Feed Me the Bones of Our Saints

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

Jump up! Take arms! Bare teeth!

We fight for these sands.

Sink iron knives and white teeth into their scented flesh, their soft city flesh, those stealers of our homes. This is our city now, this desert with its winds that scour our cheeks, its dunes that join us in song, its rare springs that we lap at so gently. We once gulped rivers of rubies and pearls; now they do and we will never be able to claim them back. We will not let them take this final city of air and graveyards from us! Jump up!

We fight for these sands with everything we have and sometimes we forget the feel of a sister’s shoulder beneath our heads, we’ve been so long without sleep–but today will be remembered for more than this.

Today we retrieve the bodies of our Saints.

In Metal, In Bone

by An Owomoyela

Colonel Gabriel met him in a circle of canvas-topped trucks, in an army jacket despite the heat of the sun.  he stood a head taller than Benine, with skin as dark as peat coal, with terrible scarring on one side of his jaw.  When his gloved hand shook Benine’s bare one, he closed his grip and said, “What do you see?”

Benine was startled, but the call to listen in on the memories of things was ever-present in the back of his mind.  It took very little to let his senses fuzz, obscured by the vision curling up from the gloves like smoke.

He saw a room in a cottage with a thatched roof, the breeze coming in with the smell of a cooking fire outside, roasted cassava, a woman singing, off-tune.  He had to smile.  There was too much joy in the song to mind the sharp notes.  This must have been before the war; it was hard to imagine that much joy in Mortova these days.

The singing had that rich, resonant pitch of a voice heard in the owner’s head, and his vision swung down, to delicate hands with a needle and thread, stitching together the fabric of the gloves.  Neat, even rows, and as the glove passed between the seamstress’s fingers, he could see the patterns of embroidery on the back.

Benine banished the vision and pulled his hand back.  “But these are women’s gloves!”

Colonel Gabriel gave him an appraising look.  “So you can do something,” he said.  “Not just superstition and witchcraft.”

Ill Met in Ulthar (Featuring Marla Mason)

by T.A. Pratt 

Dr. Husch slid the panel over the window shut as the beast continued battering against the door. “Don’t worry, it can’t get out. The interior of the room is lined with rubber, reinforced by magic. We used to keep a paranoid electrothaumaturge locked up there. There are no electrical outlets or light fixtures, either—when we found the creature in Barrow’s room, it had smashed the light bulbs, and was suckling at the outlets like a hamster at a water bottle.”

Marla took off the glasses and rubbed her eyes. “What is that thing?”

(Continue Reading…)

The Gunner’s Mate

by Gene Wolfe

“There’s something about this island—“ Muriel began.

Liza shook her head.  “I don’t like it either.”

“I didn’t mean that.  I didn’t mean that at all.”  Muriel put down her piña colada.  “It feels, well, welcoming.  It keeps telling me I’m home, that it’s where I’m supposed to be.”

“You’d better quit drinking this pineapple stuff.”

“I’ve only had one,” Muriel protested.  “This is my second.  You’re on your third.”

“Kirk drank my first one.  Can’t you feel the hostility?  The terrible loneliness?  It’s like – I don’t know.  It makes me think of a haunted house fifty miles from nowhere.”

Sand Castles

by Desirina Boskovich

“We’re on a journey,” Radley says.

“We have a map,” Audra says. She speaks quietly, barely above a whisper, but I have no trouble hearing her, even in the noisy bar.

“Yeah,” Radley says. “We have a map.”

“But what we don’t have…”

“Is a car,” Radley finishes.

I’m amused, but not surprised. Artists—this is about all you can expect. “So exactly where is this map leading you?” I ask.

“Somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico,” Audra says. “A beach.”

“There’s one outside, you know.”

“We need this particular beach.  Because of the sand,” Radley says.

“What?”

“Because we need it,” Audra says. And they won’t say anything more.