Data Ghost

by Martha Wells

When the station stats popped up on the screen, the Interface said, Anomalous. Deni batted at their ear and muttered, “No, no, quit it.”

In the second cockpit seat, Winnie threw them a look. “What?” At Deni’s shrug, her brows stayed up, skeptical. “Use your words, Tulip.”

“It’s the Interface.” Deni thumped their head against the seat back, thinking about the urge to dig the thing out of their brain with a spoon. Sometimes that shut it up. They waved a hand at their head and made their voice low and deep and ominous. “‘Anomalous.’ It’s still mad because we filled out that intake form wrong at Ring Transit.”

The Interface hissed quietly, Anomalous.

“Uh, folks,” Nehian said, his voice crackling over the comm from tertiary control. “It’s not mad about the form. Look at the station.”

Flicking through the incoming scans with a frown, Winnie said, “This is weird. Where is everybody?”

Deni looked. Okay, that was . . . not right. Though they refused to say it was anomalous. The station was silent: no outgoing signals detected, no beacons, no transmissions. “It’s offline completely?” they asked. There were a lot of things that could do that, and none were good. Like a disease outbreak, or a massive malfunction, or an attack that had taken down the life support systems. (Continue Reading…)

Be Not Afraid

by Michael Thomas Ford

“Take out all the yellow ones,” Mamaw says. “Put these in.”

She takes a box of Christmas bulbs out of the plastic grocery sack from the Dollar General and sets it on the kitchen table beside the tangled strings of lights I’m trying my best to work apart. They’re lined with green, blue, red, and yellow bulbs.

“What color do you want me to replace them with?” I ask her.

“Don’t matter,” she says, and takes a draw on the cigarette in her mouth. She blows the smoke out, and it settles over the table like smog. I wish she would quit, but she won’t, even though her cough has been getting worse and worse. She won’t go to the doctor anymore, either, because as she says, “He don’t know nothin’ I don’t already know.”

What she means is that she’s probably going to die before too long. Maybe not next month or even next year, but more likely than not she won’t be around to see me graduate from high school in two years. But that’s not something we talk about. Just like we don’t talk about what will happen to me and Pike if she does. With our parents gone, she’s the only relative we have. Since Pike is eighteen and technically an adult, I guess he’ll be in charge of taking care of things then.

Except that Pike is the one who needs taking care of, and I’ve been looking out for myself since I was twelve. As much as I love Mamaw—and I love her more than just about anything—she’s not exactly a caretaker, either. Most of the time, I feel like the only adult in the house, and I’m not even old enough to drive.

“Shouldn’t we be replacing the red ones?” I say. “I thought his eyes were red.”

Mamaw shakes her head, taps her ash into the empty Ale-8-One can beside her. “That statue they got over in Point Pleasant makes everyone think that,” she says. “Those Blenko glass eyes and all. But they’re yellow.” She pauses, takes another puff of her cigarette. “At least, they were when I seen him. I s’pose he might look different to different people.”

Him. What she means is Mothman. But we don’t say his name around here. Mamaw thinks it’s bad luck. One time, maybe a year after our parents died, I did say it, and she slapped my face so hard I couldn’t breathe for half a minute. I just stood there looking at her face all twisted up in anger and fear. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t call him. Not ever.”

Mamaw and Mothman have a history. She was five years old in 1967, the year the Silver Bridge linking Point Pleasant, West Virginia, with Gallipolis, Ohio [NOTE: Against all reason, this town name is pronounced gal-uh-police. NOT liss.], collapsed, a little more than a week before Christmas. Forty-six people died in the tragedy, including Mamaw’s cousin Elmer, who was driving a beer delivery truck across the bridge when it went down and dumped everyone on it into the Ohio River. (Continue Reading…)

If You Don’t Want a Cat, Don’t Get a Kitten

by Sonora Taylor

For Brian Keene

Some men woke to the sound of roosters. Brent knew it was a new day when he heard a steady chorus of scratches outside his window. He rolled off of his lumpy mattress, the worn comforter askew over the stained and dirty fitted sheet. One sure sign that a woman didn’t live there was that his bedsheets hadn’t been changed in months.

Brent slipped into his moccasins and pulled a coat on over his pajamas. He stepped onto the porch and clenched his teeth at the sudden rush of cold that smacked his face. He rubbed his hands together.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one small orb stick up from a hole in the porch. Another, then another, until heads and arms slinked through various cracks in the worn wooden planks, each with the same morning call:

“Mew!”

