“What is your name?”

“I am known in the village as Shim Bongsa.” Shim the Blind — and only for the past ten years since his eyes clouded, but the village must not remember him as he was before. He doesn’t let his true name leave his tongue. (Continue Reading…)

– 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…)