Last Train from Deadwall Part TWO of Two

by André Geleynse

The second time Knucklebone tried to kill himself didn’t work out any better than the first.

Sometimes, during the endless months of repair work on the endless track, Knucklebone and the other mechanical revenants amused themselves by crushing coins and other small bits of metal under the wheels of the train. Coins would fly off into the gravel bed, pancaked into paper-thin discs. Nails became miniature swords and tiny cogs spread into misshapen stars. The construction crew collected the most interesting shapes, trading them among themselves as an underground currency.

There wasn’t much that could crush a piece of hammered titanium, such as the one that housed Knucklebone’s aether core. But he was willing to bet that six-hundred tons of iron and bone just might get the job done. (Continue Reading…)

Last Train from Deadwall PART ONE of Two

by André Geleynse

The first time Knucklebone tried to kill himself, he’d already been dead for one hundred and thirteen years. He’d died in a workplace accident, which meant it was within their legal rights for the Cogsmith Railroad Company to bind his soul to his reanimated skeleton and hand him the invoice. Ten thousand chits for the soft tissue removal alone, plus a hundred thousand more for the brass gears, pneumatic muscles, aether core, and an impressively shitty diesel-powered engine to pilot his skeleton.

Knucklebone made about six chits a day. His family had written him off entirely after his death, so outside help was right out. After the first two decades of undead servitude, he’d learned about compounding interest and realized paying off his debt simply wasn’t possible this side of eternity. He’d have to find another way out. (Continue Reading…)

Auguries

By Jennifer R. Donohue

She screamed the first time, so loud that the old man who lived in the next apartment arrived at her door with surprising speed, cardigan thrown hastily over his untucked white undershirt, light scent of an evening beer while watching baseball on his breath. The neighbor held her hands and said things to her in a language she didn’t know, even though they’d had accentless conversations before, in the daylight. When she wasn’t suddenly being torn apart, when there wasn’t a sudden gush of blood onto the rag rugs she’d gotten at a garage sale, when there wasn’t a dark bundle on the floor, a wild-eyed hare, full grown, linked to her by a disgusting, fleshy cord that the neighbor cut with a folding knife from his pocket, the blade rippled with honing over the years.

She screamed, too, when she looked into the hare’s eyes, even as she also, in a small quiet rational part of herself, thought that this was probably embarrassing, though she didn’t know what she meant exactly, and screamed once more for good measure. Maybe she meant embarrassing for her neighbor to see her like this, or embarrassing for this hare to be here, but also what she saw when she looked into its eyes harrowed her and looked like rattling keys and flashing red lights, and a cut-off siren, and smelled like antiseptic. (Continue Reading…)

Redo

by Brigitte Winter

3.

In our third timeline, I met you on New Year’s Eve.

I had slept off a migraine half that day, so I wanted nothing more than to spend the evening by the fireplace cuddling with Jamie and our ancient basset hound. But New Year’s Day would be my fifth wedding anniversary with Jamie — our “wood” anniversary — and he had gotten tickets to a burlesque show because he thought he was hilarious. Predictably, he insisted that it would be wasteful to skip the show because the tickets were fifty dollars each. Plus, booze was included. Plus, he could watch women dance out of their clothes, which was significantly more interesting than watching me sit around all night in the oversized sweater and leggings I’d been wearing since Christmas.

“Plus, Mary,” he said, “maybe you’ll surprise yourself and have fun for once.” (Continue Reading…)

The Carving Of War

By Somto Ihezue

Odili was a child when Nkeala, her grandmother, died. All she remembered of her were her braids, a tangle of clouds that reached for the floor. She remembered her eyes, how they swallowed her face. To look into them was to be lost in a vastness. It was to find eyes — owl eyes, bold eyes, brown eyes — staring back at you. Most of all, she remembered her kindness, an unending sea.

Nkeala had been dìbìā — keeper, to Idemili; the roaring python, they who drowned oceans, mother of mothers. At the birth of time, Idemili, like beads dancing on a fragile waist, had wound herself around the clans of Obosi. Out of her mouth, the Eke River poured, its brooks and streamlets giving sustenance to the corn in the farmlands, the antelopes of the wild and the Irokos that split the sky. Odili’s family was bound in perpetuity to Idemili. With her grandmother’s passing, the fanged staff fell to her mother, Adaugo. In the past, a few keepers had met their fate with defiance. Odili’s great-great grandfather, Agbadike, had refused the staff when it passed to him. Setting the shrine of Idemili ablaze, he invoked the ritual of blood in a bid to sever the bond that tethered his life to the deity. Three days after, a breadfruit fell from a tree and split his skull in half. (Continue Reading…)

The Husband

By P.C. Verrone

He has never taken a man for a wife before. This becomes clear as he introduces me to his other wives. The youngest wife bristles and the wife with the long, dark hair avoids meeting my eye. The tallest wife just looks from him to me and nods. Her face betrays no hint of hospitality. They are aware that he and I have exchanged vows, exchanged fluids. However they may feel, nothing can be done about it now. He has chosen me.

He wants a feast to celebrate. We order delivery. When the driver arrives, the youngest wife invites him into the house. She is beautiful and coy, and the driver is stupid. As soon as he steps inside, our husband sinks his teeth into the man’s neck.

At the sight of blood, my eyes fill with red. I leap at the body in our husband’s arms, but a sharp jab in my rib sends me tumbling to the floor. The youngest wife tucks her elbow back against her side as she devours our victim’s clavicle. I reach for a wrist, a thigh, but the wife with long, dark hair kicks me away. The tallest wife glowers at me, lapping at the driver’s neck, inches from our husband’s lips. I can only suck the capillaries from the man’s toes. If our husband notices, he does nothing. (Continue Reading…)