The Song of the Living

by Tonja K. Johnson

When the trees start to smell sharp and crisp, I know The Dead Things are coming. That warning scent perfumes the air now. The fading summer gale bellows over a field of rolling wheat. Golden stalks bow to the force like cracked swan necks. They waltz to the tune of pine breath. Pirouette to the riotous rhythm of rot carried from The Dead Things shambling in a mass through the mountains. Below the craggy pass, craters blister up from the earth’s surface, oozing brackish slime. We are mostly alone out here. The land, too wild. The wind, too full of teeth. The river’s rush, brutal as tempest waves. Only micro pockets of Living rough the backwood to form small fortified settlements. It’s safer in the cities, with their high electric walls. Because when the trees tear up their roots and run, The Dead Things are close and only the ancestors can save you. (Continue Reading…)

Red Ripper

By Gordon Grice

Listen, I could still stretch half you pups if I felt like it. Sit down and learn something about the business. Did I ever tell you about the Red Ripper? I got a special reason for telling about him, because he’s come back to settle up with me. I never cared who he was under the hood, not until the night they went after him with a Polaroid. He was a good traveling buddy, and kind of a mentor, so what did I care? Wish to God I’d never got curious.

Some of the young guys thought Rip had a stick up his ass because he took his gimmick so serious. He never took that hood off, not even in the locker room. So one night they decided to pull a swerve on him. Rip had just gone broadway with Dory, and he comes back to the locker room and peels off everything but the hood. He’s standing there naked. Gray hair bristled on those round shoulders of his, and his balls hung halfway to his knees. What, you didn’t know that happens when you get old? Now you got something to look forward to.

Anyway, I saw one of the guys signal to another one, so I knew a swerve was up. Rip gets in the shower and one of the guys pounces into the next stall with a camera and the other guy gives him a leg up. The first guy leans over Rip’s stall and snaps a picture. I saw the flash and heard the bulb crack—they used to crack, boys, back in those days. One of the other old guys looked up and grunted a little, kind of annoyed about the flash, but he didn’t say anything. After a second, we heard Rip cussing in that grizzly-bear voice of his. The young guys ran for it like little kids. Rip comes out of the shower lacing his mask, soaped-up and cussing, and the mask is loose and flopping around, which made it look like his head was swollen up half again its normal size. Those two boys grabbed their gear and hightailed it.

Nobody laughed at Rip. Nobody needled him. People just stared at him a minute, and he stood there dripping, and then he turned around and went back into the shower. After a minute he came out with his mask laced up tight and got dressed and motioned for me to get a move on. (Continue Reading…)

Playing Tricks

By Angela Sylvaine

Dina had never seen her dad cry until the day he left. His face was puffy and wet with tears when he leaned down to kiss her cheek.

“I’ll see you soon, okay, Button?”

Dina stared at the scarred wood floor, dark curls shadowing her face. She knew he was lying, having talked to the judge about what he’d called Dina’s ‘homelife’ before he’d awarded Mom full custody.

“Just focus on getting well, Greg,” Mom said softly. She opened the front door and waited, fiddling with the frayed cuffs of her Grover Elementary PTA sweatshirt.

Outside, birds chirped, and the sun shone down on a kid riding by on his bike. Dina wondered how everything out there could be so normal when everything inside was so wrong. Their neighbor, Susan, stood at the edge of her front stoop, watching. She’d been over just about every day, comforting Mom and saying what a tough woman she was, what a good mom.

Dad shrugged into his flannel pullover, the one that felt so soft on Dina’s face when he hugged her, and walked out pulling the large, rolling suitcase they’d bought for their trip to Orlando. They never went to Disney, though. Dad had been too sick.

Her vision blurred, and she swiped at her face, reminding herself what Dad had said. She was a big girl, strong and brave enough to make it through this. But Dina didn’t feel brave, she felt scared. For her dad. For her mom. For herself. Everyone at school had seen Dad that day, watched him get dragged from her second-grade classroom. (Continue Reading…)

A Greater Dark

by M. Ian Bell

Gray sheets of rain as the door bangs in, Willard and his men materializing in that opaque haze and shaking the wet from their long coats. They assess the room with eyes accustomed to staring. Move across the floor and toward a table in the back, away from the windows black with night.

