Fat Betty

By H R Laurence

They say it’s God’s own country, and He’s always had a thing for rain. I’m high and soaked, looking over the valley with a sea of heather at my back, and if the storm lasts forty nights I’ll not be shocked. There’s still a little light over the hills to the east, but it’s cloud-clogged overhead and the sunlight can’t get through to where I’m huddled in anorak and hugging my carbine, praying for that bastard Jamie Cornfeld to make his way quick.

“You miserable sod,” I tell him, when he comes up in his hood and coat with a rifle on his shoulder and a stick in his hand. “To meet up here.” I might have walked down the street with gun in hands and not met an odd glance, let alone a copper.

“Do you good,” he says, and he’s right although I’ll not say it. “I guess that works, and all.” He’s looking at the carbine. Of course it works. Two tours and more Syrian sand than any crusader saw, it works all-bloody-right. One of them police half-tracks still has the holes.

“Alright, then,” he says, this being made clear, and we walk. It’s that steady rain, not too heavy but sure to last all night, and the heather’s wet, its springiness turned soggy. We scare some grouse and they go shooting off; I’d take a pot at them if we didn’t need to keep quiet. Good eating on those birds, though I bet they were fatter when they were bred for it.

“Let’s not fuss about this,” I say. We’ve been walking five minutes, but it’s been on my mind all day. “If there’s trouble, we should shoot them.” (Continue Reading…)

The Ecstasy of the Saints

by J.A.W. McCarthy

I’m six the first time it happens. I’m sitting in the backseat of the family sedan, staring at the rearview mirror so I can see when my father’s big eye peels upward and focuses on me, steely grey and always watching, as he promised when I started doing this. Mom faces straight ahead, shoulders curled forward as if folding herself around the cold jets blasting from the AC. They’re busy talking about traffic or what Grandma will make for dinner or how we’ll have to atone for missing confession this weekend—it’s all the same to me. It means I can slip my pinkie into my mouth, hooking towards my cheek until I feel the silky swollen hole between my tongue and molar. As I nudge into the opening, I think of my cat flexing her paw, how her claws extend smooth and quick as switchblades as her toes curl into her palm. I’m a claw, I’m a dagger. I’m dangerous, I do harm. (Continue Reading…)

The Darkness Carried by the Beasts

by Maria Haskins

Northern Sweden, March 1987, eleven months after Chernobyl

Torsten is dreaming of Gunvor, like he does every night. All these dreams are the same. He is searching for her in the woods, Ricky running ahead on eager paws with his nose to the ground, the elkhound a gray blur in untouched snow. Torsten’s chest aches and the air is hard to breathe, tainted by some unseen poison. A colorless void stretches out above the treetops, a menacing sky that holds no stars, but no matter how Torsten runs, no matter how he searches, he can never find Gunvor. Even there, even in his dreams, she is gone. (Continue Reading…)

Mavka

By A.D. Sui

You pray to forget this. You pray to forget the cold. Even under two wool blankets you’re always cold now. Skin and bones, you. A February moon hangs high in the starless sky when Andriy slips on the boots, soaked through from when you wore them earlier that day to gather firewood, and from when Ira goes to relieve herself at the outhouse earlier than that.

“Where are you going, child?” your mother says, barely whispers.

“To get water,” Andriy says and shuts the hut door.

You curl into yourself, clutch your swollen, so sunken that it swells, stomach. Only in sleep does the burn of hunger disappear. Every night, you dream of bread. All you do is dream of bread. The cellar’s been empty for months. What you can, you hide, but the Bolsheviks, they’re good at looking. Others hide food too, canned turnips and rotten potatoes, but the Bolsheviks they find those, and they find the ones that did the hiding, and then both food and people go missing. Now the dog’s gone and then the cat runs off, sensing its own fate looming. Even the domovyki, the watchful spirits of your home, vanished overnight when milk and bread was no longer left out for them. You watched a long line of them march out into the woods at daybreak, short heads bobbing in the snow. Nothing in the village now to spare it from being hollowed out. First, it’s the people that grow hollow. Then, there won’t be a single memory of their death, of their life, of the man-made famine that was their punishment for daring to exist. (Continue Reading…)

Hemorrhage

by Cyrus Amelia Fisher

It’s a dumb fight to pick, but I only learn that later. By the time they drag me out the back door of the bar, my face feels the way a Picasso painting looks. All rearranged, and probably the wrong colors.

Brit swears like a sneezing fit. Her fingers hover over the swollen mass where my face ought to be, as if she can squeeze the swelling out and find me underneath. They’re the last words she says before leaving me propped against the alley wall to make sure that she isn’t banned for life from the only dyke bar in town. They’ve been banning me from the joint for years. It’s the best place in town to rustle up some skin on skin, whether it’s a girl who doesn’t ask me about my boyfriend or a brisk upper-cut to the jaw. On a good night it might be both. I’m beginning to suspect that tonight is not a good night.

I pluck my last smoke from my breast pocket, leaving bloody streaks on my clothes as I dig out a lighter my swollen fingers can’t even flip open. I sit there for a long time after that, unlit cigarette squeezed between my lips. I’m not thinking or feeling anything in particular when I realize I’m not alone. (Continue Reading…)

Body Heat

By Mirri Glasson-Darling

The river is moving too fast and Cassie knows it, but she crosses anyway. Icy water reaches her waist, a constant push at her knees. She leans into the hiking poles, inching sideways like a crab. Halfway across, her left foot goes into a hole. For a moment, Cassie fights, then—slow-motion—feels the river take her. She falls, flails, gulps, then her left hiking pole hits the bottom, the end of the pole smacking her sternum and pushing her up out of the water and onto the opposite shore with the current’s inertia, torso hissing cold with steam.

Cassie is stunned by her escape, painfully aware of her skeleton with all its small, aching parts rattling against themselves, from the vertebra in her neck to the moth-shaped scapula of her shoulder blades. She sneezes five times, a bright, color-shot mess. Patches of ice surround her, formed from the condensed moisture of the river into white trays of diamonds. As hypothermia sets in, Cassie strips down, gets the sleeping bag out of her dry-evac-sack, climbs in, and waits to get warm. She’s lost one hiking pole, the paper map she’d tucked into an outside pocket of her pack, her phone still has no service, the topo app can’t find itself, and she’s on 24% battery power. Less than an hour to sunset, but she’s still got her compass and eventually there will be a road if she keeps heading east, even if it is another fifteen miles of bushwhacking. She’s on the wrong side of the river to backtrack now either way. She should have known better. Cassie is from Virginia and works as a wilderness guide in Alaska: she knows when it is safe to cross a river and when it is not. This was not safe. One reckless turn here in West Virginia, a fall into icy water, and she’s lost. She feels a bit better, but still cold. (Continue Reading…)

Mummy

by Kelsey Percival Kitchel

I have always prided myself on being a practical man; prosaic, if you will. In the old days the boys used to call me the man from Missouri.

Well, so I was. I had to be shown — and I was shown. Let me tell you. … (Continue Reading…)

Powers Of Darkness

By John Russell

Nickerson, R.M., failed in judgment concerning his guest Dobel. This was the reason of his ordeal that night at Warange Station: a black night and a bitter ordeal. If Dobel had been a cannibal or a headhunter—wandering thief or fugitive murderer—Nickerson would have made no mistake. But himself he was a gentle soul, trained merely in all forms of conceivable wickedness, and although he disliked the gross stranger with the sly and slitted red eyes he had no intimation of the fellow’s real nature. Not until Dobel showed such an utterly brutal manner of disbelief. (Continue Reading…)