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.

Hexagon

by Jason Rizos

The honeybees arrived in the spring, though it was as if they were always there. They built their home within his walls. The combs aligned within.

The sound was there as he slept. An enormous stone pestle, perhaps fixed on the Earth’s own axis, grinding in an enormous granite mortar. The sound of paper hexagons forming, the sound of mathematical architecture. He became a part of them. They reached him, drifted past basal ganglia, deep within the cerebral hemispheres of his brain, beyond the center of his cognate mind. There aligned a message, a primal distress signal.

The Poisoner

by Holly Day

Read by Eve

The poisoner moved into the village soon after the doctor had died. For weeks, she had been dropping crushed narcissus bulbs into the doctors’ drinking well in the dead of night, not so much that it’d kill him right away, but enough that he wouldn’t have to wait too long to die. The doctor’s wife followed soon after, her unborn child spilling out on the stone pavers, brought out too early by contractions caused by the poison.

The poisoner came down into the village the very next day, dressed in a white nurse outfit, her clothes paradoxically spotless considering that no one had anything spotless to wear, not anymore. The war had made everyone a dirty wreck, and the impossibly white clothes of the poisoner made her seem a legitimate miracle, some sort of savior coming down from the hills. They would soon find that no matter how bloody she got, her uniform would always be clean and white.