Destiny, With a Blackberry Sauce

by David J. Schwartz

During my brother Mel’s final test to become a guard, he performed a flourish with his halberd and cut off his left foot. You wouldn’t think it was possible to slice your own foot clean off while you’re standing on it, but he managed. He says that he didn’t really feel any pain at first, but he did feel the tendon in his leg rolling up like a window shade.

My parents were mortified. My dad just set his jaw like he does when he can’t yell at us right exactly then, and my mom covered her eyes. Me, I watched the whole thing. There was a lot of blood, and of course Mel was screaming—they say you’re not supposed to, that it makes a bad impression on the test officers, but I’m pretty sure I would have, too. Then the healer came over and made an incision in the back of my brother’s leg. He reached in and found the tendon where it had gone into hiding and pulled it down to where it belonged, chanting the entire time. Mel was screaming a lot louder by then. Five minutes later the foot was reattached. It’s pretty much as good as it ever was, but Mel still has nightmares about the pain.

Not that I’m the least bit sympathetic. If you ask me, he did it on purpose.

Their Changing Bodies

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Judy had been painfully aware of him since her arrival two weeks ago, when she had seen him across the mess hall. They talked a little, but Judy hadn’t been prepared for his appearance or his popularity. She hadn’t expected him to change quite so much.

Judy had first met Brandon last summer in the woods of rural Michigan, at an institution the promotional brochures called Better Image! for Teens. The kids sentenced to this energetically punctuated camp had referred to it as the Penitentiary, but Judy’s sister Alice had more accurately called it Fat Camp. Judy came home thirty pounds thinner and possessed of a first kiss that had admittedly also encompassed some of her cheek. Still, at sixteen she had finally accomplished several of her goals in life: a) meet a boy, b) talk to the boy, c) impress him with her knowledge of esoteric subjects like grafting apple trees, and, finally, d) mack on him like crazy.

If pressed, Judy admitted that perhaps she still had a slight distance to travel until she fully accomplished d). Even though Brandon had attempted to insert his tongue in her mouth, the reality of it wagging wetly in the air had so disconcerted Judy that she turned at the exact wrong moment, thereupon forcing Brandon’s tongue to slither over her cheek until he realized what had happened and put it back in his mouth. How, she asked Alice, does anyone make out with so much spit? Alice just shrugged and said you got used to it.

Judy hoped she would get used to it.

Fruit Jar Drinkin’, Cheatin’ Heart Blues

by Patty Templeton

Cazy Tipple and Balma Walker were the two finest bootleggers for a god-step or more. The only two that lived in the Rotgut, instead of on its edge.

Balma hadn’t always hated the sour, sorrowing guts out of Cazy, but times changed with the rain.

Ten years and a piece with the same two hearts in a three room cabin and there’s bound to be here-and-there altercations. Balma’d call Cazy a no-good-jar-tipper, and Cazy’d have a sip and a swallow and name Balma a brain-big-hollerin’-bitch. Balma’d throw the grits and biscuits at Cazy and the frying pan after. Cazy’d bite a brushed-off biscuit and tell Balma how fine it was. Fairly soon, the two were hot eyes over hot coffee and the stills would have to wait until the sheets had another ruffle and wet.

But this time, Cazy’d done enough wrong for Balma to prop the grudge on a pulpit and preach.

The Interior of Mr. Bumblethorn’s Coat

by Willow Fagan

Mister Bumblethorn slept through the morning, as he usually did, rising from his dry-as-dust bathtub just after noon. He stood in the weak light of the shaded window, his massive blue coat rumpled but still imposing. He did not even remember getting into the bathtub the night before, much less falling asleep in it. He yawned and shook out his arms. An antelope or a gazelle, tiny as a beetle, tumbled out of his coat sleeve and splatted on the floor below. Mister Bumblethorn studiously ignored this.

