The Engine of Desire

by Livia Llewellyn

All the signs of life are here, but this neighborhood has long been dead. They’re the only family left, and even they’ve fallen apart, like rotting meat from the suburban bone. She walks down the driveway, her low pumps clacking against the blacktop. As she steps into the street, her heart races; and now she catches the faint whine, a sonorous metallic song calling out in reply. After all these lonely years, it’s returned.

From the far end of the cul-de-sac, a sixteen-year-old girl emerges from the tangled overhang of rhododendrons framing a long-abandoned house. She saunters into the street, tanned hips curving back and forth in waves as she moves. Though autumn hovers in the air, she brings perpetual summer, shimmering all around her in rippling waves. One hand touches a lock of black hair, then tugs at her striped tube-top — for a single sublime moment, a caramel-colored areola peers into the rising dark. Megan feels the decades burn away like ash in the girl’s heat.

“Hey, spaz,” Kelly says. “Got a light?”

“You didn’t change,” Megan murmurs. “Thirty years, and you’re just the same.”

“Yeah, I never change.”

“But I have changed. Can’t you hear?” Megan presses her hand against her heart. “It’s like it’s inside me now, like I’m the engine, too.”

“Oh really? You’re the engine?” Kelly slips a cigarette into her mouth. “Are you sure?”

“You’re not taking her. It’s my turn.”

Kelly runs a long tongue over wet lips. “She’s already taken — it’s what you made her for, right?”

Crawl

by Lee Thompson

Jim grinned. “If we cut his legs off, how far do you think he can crawl before he dies?”

Sometimes soldiers come back from war full of demons, like my older brother, Jim. He slapped my shoulder, grinning, his eyes shiny as the dark still water in Sullivan County’s gravel pit. I took a step back, sent stones rolling, and rubbed my arm. Sunlight soaked through the high trees at the edge of the property. Jim looked at Robert on the ground. I didn’t want to. Didn’t want to look at Jim either, but sometimes we do what we least want anyway, God knows why.

Jim grinned. “What do you think, Gabe?”

“I don’t know.”

Bed of Scorpions

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

“It scares me,” she said finally.

“What?”

“That he’s dying.”

“Who cares?”

She turned to look at him.

“He’s filthy rich, you know,” Ramon said as he smoked a cigarette. Normally he wore gloves to avoid staining his fingers, but he had foregone such formalities in this remote corner of the state.

“I don’t want to marry him.”

“I said he was rich.”

“Maybe he will not want to marry me.”

“He better, and you better please him. There’s more money here than we’ve ever had.”

“Then you please him.”

Ramon grabbed her by the jaw, fingers digging into her flesh, and pulled her forward.

“I’ve had my share of old, ugly bitches in my bed. Sores and wrinkles and grey hair. All to keep you fed and dressed.”

“To keep us fed and dressed,” she muttered.

The Radejastians

By David Nickle

There is a cathedral in the middle of Radejast. It addresses the approaching pilgrim as a fist of granite and slate and limestone, lifting black iron bells and arches and gargoyles to touch the dangled teat of the soot-cloud that ever hangs low over the land. Within: a forest of stone pillars, some carved with the likenesses of Radejast’s saints, some simply chiseled with the mark of its venerable religion — all surrounding the dome, so high and wide that when emerging from the pillars I stumbled beneath it, madly fearful that gravity might suddenly reverse, fling me from the floor, and smash me against the curved mosaics above the whispering gallery.

The Good News Happening Congregation’s hall was larger than Radejast’s cathedral by half again: a great circular space beneath a peaked roof, lit from high, clear windows on every side. Behind the pulpit stood a crucifix with a painted sculpture of Jesus Christ bound to it, bright lines of blood trickling down his slender limbs, from the crown of thorns he wore. Altogether, it was half-again taller than any similar icon in Radejast.

Acceptable Losses

By Simon Wood

The place was different but the story was the same. The Japs had won at the expense of the British. They’d been particularly ruthless on this occasion. Besides the bullet-riddled and grenade-ravaged corpses, he recognized the hallmarks of ritual decapitation and disembowelment. The battle over, they’d set about the wounded with their samurai swords.

Blood from hundreds saturated the beach. Clelland hadn’t realized until he became a Bucket Boy that blood had an odor. It wasn’t unpleasant, just overpowering, suffocating, like being trapped in a room filled with stale air.

The soldiers had been dead some time. Twelve to fourteen hours, by Clelland’s estimates. The blazing sun had had a chance to cook the flesh. What should have been pink had blanched and turned beige. Instead of just the usual stench of shit and rotting flesh, a human barbecue was in progress.

Wearing the Dead

by Alan Smale

Trixie’s dead claws scrabbled faintly against the wooden stairs. The hairs on my arm came alive. It was clear Robbie hadn’t heard a thing.

What the heck could I say next? “I see you have tattoos.”

“Yep,” he said, and pushed up the sleeve on his right arm. “Check this out.”

They were hard to figure; dark shadows against his black skin. Against my better judgment, I was intrigued. I stepped forward.

It was a Celtic knot in a thick swirly pattern that went all around his bicep. He pushed up his left sleeve to show the silhouette of a heart with a long dagger thrust through it, ornamented with scrollwork.

“Neat,” I said. “Got any more?”

Robbie hesitated, and I realized what a potentially stupid question that had been.

Gretel

by Camille Alexa

He was tall and quiet, and thinner even than Gretel. Cigarette burn scars covered one cheek, and he was blind in his left eye from an especially bad night with his father. Gretel thought he was beautiful.

You’re beautiful, he told her later that night, after her stepmother had driven away and Brykerwoods orderlies had taken Gretel’s leather jacket and the contents of her pockets… but not the lipstick tube they hadn’t found in her bra. After she’d found him, like an uncharted territory, or an undiscovered planet, sitting on the dirty white linoleum next to a vacant chair in an empty TV room without a television. After she’d had handed him one hit of acid and placed the other under her tongue. You’re beautiful.

I’m not, she said. My front teeth jut like fallen tombstones. My nose is the size of a bus and my hair is like strips of rotting bacon and my eyes are small and brown as rabbit turds. You must be tripping.

And he said, I am, but that’s not why I like you.

The Dark Level

by John F.D. Taff

Monday morning came, and Jim wondered at the fact that no other cars followed or preceded him into the garage. And yet, as his car swirled down the ramps, he noticed that almost every parking space was filled.

He’d gone slowly down three levels looking for space “1103” before it became so dark he was forced to turn on the headlights. He barely made out a “321” in dirty yellow numbers on an empty space to his left, between a Thunderbird and a Stanza.

As he wound deeper into the building, his eyes became adjusted to the dim light. Still, he did not see a single person; no one pulling into a space, climbing out of a car, filing toward the bank of elevators.

Motes of dust sparkled in his headlights as his car swept through the aisles. The parked cars wore the dust like sequined dresses.

His car curled around the last corner, and he barely saw the numerals painted onto the dingy wall as his headlights raked across them.

Level 11.