Amma’s Kitchen

by Rati Mehrotra

I can always tell what dish my customers will order. Knowing what the dead crave is my gift. Or my curse. It’s hard to know which.

This girl, for instance. Brown, like me, but pale, as if the color’s been leeched out of her skin. Dark, staring eyes, weeds tangled in her drowned hair, and an ugly purple frog squatting on her shoulder. She doesn’t remember her name or the man who killed her, but she remembers the taste of her mother’s fish pakoras.

She drifts in, dripping water over my nice linoleum floor. I suppress a sigh. Cleaning’s the worst part of my job. At least it’s not blood and guts today.

“Sorry,” she says, glancing down.

“Don’t worry about it.” I wave her to a barstool. I have tables and chairs for groups, even a couple of red vinyl booths, but my customers are usually a solitary lot. Sometimes a family will come in, all four or five of whom have died in the same accident. I’ll usher them to a booth, doing my best to ignore their ghastly wounds, and give them what they need. (Continue Reading…)

The Mountain and the Vulture

by Nick Douglas

“High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.”

― Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Story of Mankind

At the edge of the world stands a mountain, a mile high and a mile wide, black against the white sky, like one was carved out of the other. Wind whistles against the knife point of the stone. There is nothing for the wind to blow. Nothing grows here. There is no snow or rain. The mountain is alone.

And then in the distance, in the white sky, is a dot. The dot grows into a line. The line grows into a shape. It’s the shape of a vulture in flight. Wings out ramrod, feathers like rays of the sun. Below the wings, the body, in the same dappled gold. Below the body, the head, red and fuzzy and bobbing. The vulture is sailing toward the mountain, and now it is close, and now it is circling. (Continue Reading…)

The Sound of Children Screaming

by Rachael K. Jones

THE GUN

You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or wear a visitor’s badge.

The Gun does most of its damage in the first five minutes. The Gun doesn’t care about lockdown drills, and it will not wait for the SWAT team to arrive. The Gun can chew through a door, a desk, a cinderblock wall, and kids don’t wear those bulletproof backpacks during reading time.

Everyone has a right to a gun. Nothing can take that away from you. What you lack is a right to the lives of your children.

The Gun likes a game of hide-and-seek. The Gun will rove the grounds until someone stops it. The Gun has been here many times before.

The Gun is not working alone. (Continue Reading…)

Good Fortune for a Beloved Child

By Alexia Tolas

There ain’t no body for Thomas funeral, so we bury an empty coffin.

Not empty, Daddy did tell me as we followed the undertaker to the cherry-woods and mahoganies. The coffins they pretty up with ivory velvet and pillows and other shit the dead ain’t gonna care about ‘cause they dead. We don’t even know if Thomas really —

Quintia . . .

But I hear him at night. Singing.

Please!

When the tide goes out.

Enough! (Continue Reading…)