The Valknut

by Dan Dworkin

When I wake I’m craving almonds and want to die. Pretzeled in the top sheet, fighting the light… hurts when I move, go easy… something died in my mouth, breath could bring down a plane, and the light… Jesus, that’s… fuck, that’s bright. Hot too… pores fuming booze… sheets wet, what the… oh God I must’ve… I mean, I haven’t been that fucked up since… clothes on still, one shoe, nice touch… stomach in revolt, just thinking about it makes… aw Christ, I’m gonna… run for it, wait… that was close. Too close. Why do I do this? Now if only I could remem– Wait a… I catch my reflection in the mirror, one shoe on, halfway to the bathroom… I approach, stick out my neck and the new mark there… what the f…? Is that…? Aww man, what did I do? What the hell did I do?!

The Greatest Adventure of All

by Ian McHugh

By the time I cleaned myself up, Arj had scrounged me a fresh t-shirt. I stopped outside the recovery room to pull it on.

“How is he?” I asked, rather indistinctly. My top lip had blown up like a balloon. My head ached, too, where I’d hit it on the cold bed.

“Awake. Calm,” he said. “Whole – we think. Physical responses are normal. He’s in mild shock. Hasn’t said anything yet.”

“Abby?”

He shrugged. “Gone real quiet.”

Abby and Dole were a couple, the ringleaders of our little cabal. They were the kind of adrenalin addicts who see extreme sports as a mystical experience. Who’d mangle J.M. Barrie to tell you: “Death is the greatest adventure of all, man.”

Of course, the rest of us were fear junkies too, otherwise we wouldn’t be sneaking around the labs after hours like the cast of Flatliners.

Bottle Babies

by Mary A. Turzillo

Allie first saw the fairies in the flower garden beside the driveway, and they were naked. But maybe they would be her friends. She didn’t have any friends because Mom and Dad didn’t want people to come into the house and discover Bobby.

How to make friends with them, when they were almost invisible?

She thought the spicy-fragrant petunia blossoms were small enough to make skirts for them; she knew they were girl-fairies because of their long hair, lavender, pink, and pale green, but her eyes weren’t good enough to see if they had nipples, like her own, which must be concealed.

Perhaps a tiny cloverleaf could cover each breast, though she wasn’t sure how to keep them in place.

“Mom,” she said, “May I borrow some thread?”

Mom’s sharp gray gaze flicked away from her needlework, a scene of a Japanese garden. Mom had all sorts of hobbies. “You may have that black spool that’s almost gone.”

Allie chewed the end of her braid. “Colors would be better.”

Mom threw down her needlework, annoyed.

“I want to make little clothes.”

Bone Mother

by Maura McHugh

The house tilted. A thighbone rolled off my kitchen table and clattered onto the floorboards. I cocked my head and waited for a warning. Silence. It was still sulking.

I whacked its bony walls with my hawthorn stick. “Out with it!” I said.

“A man approaches, you withered old crone!” The floor trembled with irritation.

“A fine house you are! Allowing a stranger to sneak up on me.”

The Garden and the Mirror

by Tim W. Burke

She asked me, “Will you teach the secrets of the soul and flesh?”

Her eyes glowed like onyx in the gaslight. Her skin seemed translucent, but the young man fidgeting beside her on my drawing room sofa was paler still. His fine suit and shirt sagged on him; the cadaver in him emerging.

The young man blanched at her boldness, “My wife has always been an enthusiast for mysticism. Back home in Atlanta, we tried homeopathy, faith healing, and God knows how many quacks. But the tumor grows. My fevers are getting worse. I can’t even travel home because my head aches –”

“Mr. Alecsandri,” the young woman, Olivia Spalding, leaned to me, “Our friends here told us that you cured their little boy of consumption.”

“I remember the case. I taught the boy to banish it.”

The Ashen Thing

by Paul Mannering

I dropped the half-eaten turkey on rye back on my plate and stared darkly at the new wheel-chair ramp, a big yellow exclamation mark visible from the sidewalk. Warning! Freak in Residence! Imagining the whispered concerns of our new neighbors was fuel for the fire of my self-pity. I was so lost in my gloomy fantasy that I did not notice the first tapping until it became a knocking, and then a scrape. As if someone had hit the wooden deck under my wheels and then dragged a hands worth of nails along it. I glanced around; Tammy had not re-emerged. I looked down. A glint of something wet. Something like an eye or wet flesh, staring up from the darkness under the deck. I twisted the steel rims under my hands and adjusted my position to look again. The thing was gone. I listened, and for a moment, I heard a sound like a wet blanket dragging on dirt, then Tammy re-appeared and the sound was lost under her footsteps and sigh of satisfaction.

“You done?” she asked, indicating my abandoned plate with one moisturized hand.

“Yeah, thanks,” I was still turning the fragment of a moment over in my mind. I had seen an eye. Someone was under our house. Crawling in the dust and dirt, under the decking, under the floors, slithering around the concrete pilings, the ducting of the central heating that terminated in black metal grills in our floors and doing what? Listening? Searching for a way to break in?