Mermaid’s Hook

by Liz Argall

She caught treasures from the ship with her sisters; dangerous, exotic objects that plummeted through the water. Metal not yet rusted; fractured glass and timbers not yet smoothed by the sea; woven filaments as delicate as jellyfish, and as treacherous. Curiosities from the world above to be dared, caught, examined and discarded.

She found him falling. He fell fast, tangled in chains, his shirt billowing up around him, shedding bubbles in all directions as his body tore through the water. She surged towards him, caught him in her arms, then paused. Here was no special prize. Normally, they would let humans sink to the bottom and serve as bait for delicious crabs and tastier morsels, but this one still struggled. His urgent desire to live evoking something almost forgotten; an electric hum on the back of her tongue of land-life never known, but bone-remembered. She hummed low and chirruped in surprise, “Who are you? Why are you in my arms?”

He spasmed for a moment, his convulsions almost knocking him out of her grasp, the whites of his eyes flickering through half opened slits.

Her sisters hummed, “Why are you playing with the land-thing? Wait for the crabs to come.”

“I think it’s alive.”

The Dragonslayer of Merebarton

by K.J. Parker

On reflection, if I hadn’t seen those wretched White Drakes in Outremer, there’s a reasonable chance I’d have refused to believe in a dragon trashing Merebarton, and then, who knows, it might’ve flown away and bothered someone else. Well, you don’t know, that’s the whole point. It’s that very ignorance that makes life possible. But when Ebba told me what the boy told him he’d seen, immediately I thought; White Drake. Clearly it wasn’t one, but it was close enough to something I’d seen to allow belief to seep into my mind, and then I was done for. No hope.

Even so, I think I said, “Are you sure?” about six or seven times, until eventually it dawned on me I was making a fool of myself. At which point, a horrible sort of mist of despair settled over me, as I realised that this extraordinary, impossible, grossly and viciously unfair thing had landed on me, and that I was going to have to deal with it.

But you do your best. You struggle, just as a man crushed under a giant stone still draws in the last one or two desperate whistling breaths; pointless, but you can’t just give up. So I looked him steadily in the eye, and I said, “So, what do they expect me to do about it?”

The Discriminating Monster’s Guide to the Perils of Princess Snatching

by Scott M. Roberts

I let her see my fangs.

The princess dropped the box-cutter.  She had just cut herself—shallow slashes that cried tiny, scarlet pearls.  Her blood smelled as sweet as cotton candy, but it was the scent of her destiny that had led me to her.  Spicy and cloying, the princess’s destiny made my mouth water, set an itch and tingle in my skin.  I inhaled it and let the city, with its bloated trash bags and filthy humans and miles of steaming asphalt, fade, fade, fade into the darkness.  The princess’s destiny was like Christmas morning: cloves and oranges, nutmeg explosions and cinnamon arias.  All bright; all clean.  A song in my sinuses, on the back of my throat, as pure as a child’s kiss, as sweet cream.

I bumped my nose against the window.  The twinge of pain brought me back to reality.  The city, the humans, the asphalt, all that.  And more, now: the stench of the princess’s mother downstairs, sucking on vodka and painkillers, stinking of booze and vomit.

The window wasn’t locked; I rubbed my nose with one hand and opened it with the other. “Hello, princess,” I said.

Sundae

by Matt Wallace

Perhaps the greatest warrior the world had ever known was entombed in a brown cardboard box in the attic. The box was scrawled “Kenny’s Room” in bright red Sharpie pen and stuffed into a dust-covered corner one Spring-cleaning with several others. Some contained toys the children had outgrown, others contained electronics that were working but hopelessly out-of-date. All of them were quickly forgotten about.

Inside the cardboard box filled with other unwanted toys, Sundae lay in his miniature steamer trunk. The trunk’s once-fine leather was cracked and peeling all over, its many stamps painted with their images of post card lands dulled and faded by age. Sundae himself had not faired much better through the years (it had been almost a century since he was created in Magda’s workshop).