Bleary-eyed, he walked across his tiny apartment to rummage through the cupboards, finding no food except some stale crackers. Worse, his water flask was empty as a thimble; he held the thing upside down for a full minute and not a drop appeared, not a whiff of moisture.

Mister Bumblethorn sighed heavily. Into the blank space of his empty stomach, memories began to flow like saliva. Once, adoring folk had
thrust gifts of cheese and honeycakes at him wherever he walked: through the streets of grand Abadore, through the humble thoroughfares of nameless hamlets. Fingers shaking, Mister Bumblethorn rolled himself a fat spliff of redleaf. No matter how little the peasants had, they shared their suppers with him and refused any offer of payment. Damn it, light already. After all, he was–Ah, there it was, that sweet smoke filling his mouth, translating the stream of memories into a language as meaningless to him as the clicking prayers of the insectile priests in their hive temple on Wingcleft Avenue, his old life grown as insubstantial as their flowery incense, drifting away in the wind.

Balfour and Meriwether in The Vampire of Kabul

by Daniel Abraham

It was the third of December in 188-, and snow swirled down grey and damp upon the cobblestones of London. Meriwether paced before the wide window of the King Street flat impatiently. Balfour sat before the roaring fire, correcting a draft monograph he had written on the subject of Asiatic hand combat as adapted to the English frame.

“I cannot understand how you can be so devilishly placid,” Meriwether said at last.

“Practice,” Balfour grunted.

“Every winter it’s the same,” Meriwether said, gesturing at the falling snow. “The darkness comes earlier, the cold drives men from the roads, and I have this…stirring. This unutterable restlessness. The winter traps me, my friend. It holds me captive.”

A Window, Clear as a Mirror

by Ferret Steinmetz

Malcolm Gebrowski returned from his job at the stamp factory to discover his wife had left him for a magic portal. He stared numbly at the linoleum
floor of his apartment’s walk-in kitchen, all scuffed up with hoofprints, the smell of lilacs gradually being overpowered by the mildewy stink of the paper plant next door. All that was left of eight years of marriage was a scribbled note on the back of the telephone bill.

He’d crumpled the note in his fist without thinking. He smoothed it out against the refrigerator to read Julianne’s last words again:

Malcolm,
Remember when I said you could sleep with Dakota Jewel if she ever dropped
by? I sure hope so. ‘Cause if you had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sleep with the most beautiful movie star in the world, I’d want you to take it. And remember when you said that if I ever found a magic portal, I could go?

Guess what? A magic portal opened.

Ties of Silver

by James L. Sutter

Harris always found me when I was at my worst. Not that it was particularly difficult — the way I figured it, I’d been at my worst for going on three years, and if there was reason to expect a change, nobody had clued me in.

In this case, I was sleeping off an evening of hard drinking and harder words, the latter contributing to the egg-sized knot on the back of my head. Turned out folks in the skin bars didn’t take kindly to a fur running his mouth, blueskin or otherwise. There was no way to tell how much of my headache had come from the bruise, and how much had been the brew.

Still, I was at my desk when Harris arrived. I may have been half-drunk, worked over, and counting each heartbeat as it lanced through the back of my skull, but I was no deadbeat.

“Jesus, Terry,” he said. “You look like hell.”

“At least I have an excuse,” I replied. “What’s yours? And don’t call me that.”

Harris sighed and seated himself in the only other chair. He was middle-aged and balding, with the soft cheeks of a man who’d never lost his baby fat, just converted it. His uniform was drab brown save for the full moon insignia on the shoulder, and his gut hung over his gun belt as if trying to hide it.

“Jackson, then,” he said. “But the observation stands. I heard you got thrown out of O’Meara’s last night.”

“It’s still a free city. I can get thrown out of any bar I want.”

Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar Pirates of Sarskoe

by Garth Nix

“Remind me why the pirates won’t sink us with cannon fire at long range,” said Sir Hereward as he lazed back against the bow of the skiff, his scarlet-sleeved arms trailing far enough over the side to get his twice folded-back cuffs and hands completely drenched, with occasional splashes going down his neck and back as well. He enjoyed the sensation, for the water in these eastern seas was warm, the swell gentle, and the boat was making a good four or five knots, reaching on a twelve knot breeze.

