Exquisite

by Alan Baxter

Tim Rinneman had never met a lock he couldn’t pick. It was his expertise, his pride. And his curse, as it had become a compulsion he could not resist. He grinned as he worked at the front door of his latest target, hidden in the night shadows of the porch. He had cased the joint for nearly a week, established it was occupied by a lonely but wealthy-looking man in his late forties or early fifties, who went drinking at the Blakeley Hotel every night from seven until around nine. Easy mark.

The lock barrel turned and Tim let out an almost silent, “Yes!” He slipped his lock picks back into the pocket of his dark grey jacket—everyone knew you didn’t wear black to be camouflaged at night—and pushed the door open. His wool cap was low over his brow and a grey bandana masked the lower half of his face. Tight, rubber surgical gloves kept his fingerprints private. (Continue Reading…)

The Boulevardier
by David Stevens

My love,
…

I sit on your floor. The silk wrapped bodies sway as though a zephyr blows, their feet tracing the darkness just above my head. The chatterer has ceased for now. He kept it up for hours though, barely audible, much less discernible. He has ceased his attempts to communicate, his attention no longer on the outside world. Something in his interior has caught his attention.

I wait patiently. I can wait forever. However, as the mock zephyr becomes a faux breeze, and the movements of the bodies grow quicker, less regular, your need, my love, grows urgent.

I am tired, I am hurt, but I am oh so excited. Expectation fills me as I wait to see what will pass. (Continue Reading…)

It Rises from Between My Bones

By Donna J. W. Munro

Sitting on the toilet for the first sleepy morning pee, I felt my ovaries twist as a little piece of me trying burst through in a micro-explosion of tissue, born into my desert of a womb.

It made no sense.

I sat staring at my bald head and face in the mirror hanging across from the toilet. If I weren’t the one making my features screw up in twisting confusion it would have been hilarious. Chemo makes your face strange. No hair. Not one brow or lash. It’s like looking at one of those big-eyed aliens that the tabloids are forever finding, autopsying, and giving breathless reports about probes and pregnancies. I looked just like that only not so green and way more dumbfounded.

How could my ovaries be spitting out an egg? I’d been in a chemically induced menopause since this whole mess started. Since I’d found that little lump in the same place they’d found Mom’s so many years ago.

My whirlwind started in the office of the doe-eyed technician running the ultra-sound. She’d murmured in positive little half notes until her hand froze. She stopped and pulled the wand out of my armpit, glooped on more warmed gel that honestly felt like it had been harvested from inside a body cavity instead of the little bottle warmer next to her keyboard.

Then she said, “Oh.” (Continue Reading…)

As Well As The Infirm

by Scott Beggs

$243,378

You get two shots at becoming a doctor after med school. If you match with a hospital straight off, bully for you, great job, give mom and dad a hug. If you don’t, you need to wait a year holding your breath while chopping off pig hooves for science even though you’re vegan. Then you pray you match the second time around. If you don’t, that’s it. You spent a quarter of a million dollars to disappoint your parents. 

That’s how I ended up taking a business card with only a phone number printed on it from a slick Wall Street-looking asshole with a bad cough while rounding my third shot of tequila. That’s also how I ended up covered in someone else’s blood in a knock-off Sesame Street bouncy castle, crushed by a murderer’s guilt and wondering if I’d survive to sunrise.

All I ever wanted was to help people. (Continue Reading…)

Bargain

by Sarah Gailey

Malachai loved his work. He loved wandering among the trappings of enormous wealth and influence, seeing the baubles that humans excreted to express their status. He especially loved watching those wealthy, influential mortals tremble before the might of his inescapable superiority.

Malachai worked exclusively with those humans who had found themselves at the limit of how much power they could possess. They called him to bend the rules of time and space around their whims, so that they might be even more feared and loved by the other mortals. Their desires were predictable—money, knowledge, talent, authority. These were the kinds of people who hunted down ancient parchments with the Words of Invocation inscribed upon them. These were the kinds of people who did not concern their consciences with the compensation Malachai required for his services.

They appreciated a bit of theatrical flair.
(Continue Reading…)

The Artist and the Door

by Dorothy Quick

The advent of the artist and the door was almost simultaneous. I have always wondered if the one would have been as sinister without the other. Of course, the evil was in the door, but if the artist hadn’t come along just then perhaps it might never have been released. I say that to comfort myself, but I know it isn’t true. Evil is evil. It is a power and its strength is beyond mortal knowledge. Even without the artist there would have been horror. He only served to give it speedier expression. 

But I am ahead of myself. The story goes back to my desire to have a carved door for my Elizabethan farm house. (Continue Reading…)