One of his eyes was missing, and the tear left by its departure had been sewn shut to keep the fluff from leaking out. A large patch of fur covering his right breast and shoulder was dark and brittle. He’d taken a tumble into a roaring fireplace while grappling with a particularly nasty beast back in the 70’s. The cover he’d fashioned from leather scraps for his left ear, to protect the pressed metal button that was the source of all Stenz bears’ power, looked worn and awkwardly stapled on.

There were other punctures and tears and rips. Some had been sewn like his eye, some closed hastily with masking tape that was now brown and furling at the corners.

Logic and Magic in the Time of the Boat Lift

by Cat Rambo and Ben Burgis

They said the Marielitas were escoria – scum. The abuelitas muttered it to each other, and the young girls coming home from school clustered together like butterflies, looking thrilled and worried whenever the wind whistled at them. The newspapers said Miami was under siege, that Castro had loosed the worst from the Cuban prisons and madhouses.

The respectable Cubans already in Miami – the ones who weren’t driving the boats to bring over their cousins and brothers and grandparents who’d managed to flee to the port of Mariel – were quick to repudiate the incoming. Some of them put bumper stickers on their ten-year-old town cars: No me digas Marielito.

The crease-browed TV news anchors said the Marielitas “contained a disproportionate amount” of drug addicts and the criminally insane. They predicted crimes, rapes, murders. In the evenings, they showed us it was already starting: a kid kicked to death over a pair of sneakers, a bosomy young woman with her tongue cut out. The baby that…

Some things are too hard to dwell on.

But I wasn’t too worried about the Marielitas. Petty criminals, drug runners, the occasional voodoo priest.

What I was worried about wasn’t human.

My Dignity in Scars

by Cory Skerry

I am never the first to know the demons have returned.

This time, I am at Ukaya’s house, trimming the hooves of her goats, because her joints are too swollen and stiff to wield a knife. The morning sun prickles my back and rough goat hair prickles my belly as I whittle off thin curls of hoof.

Ukaya tells me stories about my late father, who climbed a mountain at fifteen, and went on to sail foreign ships, dive for pearls, slay monsters, and rout a nest of bandits just to bring my mother back her wedding jewelry, all before I was born. At least, I think to myself, someone in our family made himself remarkable before he died.

The Three Feats of Agani

by Christie Yant

A girl sits cross-legged in the dirt before the unlit pyre, her face dotted with yellow clay and her dark hair unbound. The girl has just seen her ninth summer. The man on the pyre is her father. The old woman at her side, bent and gray, is no relation.

The girl does not cry. She looks at the pyre with coal-bright eyes, her jaw set, her fists clenched. The pyre is covered in the flowers of the season: purple, blue, and yellow. Their scent is carried on the breeze. She fidgets with the curled edge of her tunic as the aurochs horn sounds in mourning, and she knows she will never enjoy the scent of summer flowers again.

The three of them—the girl, the old woman, and the corpse—sit in silence while the sun traces its slow arc across the sky. The girl knows that this silence is expected of her. She is satisfied with it, because if she is not silent then she will scream. She does not know the right word for the anger she feels, the rage and wanting in her heart that threatens to burst from her chest and lay waste the entire settlement and everyone in it, seek out the men who ambushed and murdered her father. There is a word for it, but it is taboo to her people, and never expressed.

If she knew the right word, she would say that what she wants is vengeance.

Seeking Captain Random

by Vylar Kaftan

Dreams tell you what you really believe, deep down.  But sometimes it takes a while before you understand them.

“When I climbed the hill of bones, the shaman was waiting for me,” Darren said, stirring Nutrasweet into his herbal tea.  “Except now he was a giant rat.  Like ten feet tall.”

Darren’s always told me about his dreams.  Ever since he quit his office job to write comic books full time, his dreams have gotten weirder.  I figure he’s really dreaming about how to pay the rent next month, though I can’t see what the giant rat has to do with anything.  I was probably more worried about Darren’s rent than he was, even though we weren’t roommates anymore.

Around us, the coffee shop was nearly empty.  We sat at our usual table–the four-seater with room for my wheelchair.  Darren’s backpack and bike helmet occupied the extra chair.  The late-September sunlight stretched through the window like it wasn’t ready to leave.  I asked, “So did the rat-shaman have the sword ready for you like he’d promised?”