The Greatest Adventure of All

by Ian McHugh

By the time I cleaned myself up, Arj had scrounged me a fresh t-shirt. I stopped outside the recovery room to pull it on.

“How is he?” I asked, rather indistinctly. My top lip had blown up like a balloon. My head ached, too, where I’d hit it on the cold bed.

“Awake. Calm,” he said. “Whole – we think. Physical responses are normal. He’s in mild shock. Hasn’t said anything yet.”

“Abby?”

He shrugged. “Gone real quiet.”

Abby and Dole were a couple, the ringleaders of our little cabal. They were the kind of adrenalin addicts who see extreme sports as a mystical experience. Who’d mangle J.M. Barrie to tell you: “Death is the greatest adventure of all, man.”

Of course, the rest of us were fear junkies too, otherwise we wouldn’t be sneaking around the labs after hours like the cast of Flatliners.

Bottle Babies

by Mary A. Turzillo

Allie first saw the fairies in the flower garden beside the driveway, and they were naked. But maybe they would be her friends. She didn’t have any friends because Mom and Dad didn’t want people to come into the house and discover Bobby.

How to make friends with them, when they were almost invisible?

She thought the spicy-fragrant petunia blossoms were small enough to make skirts for them; she knew they were girl-fairies because of their long hair, lavender, pink, and pale green, but her eyes weren’t good enough to see if they had nipples, like her own, which must be concealed.

Perhaps a tiny cloverleaf could cover each breast, though she wasn’t sure how to keep them in place.

“Mom,” she said, “May I borrow some thread?”

Mom’s sharp gray gaze flicked away from her needlework, a scene of a Japanese garden. Mom had all sorts of hobbies. “You may have that black spool that’s almost gone.”

Allie chewed the end of her braid. “Colors would be better.”

Mom threw down her needlework, annoyed.

“I want to make little clothes.”

Bone Mother

by Maura McHugh

The house tilted. A thighbone rolled off my kitchen table and clattered onto the floorboards. I cocked my head and waited for a warning. Silence. It was still sulking.

I whacked its bony walls with my hawthorn stick. “Out with it!” I said.

“A man approaches, you withered old crone!” The floor trembled with irritation.

“A fine house you are! Allowing a stranger to sneak up on me.”

The Garden and the Mirror

by Tim W. Burke

She asked me, “Will you teach the secrets of the soul and flesh?”

Her eyes glowed like onyx in the gaslight. Her skin seemed translucent, but the young man fidgeting beside her on my drawing room sofa was paler still. His fine suit and shirt sagged on him; the cadaver in him emerging.

The young man blanched at her boldness, “My wife has always been an enthusiast for mysticism. Back home in Atlanta, we tried homeopathy, faith healing, and God knows how many quacks. But the tumor grows. My fevers are getting worse. I can’t even travel home because my head aches –”

“Mr. Alecsandri,” the young woman, Olivia Spalding, leaned to me, “Our friends here told us that you cured their little boy of consumption.”

“I remember the case. I taught the boy to banish it.”

The Ashen Thing

by Paul Mannering

I dropped the half-eaten turkey on rye back on my plate and stared darkly at the new wheel-chair ramp, a big yellow exclamation mark visible from the sidewalk. Warning! Freak in Residence! Imagining the whispered concerns of our new neighbors was fuel for the fire of my self-pity. I was so lost in my gloomy fantasy that I did not notice the first tapping until it became a knocking, and then a scrape. As if someone had hit the wooden deck under my wheels and then dragged a hands worth of nails along it. I glanced around; Tammy had not re-emerged. I looked down. A glint of something wet. Something like an eye or wet flesh, staring up from the darkness under the deck. I twisted the steel rims under my hands and adjusted my position to look again. The thing was gone. I listened, and for a moment, I heard a sound like a wet blanket dragging on dirt, then Tammy re-appeared and the sound was lost under her footsteps and sigh of satisfaction.

“You done?” she asked, indicating my abandoned plate with one moisturized hand.

“Yeah, thanks,” I was still turning the fragment of a moment over in my mind. I had seen an eye. Someone was under our house. Crawling in the dust and dirt, under the decking, under the floors, slithering around the concrete pilings, the ducting of the central heating that terminated in black metal grills in our floors and doing what? Listening? Searching for a way to break in?

The Interview

by M.C. Norris

“With eight years property management experience under your belt, I really see no reason to fax over your resume. Tell you what, I’m wide open this morning. I need to run an errand, pick up a few things for the interview, but why don’t you just come on down to Grisholm’s Corporate Towers and we’ll have a quick chat?”

“Right now? I mean … sure, I’d love to meet with you. But what time were you thinking?”

“I’m thinking eleven o’clock. And when you get here, Becky, just come on down to the basement. I’ll be waiting.”

Scavenger

by Jonathan Kuhn

No end in sight. He tossed aside the empty water bottle, now useless. One bottle left. Two more liters. But in this heat, that wouldn’t last long.

Maybe if he could pace himself. But he couldn’t. Because every second he wasted, it was growing closer.

It moved slowly, awkwardly jerking itself forward with each step it took. A moderate speed was enough to stay ahead of it. But the man had to rest eventually. And it didn’t.

Sand slipped under his feet as he scaled the next dune. This one was much steeper than the others, forcing him to rest halfway to the top. Perhaps it, with its one arm and poor coordination, would not be able to climb up. The top could mean safety. But this was only hopeful, foolish thinking. He knew it would find a way up. It would not stop until it had him.

Bone Sigh

by Tim Pratt

I sit at the table and work on my bonsai scar. I press the silver head of the meat tenderizer into my left thigh, stippling the skin. I do not feel pain; I scarcely feel the pressure. My nerves are dead, there on my left thigh, where I grow my scar. Matches, hot needles, knives, and time. I tend my scar, I do not control it. Skin and muscle are unpredictable– this is not like painting a picture, carving a piece of wood. The flesh knows its own logic, the bruises come strangely, the healing proceeds unevenly. I collaborate with my flesh.