“You, sir, should unmask. Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.”

Masks

by Orrin Grey

“You were his friend, right?”

His granddaughter’s voice on the other end of the phone, her words clear and free from static. I wait to answer, don’t want to, because how do I say, “I don’t know?” For months now, he has been coming over to my house to play xiangqi two or three nights a week while we drink hard cider and talk about bullshit. Does that make us friends, or just two lonely old guys with nobody else to talk to?

Whatever I feel in my heart, what comes out of my mouth is bound to be an affirmative, because what else can I say? And besides, she is so far away—London, of all places, with children of her own that I can hear in the background—while I am so close—his own townhouse just two doors down from mine, only empty spaces between us, because this neighborhood is dying, just as he was dying, just as we all are dying. One uncomfortable phone call at a time.

She hasn’t said the words, but the implication is clear in her voice. If I don’t do it, men will come. Strangers. Impersonal men who will throw it all into boxes and, from there, who knows? The Goodwill? The landfill? No place where it matters. No place where it will be appreciated.

Am I the old man’s friend? I don’t think so. Do I want to do it? No. So why do I say yes into the receiver, my voice bounced across thousands of miles to his granddaughter in London?

The answer is guilt. No more noble a motive than that. (Continue Reading…)

I will be who I will be

Made of You

by Nick Petrou

I was a blister clinging to the throat of your shower drain. I didn’t know I was alive, let alone that, as I built myself from your beautiful waste, I would grow to love you.

The first thing I remember was a taste: a sweetness tainted by bitter soap. My membrane shifted, allowing the sweet, the you, to pass, while the soapy water spat down the pipe into darkness. I disassembled a flake of your skin, reading you as you might read a book.

When I’d swollen to the size of a fingernail, I fashioned a primitive mouth and chewed the hairs that swung from the drain grate, much to my delight. Your textures excited my growth, and soon I, a curdled grey sludge, coated the entire inside surface of the pipe, down to the water seal.

After I learnt how to pass through the water seal, I spread to other pipes. And how I gorged myself on the blood and solids you flushed down your toilet. (Continue Reading…)

Fishing is a discipline in the equality of men – for all men are equal before fish.

Bitter Is The Sea, And Bright

by Michelle Muenzler

When the Isperfell come to our village of Merse by the Sea, it is not with their delicate bone-lattice knives readied and their faces painted for war. No, they approach the old way. Slowly and from just down the shore, emerald sea water cascading from their bright scales and lean arms opened wide.

Their needled teeth gleam.

“We stay,” they say, though it takes us some moments to make out the words, the long jaws of the Isperfell not being made for human speech.

But once the words are known, we do what any other village clinging to survival along these remote shores would do in our place. We greet our new guests as in the old stories–a pained smile on every face–and welcome them to our homes to stay.

It’s the price of the sea, after all. One that every village knows it will someday pay. (Continue Reading…)

“La plume de ma tante.”

Litany In The Heart Of Exorcism

By Sarah Pauling

Do you understand?

On your skin, do you feel the white sand the priests threw in fistfuls from the blessing-basin? Do you feel it crusting over your eyelids? It sticks between your cheek and the temple floor like a binding. It powders the sigils on the stone.

Do you understand what’s happening to us? Songs, prayers, incense. That awful boy–barely old enough to call a man–praying. His mother, weeping.

They want to take you away from me.

I hold your body close to mine, the white grit on my forehead grinding against the grit on yours. I hook my nails into your naked back. I try–not for the first time–to draw blood.

Do you feel it? (Continue Reading…)

“The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.”

On the Getting of Husbands and the Spawning of Children

by Sophie Sparrow

Deep in the woods, where the sun’s light never reaches to break apart the shadows, through a thicket of brambles and stinging shrubs, there stands a house. It is not made of gingerbread, nor does it walk on chicken’s legs. But it is, for want of a better word, home.

(Continue Reading…)

Proverbs 16:31 – Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life.

When I Was Young, I Did Not Need Magic

by Kat Day

I suggest you don’t try to struggle, my dear.

I’m sure you thought this would be easy. What danger is an old woman, all alone? In and out, simple. Help yourself to the purse on the kitchen table. Grab some jewellery – probably just lying around. Perhaps the Hummel figurines if you’ve any sort of an eye. My shopping bag, to put it all in. Leave the television – it’s too bulky, and who watches television these days anyway, hm?

It’s gone rather differently, hasn’t it? The best laid plans, and all that. Not that, I suspect, you planned very much. (Continue Reading…)

Overnight Home Companion

by Frank J. Oreto

Position: Overnight home companion for shut in. Must be able to read. Lack of imagination a plus. 

Salary: 250 dollars a night. I’ve never seen who pays. But the cash is there every morning at sunrise. A brown paper bag in the mailbox, twenties and tens. Good money, right? But I need to explain some things. I don’t want you coming in blind like I did.  (Continue Reading…)