I give Ben a look and he draws three drafts in chipped porcelain steins, struggles to lift them to the counter.

“Ma’am,” Willard says when I carry the drinks over. He won’t tell me his name until later, but I don’t need him to. I take a closer look, face a weathered crag though easily forty years my junior. Almost stop him when he lights a cigarette, but the air is poison, choked with dust. A little smoke won’t hurt anyone. Yet my eyes slide back to Ben with his fingers working a shock of unruly hair, lungs still pink, ten years old if a day.

Willard’s gaze has followed mine, lingers on the boy as I turn and fetch up the tray again. Lingers a moment too long.

I step to the window and stare into the blank nothing, rain streaking the glass, reflection of the motel cafe and its occupants. The Addisons in the corner, three weeks waiting for the visa to come through. Several families up from Boston area congealed around tables too small, set to depart come morning. Willard and his compatriots, silent and morose over their beers. Benyamin behind the bar with his elbows on the wood and his chin in his hands.

A flash of lightning illuminates Casco Bay and the Portland Launch Site across the water. Redwood-thick cables like monoliths stretching 30 thousand kilometers to the elevator terminus. Bright and crisp in the sudden flare like daylight and then afterimages fading to pink, to nothing.

Willard’s eyes on Benyamin again. On me. He knows something he shouldn’t. He knows who the boy is. (Continue Reading…)

Interstate Mohinis

by M. L. Krishnan

In the way of Death runs the Vaitarani river. We are flayed open to its woe. We are always aware of its currents in gurgling lungfuls of unease.

Time spun in recursive loops since I died in a scream of metal and flame and asphalt on the Parthibanur State Highway. There was no cremation. What could they consign to the flame? A scorched knob of my torso? My jawbone, still glued with tissue? A lone filling snugly hidden within a lone tooth?

Sometimes, I dreamed about flowing water. About where I would be—not here, anywhere but here—if my body had survived the accident. Mushed, but still recognizable. With its vestigial humanness that demanded respect, especially in death. My ashes would have been tossed into an ocean or a river in a coursing procession of night-blooming jasmine garlands, women who keened and thumped their chests, and drunken louts who gyrated around my urn until they foamed at the mouth. Until they collapsed in exhaustion or pleasure.

When I first began feeding, I wondered if I was a vet?la or a pi??ca. But I felt no urge to sway from bael trees or dart into a hedge of thathapoo with its ray-toothed flowers. Besides, I did not have an appetite for birds or small rodents. I only hungered for certain kinds of men.

Maybe I was a mohini. (Continue Reading…)

Devil is Fine

By Michael Bettendorf

I ain’t a good man, but that don’t mean I like doing bad things. Not everyone is afforded the choice. Not truly, anyhow, but I’ve accepted that one day I’ll be judged for what I’ve done. What I do. My lot in life didn’t leave me with a good family or much in ways of inheritance, but I was gifted with a decent mind and an eye for opportunity.

It’s how I’ve found myself huddled on the ground near some boy named Mitchell who’s convinced he’s a man just because he don’t live at home no more. But the boy’s so embarrassed by his lack of whiskers, he covers his face with a bandana all the time, like he’s playing bandit. Well if anyone is going to be suspected a bandit, I suppose it’s better Mitchell than me.

“It’s colder out here than I thought,” Mitchell says, poking the fire.

“The plains tend to trick you. Hardly any cover out in these parts. Makes any breeze feel ten times colder.”

Mitchell rubs his arms, hugging himself.

“It true you took that stagecoach yourself?” the boy asks. “That how you get that beautiful horse of yours?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“No need to be coy,” he says. “I heard you took a guarded stagecoach and everything in it all by yourself. Not a single breath of air left in anyone’s lungs. That true, mister Grant?”

“Just Grant,” I say. “And I ain’t interested in tall tales.” (Continue Reading…)