Gingerbread And Ashes

by Jaelithe Ingold

The roof of the gingerbread house has long been gone, and green mold covers the sides like a copper patina, but the air surrounding it is still sweet. Sugar gone bad with the passage of time and the death of its caretaker.

Last week, Gretel vanished from our home. She’s been lured away, I think, by something bad, for this is the only reason she would willingly leave me.

Has she come here lately? That’s the question at the forefront of my mind. We don’t talk about it, but I know she’s been here before. Many times since the witch’s death. And I haven’t always been able to resist either. The sweet rot of the place both rumbles and turns my stomach, yet still it calls to me.

We haven’t been children for a very long time, but if I remember hard enough, the sensation remains. The taste still melts on my tongue.

The Prophet’s Daughters

by Michael J. DeLuca

“Do you wonder, my brothers in service of death, what powers the prophet takes with her on her voyage down the Acheron? We all do, I suspect: all of us from Sybaris who felt the lash of her tongue. She told many bleak fates. We all wonder which she is waiting yet to fulfill–or else I suspect so many wouldn’t have come to bestow such gifts!” He cackled.

Melia’s fingernails dug into Io’s palm; Io gripped her sister tighter. No one said a word to silence him. The priest only played his lyre.

“Now let me think,” death’s taskmaster rambled, helping a mourner to hoist up the corpse of a heavy black calf, “What do the ancients teach on the subject of power after death?

“Sheshet, astronomer priestess of Egypt, achieved deathly might through preservation. She took her own life by drowning, at the age of twenty-nine. Her cult preserved her flesh and organs whole in vats of lotus honey. It is said she left plans for her own resurrection, and any man who walks within miles of her tomb dies of fever before the next moonrise.”

The Orchard of Hanging Trees

by Nicole Cushing

It’s another cool April morning in Hell, and the hanging trees (just saplings, really) are starting to sprout fleshy, strangled buds that look like choking fetuses caught up in tiny, umbilical nooses.

Their embryonic faces haven’t yet developed features, but I know as the days get longer their lips will grow into a grimace; their eyes will ooze agony. I have already been warned that their first cries (when they can utter them) will be those of breathless suffering. Their first words, pleas for help. The curses will follow shortly thereafter.

But right now, as fetus-flowers, they only emit shrill, staccato mews. But even this meager vocalization makes me shudder. I lower my glance from the entire orchard, feeling disgust for the day ahead. I whistle a tune to distract myself from the noise of thousands of semi-sentients who exist in a state of more-or-less continuous suffocation; those to whom full-sentience will bring only misery.

I am not, after all, a monster – even if I am in the employ of Hell. Even if (as my fellow laborers predict) some of the fruit will grow up to call me “Demon”, this is an absurd epithet. I do not want to be in this position. But my cares, my wants, my sense of being an individual with free will – these are things of the past. Shams more easily harbored during a lifetime marinated in the sweet sauce of ignorance.

Our Drunken Tjeng

by Nicky Drayden

With a fine bone knife I make my incision, cutting back the sticky membrane of Our Tjeng’s hull. I slip my hand inside and carefully widen the tear until it’s big enough for me to step through. Our Tjeng has blessed Kae and me with gills to breathe within his walls. The viscous liquid is clear and burns my eyes, tart and slick on my tongue.

He’s drunk as always, Our Tjeng, our fathership. And yet he leads our flock across the stars. Him and his bulging, sick liver — big as a hundred men, and it shouldn’t even be half that size. I swim towards Kae as she shaves tumor from flesh a slice at a time. Her firm muscles tense and flex beneath her hairless, pink skin. She cusses Our Tjeng, her words crisp her words warped slightly by the liquid.

I touch her shoulder. She startles.

“Your time is up,” I tell her.

We’re civil. There’s too much at stake not to be. The flock cannot afford to lose another fathership, and Our Tjeng needs us caretakers to keep him functioning.’

