Lives

by John Grant

Twenty minutes later, a ring at the doorbell.

That’s them, announces Marian, a slight drawl in her voice. Anxiousness has shoehorned her swiftly into a state of minor inebriation.

But it’s not them, it’s a man and a woman in blue, with faces as long as empty roadways.

A drunk started driving his SUV on the wrong side of the freeway. Took out four cars, another SUV and a plumber’s van before swerving right off and hitting a tree. Seven dead including the drunk driver. Three of the dead – an adult and two children – in the burned-out wreck of a blue Neon registered to Richard G. Charters Jr. The cops called first at Dick’s and Marian’s home, and were sent here by a neighbor . . .

All three of us on the couch in tears, me in the middle with my arms around the shoulders of the two women, as the cops do their best not to transgress their professional code of non-involvement.

The bell goes again, and the lady cop murmurs to us that she’ll get it.

The Moon and the Mesa

by Daniel Braum

We push our way through the hot maze of cologned bodies and emerge into the relative quiet of the street. She fishes in her purse but instead of taking out a pack of cigarettes she pulls out the little black gun. She holds it up admiring it in the streetlight.

“Didn’t you want to take them home. Didn’t you want to-”

“Aw fuck. What the hell are you doing with that? Don’t take it out here!”

I snatch the gun and stuff it back into her purse.

“Hey. Easy there,” she says. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re not going to. You said.”

She’s much too calm. It’s that calmness that scares me.

Sweet Little Memory

by Antony Mann

Left, a carpeted staircase climbed up, and I saw from the ragged pink teddy bear on the bottom step that the entity had begun to colonise downstairs. Which meant that the upper floor was already under its control. I scanned the living room, but there was nothing else of it to see: just a few framed landscapes which gave art a bad name, bits and bobs on the mantle, a television and shelves of videos in the corner.

There were no photos.

Oral Tradition

by Angel Leigh McCoy

Heavy footsteps crossed the verandah and approached the front door. Momentarily, a tall, thick-muscled black man entered the room. He wore the attire of a blacksmith from the 19th century, including the heavy leather apron. His image shifted in the breeze, like laundry hung out to dry, but upside-down, with inverted gravity, anchored by his feet to the floor. Around his neck, he had the unmistakable mark of a rope burn.

I stumbled back, back into an end-table. Clumsy, I placed it between me and my visitors.

Man, You Gotta See This!

by Tony Richards

The exhibit reached its conclusion, you see, in a big square room which just contained one painting. A triptych, they called it. Three almighty canvases put together to form one.

It was water lilies, of course. Took up an entire wall.

And there were benches in front of it, so I just sat down. And then allowed my mind to fall forward into that weightlessness of pastel colour.

I didn’t realise Kara had gone wandering back to see the scenes near Tower Bridge again.

When she tapped my shoulder, asked me if I’d been sitting here all this time, more than half an hour had passed.

I had gone completely elsewhere. I’d been lost. Blissfully so.

And Jer would never understand that.

Wendigo

by Micaela Morrissette

Her elegant companion invited her to accompany him to the grocery store, and she accepted. “Dress warmly,” he counseled. He drove for hours in the dark, the headlights spinning uncertainly off the broken curbs, the sharp teeth of the stoops, the strobing telephone poles. The supermarket was in a bad neighborhood, but vast, swallowing several city blocks. Homeless were encamped at the intersections of the aisles. They each took a cart and moved quickly to the meat department, looking neither left nor right. The meat department was a gargantuan walk-in refrigerator: the space so enormous and the cold mist so dense that she could not see from one wall to the opposite. They did not leave each other’s sides. They did not speak or touch. They filled their carts: chicken, goat, bear, salmon, pork, lamb, conch, squab, rabbit, shark, beef, veal, turkey, eel, venison, duck, mussels, ostrich, frogs, pheasant, squirrel, seal. Tripe, kidneys, liver, tongue, and brains. She suggested the purchase of some lemons and marinade; he reproved her cordially.