The Book

by Lavie Tidhar

There is a bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London and it’s never open. Its windows are covered in a thick film of dust and spiders grow webbed cities in its darkness. There are books inside that no-one’s ever read; books that human eyes had never seen, books where black ink spells secrets on black paper, books written in darkness that cannot be read in the light.

Crossroads

by Laura Anne Gilman

John came to the crossroads at just shy of noon, where a man dressed all in black stared up at another man hanging from a gallows-tree. No, not hanging; he was being hung, the loop still slack around his neck, his body dangling in mid-air. That, John thought, his pack heavy on his shoulder and his hat pulled low, was not something a wise man would get involved in. And yet, he could not resist asking, “What did he do?”

The man in black turned around and glared at John. “He asked too many impertinent questions.”

The man with the rope around his neck laughed at that, a rueful, amused sound, and John decided he liked the dead man.

“You might want to move on,” the man in black continued in a voice that wasn’t a suggestion. “This is a bad place to be for a lone traveler.”

Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas

by Alberto Yáñez

“You do that better than your sisters, Gabe,” Mom says to me as I
spread the corn masa on the soaked husk and spoon the right amount of
shredded spiced beef onto it. The aroma of meat braised in a sauce of
chiles, garlic, bay, pepper, and cloves makes every breath feel like
Christmas. My stomach growls softly in a tiny fit of impatient hunger.
It’s the first time I’ve been actually allowed to help with the
tamales since . . . well, since a long time. My sisters are good
cooks, too, so Mom’s praise isn’t cheap. “They always overstuff them.”

I wrap up the tamal and try not to smile too much, but Mom ignores my
pride anyway. She doesn’t want me getting too cocky. This is women’s
work she’s letting me do, and she thinks it wouldn’t be good for me to
be too proud about it. I think she forgets sometimes, but I _am_ a boy
after all.

Because of that, I probably shouldn’t be standing there in her
daisy-yellow kitchen learning how to make tamales properly, but Dad
isn’t home right now and my brothers aren’t going to notice so long as
the food’s good.

It will be. Mom’s cooking is still the best.

Unpossible

by Daryl Gregory

Two in the morning and he’s stumbling around in the attic, lost in horizontal archaeology: the further he goes, the older the artifacts become. The stuttering flashlight guides him past boxes of Christmas decorations and half-dead appliances, past garbage bags of old blankets and outgrown clothing stacked and bulging like black snowmen, over and around the twenty-year-old rubble of his son’s treasures: Tonka trucks and science fair projects, soccer trophies and summer camp pottery.

His shoulder brushes against the upright rail of a disassembled crib, sends it sliding, and somewhere in the dark a mirror or storm window smashes. The noise doesn’t matter. There’s no one in the house below him to disturb.

Twenty feet from the far wall his way is blocked by a heap of wicker lawn furniture. He pulls apart the barricade piece by piece to make a narrow passage and scrapes through, straws tugging at his shirt. On the other side he crawls up and onto the back of a tilting oak desk immovable as a ship run aground.

The territory ahead is littered with the remains of his youth, the evidence of his life before he brought his wife and son to this house. Stacks of hardcover books, boxes of dusty-framed elementary school pictures—and toys. So many toys. Once upon a time he was the boy who didn’t like to go outside, the boy who never wanted to leave his room. The Boy Who Always Said No.