Wolfy Things

by Erin Roberts

Tonight, me and Lee gonna kill the wolf. Been digging a pit out in the woods all summer, filling it up with wolfsbane and sharp rocks big as our heads, covering it up with leaves so wolfy eyes can’t tell it’s there. Lee even snatched a whole chicken outta his Pa’s coop, snapped its neck and threw it on the pile like some kinda wolf Christmas come early. Wolf just has to go sniffing over by the edge and we give a good push and we’ll be Nicky and Lee, honest-to-God wolf-killers.

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Hatyasin

by Rati Mehrotra

Friday was the last good day. On Saturday the hunters came and by Tuesday Mira was gone, swallowed in the maw of the crowd fleeing Chandipur.

Mira my older sister, the normal one. I look up at the stars glittering in the sky and pray that she is safe.

Why did they come? Chandipur is as far as it gets from the heart of the New World. Perhaps the capital wants to stamp out the border communities, make sure that the taint of the old blood never spreads. The taint I’ve lived with all my life.

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The Saint of the Sidewalks

by Kat Howard

Joan wrote her prayer with a half-used tube of Chanel Vamp that she had found discarded at the 34^th St. subway stop. It glided across the cardboard – the flip side of a Stoli box, torn and bent – and left her words in a glossy slick the color of dried blood: “I need a miracle.”

You were supposed to be specific when asking the Saint of the Sidewalks for an intervention, but everything in her life was such a fucking disaster, Joan didn’t know where to start. So, she asked for a miracle, non-specific variety.

She set her cardboard on the sidewalk, prayer-side up. Then lit the required cigarette – stolen out of the pack of some guy who had been hitting on her at a bar – with the almost empty lighter she had fished out of the trash. You couldn’t use anything new, anything you had previously owned, in your prayer. That was the way the devotion worked: found objects. Discards. Detritus made holy by the power of the saint.

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The Husband Stitch

by Carmen Maria Machado

(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices:

Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.

The boy who will grow into a man, and be my spouse: robust with his own good fortune.

My father: Like your father, or the man you wish was your father.

My son: as a small child, gentle, rounded with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband.

All other women: interchangeable with my own.)

In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them. I am at a neighbor’s party with my parents, and I am seventeen. Though my father didn’t notice, I drank half a glass of white wine in the kitchen a few minutes ago, with the neighbor’s teenage daughter. Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.

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The Lady’s Maid

by Carlea Holl-Jensen

Sometimes she wonders about the girls whose heads her mistress wears. Sometimes, though not often, she wonders where they came from, who they loved. She wonders who, if anyone, keeps their memory now.

Mostly, though, she doesn’t trouble herself. It is her lady’s right to take what she desires. Everything is hers, as far as the eye can see: the mirrored sitting room and the marble statues in the courtyard and the deer in the forests to the east and the endless farmland, now fallow, to the west—all hers. Any passing milkmaid with a handsome head of curls, any traveling fortuneteller with changeable sea-green eyes—they are all hers, too, if she wishes it. This is the order of things.

The Half Dark Promise

by Malon Edwards

The first thing Bobby Brightsmith told me when I moved to the South Side of Chicago from La Petite Haïti with Manmi was to run like a scalded dog if I ever saw zonbi la in the half dark on the way home from school.

See, when Bobby was eight years old, a little girl and a little boy were snatched from the half dark not far from home. They were never seen again. Bobby said because of that little girl and that little boy, timoun yo in Chicago now walk home from school in groups, in the half dark just before nightfall. The half dark comes fast this time of year.

Flash Fiction Extravaganza! Ghostly Interludes

“The Spirit of Pinetop Inn” by Renee Carter Hall.

Read by Folly Blaine.

First appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (#58).

The first ghost showed up right on time, striding into the Pinetop Inn’s front parlor so regally that the proprietors, Emma and Tom, expected a flourish of trumpets to accompany his entrance.

The ghost bowed to Tom and kissed Emma’s hand. “Sir Edward Blackthorn the Fourth, at your service, my lord, my lady.” He straightened and handed Tom a thick leather-bound book. “My references, dating all the way back to 1784. I trust you will find everything in order.”

Tom squinted at the faded calligraphy. “Impressive.” (Continue Reading…)