Our Drunken Tjeng

by Nicky Drayden

With a fine bone knife I make my incision, cutting back the sticky membrane of Our Tjeng’s hull. I slip my hand inside and carefully widen the tear until it’s big enough for me to step through. Our Tjeng has blessed Kae and me with gills to breathe within his walls. The viscous liquid is clear and burns my eyes, tart and slick on my tongue.

He’s drunk as always, Our Tjeng, our fathership. And yet he leads our flock across the stars. Him and his bulging, sick liver — big as a hundred men, and it shouldn’t even be half that size. I swim towards Kae as she shaves tumor from flesh a slice at a time. Her firm muscles tense and flex beneath her hairless, pink skin. She cusses Our Tjeng, her words crisp her words warped slightly by the liquid.

I touch her shoulder. She startles.

“Your time is up,” I tell her.

We’re civil. There’s too much at stake not to be. The flock cannot afford to lose another fathership, and Our Tjeng needs us caretakers to keep him functioning.’

“Our Drunken Tjeng” used the following sounds from Freesound to make the Fathership soundscape.

“earthscan1” by irad

“deep pulse_02.L-Joined” by martian

“Ambient Darkness” by DJ Chronos

“Single Heartbeat HQ_BeatSmith” by Lunardrive

“heartbeat regular” by zimm

Wailing Well

by M.R. James

In the year 19— there were two members of the Troop of Scouts attached to a famous school, named respectively Arthur Wilcox and Stanley Judkins. They were the same age, boarded in the same house, were in the same division, and naturally were members of the same patrol. They were so much alike in appearance as to cause anxiety and trouble, and even irritation, to the masters who came in contact with them. But oh how different were they in their inward man, or boy!

It was to Arthur Wilcox that the Head Master said, looking up with a smile as the boy entered chambers, “Why, Wilcox, there will be a deficit in the prize fund if you stay here much longer! Here, take this handsomely bound copy of the Life and Works of Bishop Ken, and with it my hearty congratulations to yourself and your excellent parents.” It was Wilcox again, whom the Provost noticed as he passed through the playing fields, and, pausing for a moment, observed to the Vice-Provost, “That lad has a remarkable brow!” “Indeed, yes,” said the Vice-Provost. “It denotes either genius or water on the brain.”
(Continue Reading…)

The God Complex

by Neil John Buchanan

She recognized an Echo drone when she saw one. Probably a scout sent to investigate the crash.

‘Pheromone discharge detected,’ the suit chimed, and the helmet slammed shut. A moment later, a tube expanded from the drone’s underbelly, and a thin spray of liquid splashed across Nadia’s visor.

‘I am God,’ it pronounced. ‘Do you come in love?’

The Crucifixion of the Outcast

by William Butler Yeats

A man, with thin brown hair and a pale face, half ran, half walked, along the road that wound from the south to the town of Sligo. Many called him Cumhal, the son of Cormac, and many called him the Swift, Wild Horse; and he was a gleeman, and he wore a short parti-coloured doublet, and had pointed shoes, and a bulging wallet. Also he was of the blood of the Ernaans, and his birth-place was the Field of Gold; but his eating and sleeping places where the four provinces of Eri, and his abiding place was not upon the ridge of the earth. His eyes strayed from the Abbey tower of the White Friars and the town battlements to a row of crosses which stood out against the sky upon a hill a little to the eastward of the town, and he clenched his fist, and shook it at the crosses. He knew they were not empty, for the birds were fluttering about them; and he thought how, as like as not, just such another vagabond as himself was hanged on one of them; and he muttered: ‘If it were hanging or bowstringing, or stoning or beheading, it would be bad enough. But to have the birds pecking your eyes and the wolves eating your feet! I would that the red wind of the Druids had withered in his cradle the soldier of Dathi, who brought the tree of death out of barbarous lands, or that the lightning, when it smote Dathi at the foot of the mountain, had smitten him also, or that his grave had been dug by the green-haired and green-toothed merrows deep at the roots of the deep sea.’ (Continue Reading…)