The Tallow Feast

By Damien Kelly

Years ago, a woman – reputed to be crafty – berated Alma’s mother in the market square for rendering her tallow with salt and water.

Your oil will lose all goodness that way, she said, and it will spoil. She said it idly, half-smiling, as if sharing advice, but she meant it as an augury and a curse and every wife within hearing knew it. Because she was a witch.

“She’s no witch,” Alma’s mother told her later. “She just fancies herself.”

And as she added salt to the beef fat and water, Alma’s mother educated her daughter on the realities of rendering tallow. And curses.

“You can skim the oil, without touching the water. Know your depth. Control your heat. Else you can cool and rewarm the solid tallow cake any number of times, to ensure the salt and water alike have sunk below. Take the time. Take care. Because it is a fact, daughter mine – and no witch can change this – that neither salt nor water dissolve in oil.

“So, if it’s there, it’s because you let it in.”

Her tallow was always white as snow. Never smelly or salty. And it never spoiled. (Continue Reading…)

Turquoise Waters

by Nicole Givens Kurtz

“Let me die,” India whispered, her voice soft against the hot hiss of bullets whizzing by her and Tish, her partner. She licked her cracked, full lips and struggled to find both spit and words.

“No.” Tish shook her head. It ain’t supposed to be like this.

The day had begun as a normal one, sunny with clear skies. Cornflower blue draped above vibrant red canyons and verdant cacti comprised most days in the New Mexican territory. She and India traveled by horseback on the road to Wild Sage, a mecca to all seeking freedom and autonomy. The west offered hope for anyone scurrying from the East’s societal trappings or the South’s ruin.

Around dusk, things veered off track. (Continue Reading…)

The first person to see the wave was a fisherman. Like most of his kind, he was strong, fond of water, and a heavy drinker; he wore rubber boots and a yellow coat slicked with salmon guts. It’s important to stress that there was nothing heroic about this fisherman. He was a normal man. He had friends and family. One bar server remembered that he used to show off on Friday nights, after the day’s catch, impressing local women with his trick shots.?* 

Footnote:
* Anonymous interview.

(Continue Reading…)

The Squatters

by Shawna Yang Ryan

The government begins excavating the bones in late February to coincide with the events planned to commemorate the massacre. It is meant to gesture that they truly do intend to follow through on their promise of “truth and reconciliation” and with the upcoming election, a way to score political points for the candidates of the ruling party. The site is one of a number of mass graves that have been located in the past two decades, and now there is an official governmental department in charge of identifying the victims and honoring them with a proper burial and headstone.

I would like to tell you we were always solemn as we cataloged and analyzed these lost lives, but we made jokes because laughter is what made us human, alive. Dissociation was part of the job.
(Continue Reading…)

Our family doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful.

The Wind Beneath

By Alex Ebenstein

There’s a gale when dawn illuminates our world. The morning light arrives as though leached from my son’s eyes, his gaze cast skyward, forever in search of hope, his dreams. He’s gone.

There’s little else to mark the passage of time now, everything’s wind and survival…and heartbreak. When the world turned, we had no choice but to reckon with loss. To choke on it with every gust. We made it damn near ten years after, him and I, and that’s that. I don’t know what time I have left, but it feels like too much now.

It’s not all bad, this incessant wind that yanks at my clothes as I sit grieving. An old neighbor, distant a mile or so as we are nowadays, was an engineer. Before. A good one, apparently, able to retrofit leftover technology, made harnessing wind for energy a breeze. So we’ve got that at least, an efficient windmill and perpetual electricity. Well, I have that. The neighbor hanged himself years ago, and today my boy is dead.

The wind isn’t the problem. The problem is everything else. (Continue Reading…)

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…)