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.

About 77 Degrees, West of Nassau

by Don Norum

He made another lunging, splashing grab for the edge of the deck above him and fell short, fell back into the water with his fingers scrabbling on smooth fiberglass three feet short of salvation.

Richard le Pine floated onto his back, letting the salt water bump him into the slick hull with every gentle swell. The shadow of the mast stretched out past him onto the water.

He had trouble telling what time it was, or how long it had been. Two hours, maybe three, at least.

No, he thought as he looked up at the mast, longer than that.

The Nimble Men

by Glen Hirshberg

We’d reached the de-icing station, and I pushed on the brakes and brought the coasting plane to a rolling stop. No matter how many times I did this, I was always surprised by the dark out here. At every other point within two miles of this tiny airport, manmade light flooded and mapped the world. But not here.

I peered through the windscreen and the wavering skeins of snow. It took a few moments, but eventually, my eyes adjusted to the point where I could just make out the de-icer truck parked a few meters off the taxiway in the flat, dead grass. Weirdly, it had its boom already hoisted, as though we were meant to make our way into the fields to get sprayed. I couldn’t see either the driver of the truck or the guy on the enclosed platform at the top of the boom, because both were blanketed in shadow.