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.

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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…)

Gentler Things

by Thomas Ha

Of course they don’t tell you about the Prince Who Lost.

Theirs are only the stories of victories.

It’s true they once described the steadiness of the Prince’s hands when raising the three-bladed spetum, the potent poise and power he possessed when clearing the fields of invaders rising from oceans of the dead. Or the celestial runes inscribed along the fuller of his sword, the very same weapon wielded by his King-father, before the weight of years kept the old man to the warmth of the keep. Or of Abhainn, the Prince’s flare-steed, who carried him unfathomable distances, a blood horse gifted from the apogeic families, so conjoined with his thoughts that the two moved like a curved leaf on gusts of wind, slipping past walls and abatises and outstretched hands. But all of the stories stopped after the Ossean Caves, when the Prince sought the Last Wyrmlet and never returned, because grim tales do little to fill the purses of poets.

Men preferred to hear of the Conqueror — the knight-rough who later did what the Prince could not — the one to finally slay the Wyrmlet and carry its bloodied body to the sun at the surface. Better, they thought, to speak of him than dwell on all of those men before, whose bones were ground beneath his boot-heel in his advances through the hollowed caverns. This is what they want to hear, my father always told us: the ones who win, not the ones who lose.

And who could blame them? (Continue Reading…)

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The Girl Who Never Was

Harold R. Thompson

I met Kate Krimple at a downtown coffee shop. Kate’s new children’s book was called Tayo and the Wolves, about a dog who claims to have lived with wolves for a week. I was to provide the cover and interior illustrations. This was the first time we’d met face to face, and I was happy to find her warm and easy to talk to. In fact, our conversation came so easily that we moved on to talking about ourselves.

“Is Krimple your real name?” I asked.

I guess that was maybe a little too forward, but the way things were going I felt comfortable asking, and I was happy to see her smile.

“No, of course not. It’s Dugger, but Kate Krimple has a better ring to it.”

She tucked a lock of dark hair behind one ear, and I wondered how old she was. I’d read her official bio (in which she was definitely Kate Krimple and not Kate Dugger), but there’d been no mention of a birth date. Then I wondered why that mattered. It just popped into my head.

“How about you?” she said. “I like to know things about my artists and illustrators. Family? Kids?”

No, I told her, I’d been married, but . . .

“She passed away. Cancer.”

I gave her the same shrug I used every time.

“It happened quite a while ago,” I added.

She offered her condolences, and asked, “So no kids?”

I guessed, as a children’s author, she was always curious about her market.

“No, we never did. I always wanted to, but it didn’t happen.”

She nodded, but her smile had faded and I could feel a darkness creeping in and knew I had to lighten the mood.

“At least my house is tidy,” I said. “More or less.”

We moved on to other topics. When the meeting ended, we shook hands and I promised to show her some sketches soon. (Continue Reading…)