Brent sighed. It was time to feed the kittens.

Brent hadn’t wanted a pet. But living near the woods meant that sometimes, pets came to you. Brent had been outside drinking coffee when he heard the first mew. He’d looked and saw one single kitten, a calico with orange eyes. It looked at him expectantly, as if the kitten had been there all along and it was Brent who’d moved into its space.

“Hey little fella,” Brent said, deciding the kitten was a boy. “Where’d you come from?”

The kitten blinked over a wet, blank stare, as cats tend to do.

“Is your momma here?”

“Mew!”

Brent surveyed the porch, but saw no mother cat. He had no neighbors to speak of for miles, so he didn’t think the kitten or his lost parent had an owner. He walked into the yard and saw muddy paw prints walking from the woods. He stooped for a closer look, and saw that the paw prints weren’t brown, but a deep red.

Brent jumped back. If a predator had attacked the kitten, he didn’t want them coming near him to finish the job. He rushed back to the porch, where the calico sat expectantly. His fur was clean, no blood on its tuft or its maw. Brent figured the morning dew that covered his moccasins had washed any remnants of the attack away.

“Mew!”

Brent didn’t want a cat. And he knew the old adage: if you don’t want a cat, don’t get a kitten.

But the kitten sure was cute.

“Okay,” he said, as if he’d had any choice in the matter the minute he saw those wide orange eyes. “But you have to stay outside.” (Continue Reading…)

Onitsha Main, Ochanja, The Twins, Nkpor, and the Shadows of Shoprite

By Somto Ihezue

Onitsha Main.

It started with the garri sellers. Basin by basin, their grains went gray with mold. Stall by stall, they all shut down. The small-scale carpenters down by the port were next. With soaring prices, they could not afford to transport their production materials into town. The Abada textile dealers packed up their bales of fabric and locked them in a warehouse. They planned to wait out the crisis. One morning, they woke up and found the warehouse razed, their fabrics with it. The Abada women wailed. The Abada women rent their clothes and rolled in the dirt. The flames roared higher.

This, this was how they knew. Onitsha Main Market, the largest market in West Africa, had gone missing.

The town of Onitsha had never faced a crisis of this scale. Many bordering towns also relied on Onitsha Main for trade and business. His siblings, the other major markets in the town—Ochanja, The Twins: Relief and Head Bridge, and the youngest of them, Nkpor—had looked everywhere. They looked in the Niger River, Onitsha Main was not there. They visited their cousin Ariaria in Aba, their brother was not there. They looked in anthills, on camel backs in the Sahara, in tomato baskets, and in every uttered word. It was like Onitsha Main had ceased to exist. (Continue Reading…)

The Slow Music Of Drums

by A.C. Wise

It was easier than I imagined, tracking down the last original member of Exquisite Corpse. My uncle left surprisingly detailed notes for a man with a disordered mind—left them, and then disappeared.

Died. Disappeared. I don’t know.

Julian was the name on my uncle’s birth certificate, but everyone called him Rabbit. We weren’t close when I was growing up, only after my own father died and I discovered that I had a lot more in common with my father’s brother than I’d ever had with him. We’re both prone to obsession, insatiable curiosity. It’s gotten me fired from more than one job, following my own line of interest rather than writing the story as assigned. Rabbit wasn’t a journalist, but I bet he was difficult to work with too.

I’ve been telling myself that Rabbit died, for the sake of closure, but I’m pretty sure that’s a lie. He mailed me a key, wanted me to follow him. Left a mystery for me to unravel, knowing I’d be the one to help my not-quite-aunt Jessi sort through his stuff once he was gone.

Before he vanished, Rabbit and I had been talking a lot on the phone. Late night calls—or early morning ones, depending on your perspective. The calls were mostly him rambling, me listening. I didn’t follow everything he said, but a few things stood out.

He said our family is cursed. (Continue Reading…)

Less Exalted Tastes

by Gemma Amor

John Guthrie stood at the end of a long gravel driveway and stared in unadulterated joy at the largest mansion he’d ever seen. In the meagre light of an autumn day, the scrolled corbels, smooth limestone ashlar, and innumerable sash windows of the house shone with promise, a promise picked out in high relief by a fleeting sun that occasionally fought its way through heavy, rain-laden clouds. A storm was coming. The trees around him rustled with a quiet anticipation that he, in his excitable state, could not hear.

All John Guthrie could hear was the sound of money singing. (Continue Reading…)