Of Black Town’s Monster

Part One of Two

Chaitanya Murali

February 21^st, 1695

We break at dawn. The trance broken, our deed done; we split as dandelions in a stiff breeze, disappearing, melting back into our lives, carrying little but an afterglow so suppressed it appears only as sweat upon our brows.

Tonight, we tell ourselves.

Tonight, we set our trap.

Fort St. George. A town built by the Company, with the promise that it would bring us prosperity. Land surrendered to them on the basis of a lie. White walls built around it to the exclusion of our people.

Only Whites may walk freely within White Town, after all.

I only walk there in the heat of their scorn.

My every move suspect.

My every breath sacrilege.

My every step dirty. (Continue Reading…)

Putti Call

By Emily Munro

Hopefully you’ve never tried to stuff a struggling toddler into a dog crate, but let me tell you, it’s even worse when they have wings.

Three cherubic faces peered out over the stone tracery that framed the partial rose window. Fat baby fingers gripping the stone, their movement sent a snowfall of dust motes through the multicolored shafts of afternoon sunlight.

“You’ve got putti alright,” I said, looking up at the grimy, soot-streaked bodies and mangy oil-sheen wings of the creatures as they hissed and spat at us from the heights.

“Not Cherubs?” the building superintendent asked.

“Same difference. Cherub is religious. Putti is the historical term, so we use that. I think they’re attracted to the architecture.” (Continue Reading…)

Why a Spider Needs a Parachute

by J. L. Akagi

I was the only person who knew that my friend Haru wasn’t a woman. They told me so a long time ago, but I only saw Haru as they were once.

The story goes like this.

It was the kind of New York summer that began in May. The hot wind up the coast brought in tropical storms and giant Joro spiders. The humidity created a jungle mist in Brooklyn so dense I couldn’t discern what was condensation and what was spider web. On my treks to the subway each morning, I’d walk face-first into at least one of the webbed parachutes the giant spiders used to glide.

Haru and I spent most weekends waiting out the heat, crowded in front of Haru’s window AC unit. Even in the airflow, I poured sweat from my temples and pits, but Haru remained dry. Never a silken hair out of place. This was something I suspected men loved about Haru: their physical and mental composure. Men loved feeling as if Haru needed nothing. (Continue Reading…)

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…)