“For the first part, this skiff formerly belonged to Annim Tel, the pirate’s agent in Kerebad,” said Mister Fitz. Despite being only three feet six and a half inches tall and currently lacking even the extra height afforded by his favourite hat, the puppet was easily handling both tiller and main sheet of their small craft. “For the second part, we are both clad in red, the colour favoured by the pirates of this archipelagic trail, so they will account us as brethren until proven otherwise. For the third part, any decent perspective glass will bring close to their view the chest that lies lashed on the thwart there, and they will want to examine it, rather than blow it to smithereens.”
“Unless they’re drunk, which is highly probable,” said Hereward cheerfully.

Black Swan, White Swan

by Eugie Foster

Concentric circles lap beneath the dock’s wooden planks. A swan floats out, its shining plumage driving the water’s void back.

“There’s a man across the way.” The swan fixes Delia with polished onyx eyes. “Sometimes he’s a lighthouse and sometimes he’s a train, but silence doesn’t scare him.”

Delia stares at the luminous bird. “I don’t want a lighthouse or a train,” she says.

“Sometimes he’s a shelter in the rain.”

Delia studies the ripples that pass through the water’s surface in the swan’s wake.

“Don’t shut the door, it puts walls around you.” The swan dips its beak. “Call me the ocean, and I’ll change with the moon. You look right through me, but I can see the end of the storm.”

“Stop it.”

“Across the way there’s a man who holds questions without asking. A little peace of heart to guard with a stone wall,” the swan says. “Or a piece of heart guarded by stone walls. Let me in, and we can sing for nights.”

“Go away.”

The swan warbles, a musical wow-wo-ou. The wild cry startles Delia, and she takes a step back. Her foot catches on a knot jutting from the weathered planks; she unbalances, arms pinwheeling. As she tips into the icy lake, the swan takes wing, arrowing into the sky with a sweep of white feathers.

Black arms fold her to a black breast; the cold locks her lungs shut as water weights her limbs. Delia fights the embrace, even as she acknowledges her relief.

Still Small Voice

by Ben Burgis

Jack slipped on his invisibility shawl as he entered the café. Henry sat at a table by himself, reading a handsomely leather-bound book.

A few patrons looked up at the sound of the door opening and closing, then turned back to their business when they saw no one there. Under his cloak, Jack luxuriated in the artificial cool of the café.

Outside, it was a sweltering summer day, the kind of day that felt like all five of the Gods had lit five flames behind the clouds and the heat from those flames drowned out even the heat of the suns. It was the kind of day when even the wild dragons stayed out of the sky. Inside, it felt cool as autumn.

The heating and cooling control of the Island’s cafes and taverns, half-magic and half-mechanical, were one of the things Jack had almost forgotten to miss in his years in the West.

Henry turned the pages of his book, running his finger over the lines in a picture of intent fascination. Jack sat down across from him. Henry looked up, then shook his head and went back to the book.

Jack giggled. Henry looked up again. He closed his book, placed it ever so gently on the table and stood up. Jack forced himself to be quiet. Henry glanced to the left and then to the right, his lips set in a frown of deep suspicion. Then, at last, Jack took pity on the man and pulled off his shawl.

Henry staggered back. His chair clattered to the floor. Patrons at other tables turned to stare. Jack doubled over with laughter.

“So.” Henry picked up the chair and, with a show of dignity, sat back down. “I take it this is one of the Western marvels you wrote me about?”

“It is.” Jack folded the shawl as he spoke.

Henry stared at him. “How are you doing that? Can you see it?”

“Not a bit. I can feel it. If you stare at the damn thing for long enough, you can make out a sort of outline, but I find it’s best to remember where you left it.”